Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

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!

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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.…

I’m pretty sure that if there isn’t already a sport that involves mocking what people of the past predicted our society would be like, then we need to invent it. Right now. Tomorrow: Science Fiction and the Future has some gems. It opens with a piece by Isaac Asimov, who begins:

Predicting the future is a hopeless, thankless task, with ridicule to begin with and, all too often, scorn to end with. Still, since I

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It’s 2000, and a strongly moralistic conservative movement is sweeping the United States of America. Blaming natural disasters and the declining economy on “unsavoury” elements of American society, the American Alliance wants to restore morality and “family values”. Does this sound familiar? In some ways, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is ten-years-too-early yet eerily prescient. There is so much in here that rings true, which is terrible. At the same time, it is a deeply flawed…

I knew Cormac McCarthy and I were going to have differences from the moment I opened The Road and discovered the dearth of quotation marks. Yes, I’m one of those readers, and this is going to be that type of review. Exits are located on both sides. For those of you who choose to remain on board, please fasten your seatbelts. In the event the review experiences a sudden loss in pressure, an oxygen mask…

Another, albeit much more recent, addition to my to-read shelf courtesy of io9, Machine Man is sardonic exploration of the symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. I happened to see a copy on the library’s “New Books” shelf, so I took the opportunity and grabbed it. Unlike Fragment, Machine Man seems a little more plausible, which makes it much scarier. Max Barry’s main character isn’t someone with whom everyone will identify—he’s rather asocial…

Often I go into novels with expectations. If they’re by an author I know and like, or if they came highly recommended from a trusted source, then I might have very high expectations. If they’re something I plucked from the library’s “New Books” shelf, then I’ll be less hesitant. Sometimes, however, I go into a book with few or no expectations. This is not because I am being open-minded; I am a huge literary snob…

Ever discover an author through another medium, like TV or Twitter or the author’s blog, and realize you want to read everything this author has written and you want to read it yesterday? That’s how I feel about Charles Stross. It’s similar to my evaluation of William Gibson in my last review; Stross writes about the present changes facing humanity in such an interesting way. I don’t always agree with him, and his…

After reading Neuromancer I took a short detour into some of Gibson’s other works of fiction, and then I read Virtual Light. With Pattern Recognition I seem to have established a trend of reading his three trilogies in a breadth-first rather than depth-first mode: having completed all of the first books, I will now read all three second books, etc. This might be an unusual way to go about it, but I hope it…

One day I hope to read a Nancy Kress novel full of amazing, deep, complex characters who manage to transcend the stereotypes often demanded by plot and story. Alas, that day has not yet come.

Probability Moon ended on a bittersweet note. The Zeus and its crew was destroyed when Orbital Object #7 exploded rather than go through the space tunnel. The anthropological team left on World was rescued—just in time, from their perspective, because…

Last week Kevin Mitnick was on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, Ghost in the Wires and talk about hacking. For those of us who grew up with the Web as a fact of life and absorbed "hacker culture" through Hollywood, Mitnick's experiences seem somewhat alien. Hacking started long before the Web, of course, and even today hacking is nothing like what one sees on the movies. However, it's just in this decade…

I have never before read anything by Ian R. MacLeod. I have a terrible and impoverishing addiction to purchasing titles from specialty publisher Subterranean Press, and during an all-too-common binge (this time it was Charles Stross titles), I saw this on offer, shrugged, said, "What the hell?" and added it to my cart.

I don't recall hearing much about Ian R. MacLeod either. His name is almost criminally similar to Ian McDonald, however, whose …

This is exactly what I needed after the disappointing Clan of the Cave Bear. Nancy Kress is an author whose ability to make me think never fails, even if I don't always enjoy her characterization. She doesn't just touch on or grapple with Big Ideas; she stalks them, lassos them, and puts them to work doing her bidding. And she is really, really smart. Wikipedia doesn't tell me what she specialized in during her…

Recently I stole the soapbox in another person's review of Shampoo Planet to pontificate about my personal reader's theory of Douglas Coupland. JPod was the first Coupland novel I read, and it is also my favourite. We all react to Coupland differently—i.e., JPod is my favourite, but some of my friends hate JPod with a passion and love Girlfriend in a Coma or Eleanor Rigby. Despite the fact that Coupland always deals with the…

Last time, on Kara's reviews:

… there's a very palpable, somewhat ironic fear here, because in a way these three are more frightened of the Blitz than the stalwart contemporaries (or "contemps" as the historians call them).… So for a moment, there's a justifiable and interesting suspense. Unfortunately, Willis attempts to sustain that suspense entirely too long…

… all the characters in this book are ninnies … They complain about the retrieval team not

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Time travel is a sexy science-fiction trope. It's right up there with faster-than-light travel (the two are, in fact, inextricably related, and chances are you if you invent one then you'll have invented both) as something that, as far as our current understanding of the universe works, is impossible. There are some fascinating loopholes involving wormholes and general relativity, but in order to get it working you need metric shit-joules of energy and something called …

I really like the feed icon. It's simple, clean, and easy to recognize. I love it so much that when Mozilla decided to remove it from the location bar in Firefox 4, I installed an extension just to get it back. It's awesome, and what it represents is awesome. The idea that anyone with an Internet connection (which is not as many people as we're wont to think) can report on the news is definitely…

Let me begin with a huge disclaimer: I have not read any other books in the Vorkosigan Saga. And it's all Lois McMaster Bujold's fault.

Well, that's not strictly true. It's the fault of her fans for getting Cryoburn nominated for a Hugo Award, which is why I am reading it now. But ultimately it's Bujold's fault for garnering such a huge fanbase. So there. I had intended to start with the first book and…