Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

If I didn’t know that Profession is an Isaac Asimov story, I would be inclined to say that it resembles very much an Isaac Asimov story. It is a textbook example of the kind of basic, fundamental social science fiction that Asimov made so popular and that had such an influence on the field at large. Asimov takes a single idea—that we could educate people by downloading the knowledge into their brain instead of devoting…

So, back when The Year of the Flood, Oryx and Crake’s contemporaneous sequel, came out, the great Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Guardian that she must honour Margaret Atwood’s wish not to have her novels labelled science fiction. She claims this restricts her ability to praise the book in the way she wants:

I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as

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The Large Hadron Collider is doing pretty well this early into its life. It has already produced compelling evidence for the existence of a Higgs boson. And it hasn’t produced a microscopic black hole that would sink into the centre of the Earth and devour us all. Yet.

David Brin wrote Earth around the same time I was born, long before the LHC was being built and its doomsayers were crying disaster. Even then, however,…

Sometimes I wish I had the power to checkpoint my life, much like one can in many video games. I’d like to index certain times and be able to rewind to them and then make a different decision. For example, this morning I noticed that I was running low on brown sugar, and I hadn’t bought any more last time I bought groceries. It made me wish I could go back to the point where…

William Gibson once said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’m starting to think this is the case with the Singularity as well. By its very definition this would seem to belie the idea of a Singularity at all, but bear with me.

Singularity generally deals in two closely related concepts: artificial intelligence and posthumanism. Once we get an AI that no longer relies on humans to improve its own processing…

Can you imagine being in two places at once? It’s a common image to conjure, but actually imagine it. Weird, huh?

Now try imagining being two people in two places at once. Or two people, in the same place. That’s even harder, and even weirder. But it’s exactly what Ann Leckie asks of us in Ancillary Justice, a book about a person who was once and is still but isn’t any more a ship, …

The librarians at my school alerted me to this book. I knew Neil Gaiman had written a special short story, “Nothing O’Clock”, for the 50th anniversary, but I hadn’t been particularly bothered about finding it. Aside from the fact that I tend not to read fan fiction, the state of ebooks these days is still deplorable enough that finding a non-DRM copy would probably have been tricky.

Luckily, I was clever and made sure I’m…

I actually read this soon enough after Redemption Ark that I can still remember some of the details of that book! Absolution Gap picks up two generations later. The Nostalgia for Infinity is parked on Ararat, and its occupants have set up a “temporary” settlement. Little do they know that, in the space around them, Conjoiners and Inhibitors battle to a standstill, until a lone craft breaks the silence and crashes into Ararat’s ocean. Clavain,…

I don’t often read novels set in my favourite television or cinematic universe any more. I have fond memories of when I was much younger, and I had the time and freedom to virtually camp out in the library, of borrowing whatever Star Trek novels they happened to have available that day. After I became more comfortable with original SF and fantasy, I started to shy away from media tie-in novels. As I grew up…

When I was a child, I remember tuning into re-runs of seaQuest DSV on the Space channel in Canada. (I was alive when it first broadcast, but it was in re-runs by the time I started paying attention.) I never watched the series regularly, but I’d happily sit in front of an episode if it happened to be on. I was captivated by the idea of a tricked-out submarine exploring the deeps of the ocean…

I love the idea of superhero fiction. I don't actually read that much, mostly because it comes in the form of comics and graphic novels. I don't have anything against those. They're just not my typical jam.

The sudden trend towards writing about superheroes in the novel form is a boon to me, then, because the novel is my jam. (I'm a little pessimistic about the shelf life of the novel as a form in…

Not that long ago, I sampled another anthology of alternate history, Other Earths. Now I’m dipping into this specialized sub-genre again with Roads Not Taken. The premise is similar, but in this case the stories were all previously published in either Analog or Amazing. Though I’m disappointed that not one of the ten contributors is a woman, the stories themselves are much more thoughtful and interesting than those I encountered in Other…

On one hand, I love science fiction that examines how new technology can completely disrupt society. Few people, two centuries ago, could envision the way we live today, so many of us spending our time punching buttons on the side of a flat box so that words show up on a screen a few centimetres away. Technological advancement is driven by and drives changes in society. On the other hand, it’s always nice to see…

Big bad killing machines are coming into your section of the galaxy. Intelligence is a plague they mean to wipe out, because otherwise, intelligence is doomed.

If Revelation Space is a high-concept space-opera archaeological mystery, then Redemption Ark is more of a straightforward thriller. Several of the surviving characters from the first book are scattered across the two systems, Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis, with the Inhibitors closing in and most of humanity none the…

This one of those tales that have percolated down through culture but that most of us have never actually read. I assigned it as a short reading assignment for my sixth form English class, something we could cut our teeth on while we start looking at the possibilities for texts to study this year. They were all familiar with the general idea, though I was surprised to find out that one of them was surprised…

Some science fiction revels in its immersion in the futurescape, that unknowable presentation of technology and society that seems so distantly related to our own. Utopian fiction likes to posit that we will somehow overcome our vices (though, for the sake of story conflict, discover wonderful new ones). Dystopian fiction does the opposite, amplifying our vices with scary new methods of oppression, while also offering the hope of an easy dismantling of the totalitarian bureaucracy,…

Big Dumb Objects always provide an interesting starting point. The Stone, as the Americans christen the hollowed-out asteroid that appears above 21st-century Earth in Eon, is full of mysteries. It has the exact same profile as Juno, but much less mass, because someone has hollowed it out into seven enormous chambers. Could it be from humanity’s future? Or a possible future? And if so, does it hold the answers to avert a Russian-American nuclear…

I am so confused. It was all going well until the last few chapters, and then the story metamorphosed into a bizarre garden of shards of reality, and I lost the plot entirely.

Singularity and post-Singularity fiction does not seem to be my friend these days! In Newton’s Wake, the Singularity—which Ken MacLeod refers to as “the Hard Rapture” here—happens, and a vast percentage of the Earth’s population are involuntarily uploaded to machines. The…

A few weeks ago, Bruce Sterling shared his thoughts on hacking and activism three years after first discussing the Wikileaks scandal. One thing he said really stuck with me:

Even the electronic civil lib contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now, mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are electronic first, and civil as

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Whoa, so Guy Haley has a new novel out, and my library inexplicably has it in stock not two months after its release. Kudos to my library for whatever motivated that purchase. Thanks to my Angry Robot Books subscription, I discovered Haley through Reality 36 and its sequel, Omega Point, two mysteries set in a future where strong AI has become a fact of life. In Crash, Haley takes a slightly different approach…