Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

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

…

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…

I didn't want to give this book five stars, but Ian McDonald hacked my brain. I had heard enough about The Dervish House—my first novel by McDonald, incidentally—to be fairly confident I would like it. Yet it is not the sort of novel that inspires love at first sight; rather, it tantalizes, flirts, and seduces its way into your heart. It accomplishes this through McDonald's style, the way he describes the city of Instanbul,…

Did you read Neuromancer and say, "This was good, but it could have used more steampunk?" That's kind of how one might describe The Difference Engine: Neuromancer meets steampunk. It's not a comprehensive, completely accurate description, but if that's sufficient for you, you can stop reading now and go read the book.

Still here? Cool.

William Gibson is on my "I must read everything by him!" shelf, and his influence on literature, particularly science…

Last week, Atlantis lifted off for the final space shuttle mission ever. The space shuttle program is older than I am, and to be honest, it's overdue for retirement. The Challenger and Columbia tragedies underscored how cantankerous and dangerous this method of low-Earth orbital delivery can be. The numerous delays in the final flights of Discovery and Atlantis emphasized the fragility of the aging shuttle fleet. So we should not be mourning the loss of…

My relationship with Dan Simmons has been ambivalent. We've had bad times and even worse times. We've also had some good times, namely with Hyperion. So I went into The Fall of Hyperion feeling pretty good, and if anything my opinion of this series has only improved. Any ill will I bore Simmons for the books I didn't like has dissipated thanks to his masterful presentation of this epic science-fiction series. The …

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…