Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible.

Keeping Earth habitable is a pressing concern today. Even if we manage to avoid eco-catastrophe (and I’m optimistic on this), that’s only a small hurdle in the grand scheme of the cosmos. We only have about a billion years left before the Sun swells so much that it cooks the atmosphere. A few billion years…

I grabbed Polaris on a whim at the used bookstore. It looked like an interesting mystery set in the future—a future where humanity has spread to other planets, where entire civilizations have risen and fallen over a few millennia. With all this history between Alex Benedict and life back here on Earth, there are bound to be so many cool mysteries to explore. But when Alex and his partner, Chase Kolpath, begin investigating the sixty-year-old…

Here’s a tip: if you want to disappear and assume a new identity, don’t befriend children and become their mentor. Inevitably they will discover you have a mystery past that you don’t want to talk about. And children are really, really good at uncovering things adults don’t want them to know. It’s like a sixth sense most of us lose at puberty—the moment an adult evades a question, the child files it away under, “I…

So we can’t go back in time—but what if we could see back in time? Glimpsing the past is almost as common as stories involving actual time travel. In The Man Who Ended History, however, Ken Liu puts a very intimate and emotional twist on reliving and remembering the atrocities of war. Coupled with the archaeological premise that these observational trips to the past are always a one-time affair—each act of observation destroys the…

Corporations are legally people—how long before they become nation-states? Some of them own islands, or indeed, virtually entire countries. I’m not as pessimistic as some about our short-term survival odds in the coming century. Sure, we have problems, but we’ll muddle through—somehow. Yet if I had to pick which chilling dystopian vision of the future I feel is most likely, the corporations-own-us-all future is the one I’d choose. It’s feudalism all over again, baby—party like…

Living in space is hard. Like, really hard. Like, super almost-impossibly-crazy-stupid hard. Leviathan Wakes has some great moments that illustrate the various hazards of living in space, and it underscores the importance of Earth’s continued existence to the otherwise estranged colonies and stations. Yet even it has a fairly optimistic outlook on our ability to harness the solar system for our needs. Containment, on the other hand, makes even starting up a colony on…

The Internet isn’t for porn, silly human. The Internet is for spam! It’s an interesting spin on a truism of our times.

We are seeing the first reported smartphone botnet. We are seeing the future. Policing of the future isn’t going to be about Robocop busting drug dealers and car thieves on the street of Detroit. Automated drones might be part of the package, but there will still be boots on the ground—just heavily…

Well, this concludes my reading of this year’s nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I’m struggling to decide which, if any, I should support. Last year The Dervish House hacked my brain and made it an easy choice. This year, not so much. Of all the nominees, however, I think Leviathan Wakes comes closest—it’s certainly the novel I enjoyed the most. (A Dance with Dragons is probably the second choice, but…

I’m not the right person to read this, at least not right now.

I know it’s kind of my hang-up to turn everything into a generational thing, but I think that’s in operation here. I didn’t live through the 1960s or the 1970s. I don’t get what the political climate was like then, either in North America or in Europe, and I come to New Wave science fiction experiencing everything second hand. That doesn’t mean…

So here we are again, almost one year later. Another Newsflesh novel nominated for a Hugo. I’ve decided that everything I want to discuss about this book takes me into hella spoilers territory. So that spoiler flag I put on here? Don’t ignore that if you were thinking I was kidding. I wasn’t. From here on out, we will be knee deep in zombie guts and spoilers. If you want a non-spoilery review, check out …

Some books are just made for readers. Embassytown, with its focus on the way language shapes our perceptions and our thoughts, is one such book. As readers we are conoisseurs of language, we inhale it and revel in it and cultivate it and all of its diversity. Language informs us, sways us, entertains us, engages us … it is everything to us.

Science fiction seems, to me, like a perfect vehicle for exploring our…

I don’t know how I first got into Star Trek, but I owe almost the entire trajectory of my life to it. I’m not exaggerating. Aside from my interest in teaching (and even that might have been influenced by Star Trek’s love for exploration and knowledge), that TV show profoundly influenced my decisions. The first online community I joined was a Star Trek roleplaying group. Connections I made on that community led…

Redshirts wasn't in stock Tuesday, and Kobo's DRM shenanigans made me loath to purchase the ebook despite my shiny new tablet. Fortunately, I had already borrowed The Android's Dream from the library. I try to pace myself between books by the same author, but in this case I suppose I'm making an exception. Not that I mind in John Scalzi's case.

The Android's Dream is what I would call clever but zany SF. It's about…

The simulation hypothesis is perhaps the ultimate conspiracy theory, the one conspiracy theory to rule them all. It’s common enough that more than one blockbuster film has been based on the premise. Like many philosophical concepts that encourage exploration through science fiction, the simulation hypothesis can be imagined in a plethora of ways. I admit I find it compelling, but only to a certain point, since there’s really no way to know….

The Restoration Game…

Genetic engineering used to be purely science fiction. It’s a mark of how far we’ve come that these things are now becoming part of our everyday world. The once-hypothetical question of how to deal with augmented athletes in events like the Olympics is no longer so hypothetical. In The Games, Ted Kosmatka deals with the question in a simple way: no tinkering with the human athletes, but attach a single event that allows countries…

We’re at an interesting point in our history when it comes to spaceflight. We bravely ventured as far as the Moon, but now we cling to the skin of our world, skimming our atmosphere in shuttles and space stations. We are at an impasse, waiting for that next step, that next flurry of activity that will open a new chapter in human spaceflight. It’s looking like commercial spaceflight is the new frontier. Even so, it…

I have a thing for demon-summoning.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. I don’t have a thing for demon-summoning. As in, I don’t like summoning demons. Actually, I’ve never summoned a demon, but I imagine that if I did summon a demon, I wouldn’t much enjoy it. However, I suppose that there is a small chance that if I do, one day, summon a demon, then I might discover I enjoy it and start off…

Time travel is a very broad trope in science fiction. There are so many stories to tell using time travel and so many ways of doing it. I love time travel stories (particularly Doctor Who), the nitty-gritty, wibbly-wobbley, timey-wimey type of stories that can leave you utterly confused and gasping for breath by the end. For all their intricate potentialities, however, time travel is really only good for two things: observing history, and fucking…

I ended last year, and started this one, by discovering a great new writer of science fiction. In Reality 36, Guy Haley combines smartass private investigators with artificial intelligence, creating a truly entertaining posthuman thriller. There was just one problem.

It ended on a cliffhanger.

Fortunately, by the time I got around to reading the book, its sequel’s release date was fast approaching. So I was eagerly awaiting this month’s subscription email from Angry…

Oh, Mockingjay, I’m just not sure what to do with you.

I suppose that at this point the trilogy has taken on a certain trajectory. Katniss rebelled against the Capitol, inadvertently started an uprising, and now finds herself the face of that revolution regardless of her desires in the matter. It seems inevitable that the third and final book will feature the climax of this uprising, an assault on the Capitol, and one last…