Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

Two years, almost to the day, have elapsed since I read the first book in this series. Since then it has gone from trendy young adult sensation to international book series phenomenon. My second student-teaching practicum is in a Grade 7/8 environment, where it seems like every student is reading one of these three books. I even got to accompany my Grade 7 and 8 classes to watch the movie when it came out in…

It would be tempting to say that Joe Spork lived a quiet, unremarkable life until he was pulled into an attempt to stop a mad South Asian dictator from unleashing a 1950s clockwork doomsday device by a retired octogenarian super-spy named Edie Banister. Tempting, but not quite accurate, since Joe is the son of the infamous Matthew “Tommy Gun” Spork, who kept fashionable crime and the honourable lifestyle of the gangster alive long after it…

After two somewhat disappointing books, I finally picked up a book I’ve had since at least my birthday. My experience with Kurt Vonnegut remains slimmer than I’d like, with most of it locked away in adolescent memories now slipping beyond the horizon of my mind. So it feels a little odd to be reading Armageddon in Retrospect, theoretically his last work (unless his estate publishes more unpublished tidbits), already. But I did, and I…

I’m terrible at explaining orally what books are about. Two people, the sort of people who don’t read books like this, asked me what Scratch Monkey is about while I was reading it, and I stumbled over my reply. “It’s a far-future posthuman story featuring nanotechnology and strong AI,” I mumbled, knowing that this explanation would make no sense to them and is more an over-generalization of the setting than any useful description of plot…

Whole brain emulation and mind uploading are science-fiction concepts that I love, because they raise really complicated questions related to philosophy of mind, a particular field in philosophy that I find very fascinating. Moreover, it’s scary how close we might be to achieving these in real life. Some critics have made very compelling cases for why this isn’t possible—but no one has been able to prove it, one way or another. Where scientists cannot yet…

Sometimes having a good idea just isn’t enough. This might hurt, but it’s the truth. For whatever reason, sometimes writers have amazing ideas that don’t pan out. And when those ideas stall mid-story, they take the entire book down with them.

In Brains: A Zombie Memoir, Jack Barnes is an English professor who gets bitten during the zombie apocalypse. After transforming, he discovers that he can still think and still feels like himself—aside from…

I have often lamented our slavery to linear time. It is a peculiar form of universal injustice, this fact that we can never revisit moments once they become “the past”, that the present is continuously slipping through our hands and solidifying into something we cannot change, except through the careful or careless manipulations of memory and history. What would lives be like if we could experience every moment simultaneously? What if we were conscious of…

In my review of Tomorrow: Science Fiction and the Future, I briefly touched on the parallels between the Cold War era apprehension over thermonuclear war and our current generation’s dance with global warming. We are acutely aware of our mortality, as a species, and the science fiction of these eras reflects that. Yet while some of the evidence of global warming has hit the front page—and been met with all the attendant scepticism and…

N.B. All roads (save two) lead to TVTropes. Proceed down them at your own risk.

So, Robopocalypse, we meet again for the first time!

I try to award priority to books that have been sitting around in my overflow bin, gathering dust. But I got Robopocalypse as a Christmas gift from my dad, and I admit I was a little curious about all the attention this book had received. So I let it jump…

There is a new buzzword making the rounds these days: gamification. It refers to the trend of turning quotidian tasks into games. Usually the end goal of the game maker is profit, of course, but often gamification has benefits for the players—it turns an otherwise boring or dull task into something fun. CBC’s Spark has explored gamification. They’ve also interviewed Jane McGonigal, who has some interesting ideas about how gaming is changing…

William Gibson can write. I keep exploring this in different ways and different words as I read through Gibson’s oeuvre, but in the end it comes down to two appropriately alliterative words: William Gibson has voice and vision. He has a way with language that not every writer, even really good ones, ever manages to master. He knows how to use and manipulate words and phrases to create cultures. With this talent, he…

Reality 36 is a mystery novel wrapped inside a science-fiction story wrapped inside a fun, technologically-oriented thriller. Richards & Klein are PIs in 2129. Richards is a Class Five AI, while Otto Klein is an ex-military German cyborg. And their day gets complicated when they have to solve the murder of Zhang Qifang—he was murdered twice, you see.

The stakes are high. Qifang’s disappearance and murder have sent ripples throughout the Grid, and the people…

I have an itch when it comes to artificial intelligence. Guy Haley scratches that itch, and then some. My hang-up on AI probably has to do with my interest in the philosophy of mind, the nature of consciousness itself. Will we ever be able to model human consciousness? Will we ever be able to create sentient AI? (These questions are related but not necessarily equivalent.) AI brings with it difficult issues that we will have…

Jay Lake has been hovering around the edge of my observable SF/fantasy universe for a while now, finally entering that universe when I read his Clockwork Earth series. Unfortunately, Mainspring disappointed me, and while the other two books in the trilogy were a big improvement on it, I was not much impressed. Sometime between acquiring Mainspring and reading it, however, I decided to buy this anthology from Subterranean Press.

I like novels more than I…

Without a doubt the Second World War is one of the most influential and significant events to occur in the past hundred years. The scope of this war was magnified and bigger than ever in every way: in the countries involved, in the technology and tactics developed and deployed, and in the atrocities committed. And so World War II has seared itself onto the collective consciousness of our species as something never to be forgotten.…

In case you haven’t heard yet, I love hard science fiction, particularly in space opera form. I could digress into some hefty analysis of how designations like hard are loaded terms that only exacerbate science fiction’s precarious position in the genre ghetto—but I won’t. Suffice it to say, I’m referring to stories that use advanced but plausible technology for technology’s sake, stories whose events span millions, if not billions, of years and can affect the…

Every once in a while when I open a box from Subterranean Press, I discover a surprise tucked inside. Such was the case with Zodiac; I received a free surplus ARC of their special edition of this novel. I seldom refuse free books, and of course, it’s Neal Stephenson. So off we go.

Even when attached to a name such as Stephenson’s, a novel that bills itself as an “eco-thriller” does not earn eager…

It’s been almost five weeks since I did this, so let’s hope my skills haven’t atrophied too much! My student teaching practicum was awesome, but it left me little time for reading and no time for reviewing. Now I need to catch up. So please forgive me if the details in this review are sparser than ordinary; there is a very good reason why I write reviews as soon as possible after finishing a book!

…

I know the line between science fiction and fantasy, if one exists at all, is tenuous, as is any genre brinksmanship one cares to play. I do try, however foolishly, to draw one, if only for my own personal cataloguing efforts. And I could go more into how I agree with the camp that views science fiction as a setting rather than a genre, but that’s not pertinent to my point. In science fiction,…

Contrary to what the title of this book implies to any sensible reader, this book is not about River Song. Disappointing, I know.

I ended up liking this book much more than I expected. To be perfectly honest, I did not want to like The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s a popular book, a “pop lit” book that has appropriated something so dear to science fiction and turned it into a gimmick for a romance.…