Anyone else remember Creatures? I played that game when I was younger … I might still have it around somewhere in a closet. Hmm, maybe I should dig it out. Because The Lifecycle of Software Objects reminded me of Creatures (albeit without the breeding). The digients in Ted Chiang's novella are artificially-intelligent software programs who begin as a genome created by software developers. The genome is just a starting place, however, and more complex…
-
-
My experience with Iain M. Banks has been lukewarm. I liked but didn't love the first book in this series, Consider Phlebas, and I absolutely hated The Algebraist. I read The Player of Games because I am an artificial intelligence, post-scarcity junkie, and Banks is the kind of author who serves as my pusher.
The Player of Games more than makes up for any disappointment I felt over Consider Phlebas. In this…
-
Margaret Atwood looms large in that particularly Canadian part of my literary subconscious, the part that natters at me to call stuff "CanLit" and berates me for having never read anything by Michael Ondaatje. Atwood is Kind Of A Big Deal, but so far I have managed to avoid reading any of her novels and have read, as far as I can recall, one of her short stories. Already, though, I have a bone…
-
We are very spoiled, and very privileged, to live now in the twenty-first century. We look back on works of science fiction from the 1950s, 1960s, and onward that reference the 1990s or 2000s as "the future" and make grandiose predictions: we'll have flying cars! a eugenics war! robot apocalypse! It's interesting to note that such extrapolation, while often falling very short of the mark, tends to be conservative when it describes the technological platforms…
-
Somewhat disappointingly, this is not a story about what happens to Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity after the Rapture. It's an interstitial between the abrupt ending of Firefly and the Serenity movie, covering some of the difficulty the crew has getting work, as well as Shepherd Book and Inara's departures. We also see an old antagonist, Lawrence Dobson, return for revenge.
In case you don't remember him, Dobson was an Alliance agent…
-
I tend to read books one at a time in quick succession. I have to, for the same reason I am so assiduous in writing reviews: I have a poor memory for these types of details. However, every so often I'll have a "project" book that takes me weeks or months to read, in parallel with my other books. I tend to do this with lengthy anthologies; I've been doing it with the Iliad.…
-
Once upon a time, a science-fiction author wrote a novel about a Big Dumb object. It would go on to win the trifecta: the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel, not to mention become the iconic novel about Big Dumb Objects. It is now, essentially, a classic.
Fans with engineering degrees from MIT decided to crunch the numbers and ask difficult questions about how this Big Dumb Object could actually work the…
-
Uh-oh. Jennifer Sharifi is back. This can't be good for the story, and last time she was the antagonist, it wasn't good for the book either.
I'll say this about Nancy Kress: she has a way of surprising me. I did not expect her to kill off Leisha Camden so abruptly in Beggars and Choosers. The stunning events that happen in Beggars Ride, some of which are the result of Jennifer's decisions, were…
-
My father gave me this book for Christmas of 2009, and it has been sitting on my to-read shelf ever since. I suppose I have been avoiding it, probably because I had (and still have) better things to read. However, in my quest to empty my to-read shelf before I replenish it with books from the overflow bin, I changed that.
I didn't read this book in 2009, but I did read Flashforward. Stephen…
-
My golden standard when it comes to stories of genetic manipulation and its effects on society is Gattaca. I've only seen it twice, I think, yet its impact on my consciousness (and conscience) remains clear in my mind. Growing up concurrently with the Human Genome Project and watching the advancements in genetics that are happening in my lifetime, I am wary of what will happen if governments, corporations, and people do not reach a…
-
I liked The Ringworld Engineers more than I did Ringworld, in the sense that I enjoyed reading it more. Yet it is neither better nor worse than its predecessor. Although full of many more interesting conundrums than the first book, The Ringworld Engineers still suffers, notably in its treatment of female characters and sex. And after a careful unveiling of mystery after mystery leading up to a climax with such great potential, the ending…
-
I love to sleep. I prefer at least eight, preferably nine hours of sleep each night. Going to bed at midnight and waking up at nine in the morning is a perk of my madcap, Bohemian university student lifestyle that I will have to abandon once I become a stern, starched-collar high school teacher. For now, however, I like my sleep, and I will defend to the death my right to snore it. But if…
-
After I finished Pandora's Star, I ordered this sequel online and began it soon after it arrived at my doorstep. This is significant, because while I do not adhere religiously to the general order of my to-read list, I try to follow it in good faith. I couldn't wait over a year to read Judas Unchained, so despite my general moratorium on buying books, I made an exception. And I'm glad I did. …
-
We begin at the beginning, because the beginning is awesome and foreshadows the epic quality of Pandora's Star, as well as the sense of humour, levity, and gravity that Peter F. Hamilton uses to create an incredibly compelling and vast narrative.
Wilson Kime is the pilot of the first manned Mars lander. The mission crew steps onto the surface and raises the United States flag, only to be interrupted by a stranger in a…
-
Genetics is one of the reasons I'm glad we have science-fiction authors. So far physicists have conspired to make faster-than-light travel impossible (or at least highly impractical), so perhaps we won't be meeting any intelligent alien species any time soon. In the past ten years, however, our understanding of genetics and the human genome has grown considerably. As we become more adept at manipulating our genome, whether it's to cure hereditary diseases or augment healthy…
-
Second Review (February 12, 2011)
Dune is a classic because it tells a classic story well. It combines two plots that I love: a vast political intrigue with an intimate family conflict. The Atreides and Harkonnens are related by blood; their feud is a blood feud going back generations. Yet their battles are political in scale, using vassals as soldiers and spies in an interstellar chess game where the throne of the Imperium itself is…
-
(In my best Majel Barrett voice.) Last time, on my review of the Uplift Storm Trilogy…
- Alvin et al were rescued from their wrecked diving bell by none other than the submerged crew of the Streaker.
- a Jophur starship landed on Jijo, capturing the Rothen ship and promising a slow, painful annihilation if the Jijoans did not divulge the location of the Streaker (if they did, the Jophur promised a swift annihilation). …
-
Shit just got real!
OK, so remember how Brin left off Brightness Reef on a cliffhanger? Jophur ship had just landed above the returned Rothen vessel, totally changing the balance of power on Jijo. Sara and the starfaring Stranger, whom we now know to be Emerson from the Streaker escaped the zealots and have fallen in with a group horse-riding human women and urs. Dwer and Rety are stuck on a mad robot. Oh, and…
-
You cannot ask for a better premise than Uplift. Of all the science fiction series I've read, David Brin has something special here. Uplift is more than just panspermia, because Brin has taken the idea of aliens genetically engineering pre-sapient life to full sapience and wrapped his own entire mythos around the concept. As a result of Uplift, galactic civilization is a network of intricate social relationships defined and bound by literally millions of years…
-
I had never heard of Jack Vance until Subterranean Press announced it would be publishing a tribute anthology containing stories from some of my favourite authors. Apparently Vance is a master fantasist, on par with Tolkien, and his Dying Earth series inspired all of those authors, and many more, in the latter half of the twentieth century. So I ordered the massive volume from Subterranean Press, and then I set about finding a copy of…
Showing 501 to 520 of 624 results