Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

In The Margarets, the eponymous character finds herself splitting into separate entities at various points in her life, each entity pursuing a different life, gaining different knowledge and experiences, and becoming a separate person. This is not an accident, of course, but all part of a carefully orchestrated plot by some gods to help restore humanity's racial memory so it will stop making war and killing planets.

Why yes, I do have the ability…

Aliens are invading Earth, spreading seeds that germinate on the human body and develop into blue Triangles. These Triangles then hatch into tentacle-borne pyramids that will build an interstellar gate to let the aliens cross the vast distance between Earth and wherever it is they live. They were stopped once before. Now their agents on Earth are trying again, and again, modifying tactics each time. And it's clear that the Triangles alone won't be enough—they…

So, there's this guy, right? Ex-football player with an injured knee, now paying the bills with a tech support desk job in small-town Michigan. Then he gets infected by triangle-shaped alien parasites that hijack his body, drive him crazy, and want him to meet up with other hosts so they can build a giant gateway and welcome Earth's new alien overlords. Suddenly, Perry Dawsey isn't having a good day anymore.

At first glance, Scott Sigler's …

Seldom does a book live up to blurbs like "Unforgettable. Impossible to put down," as Jack McDevitt says of Wake. Usually, such claims are empty hype, even when the book is good. Not so with Wake. I agree wholeheartedly with McDevitt, for I was 100 pages into the novel before realizing it was 2 AM and I should probably get some sleep. There's no way that Wake could be mistaken for "an action-packed…

This is one of the scariest books I have read in a long time. Good science fiction, good posthuman fiction, challenges the idea of what it means to be human. Octavia E. Butler goes beyond that, way beyond, challenging not just what human means but how open-minded I am to such challenges. This book blew my mind.

As a huge fan of science fiction, and as a relatively erudite person, I like to think…

Something's been nagging me ever since I began reading Allen Steele's Coyote series. I enjoyed both Coyote and Coyote Rising, for the most part, yet something was missing. Coyote Frontier brings that missing piece of the puzzle to the series, for we finally get to see Earth with our own eyes, and Steele reminds us why space travel isn't just for science fiction.

In Coyote Frontier, a starship belonging to the European Alliance,…

Practically an historical artifact to me, Sex and the High Command was educational even though it was not entertaining. It reminded me that there's a sharp difference between books set in the Cold War written during the Cold War and books set in the Cold War written after the fact. Reading it while discussing The Left Hand of Darkness in English class, I was struck by the similarities in the two novels: both are about…

Full disclosure: I received this book as a gift from the author.

Reviewing series always poses a challenge. I've reviewed the two previous books in Lee Stephen's Epic series: Dawn of Destiny and Outlaw Trigger, and I don't think it's demeaning to Hero to call it "more of the same." Most of what I said regarding the first two books stands for this book as well: there's plenty of action, great dialogue, and the…

I can best summarize my feelings about Hyperion like so: why did someone let me read the terror that is The Terror when I could have read a good book by Dan Simmons?!

Frame stories are not my favourite way to conduct business with a novel. In general, Hyperion's greatest flaws lie within its structure, frame story included. That and the abrupt ending devoid of any real conclusion are probably the two chief sources…

Full disclosure: I received this book as a gift from the author.

The Epic series opened strongly, but it doesn't hit its stride until the second book. While Dawn of Destiny had some of the best heart-pounding action I've read recently, it still felt preliminary, like a too-small appetizer at a restaurant. Only because I knew there was more coming did it feel like enough. The next course was certainly worth it, however.

Set…

Full disclosure: I received this book as a gift from the author.

There's something refreshing about a boots-on-the-ground alien invasion of Earth. When aliens darken our doorstep, they seldom need to send troops down to pacify the population, probably because any species advanced enough to have interstellar spaceflight capability will also have some pretty terrible weapons. Why send wave after wave of soldiers when some well-placed bombs and a few destroyed satellites will accomplish the…

Maybe it's unfair to compare them, but having read this hot on the heels of The War of the Worlds, I liked The Time Machine better. On thematic grounds it's a close battle, but The Time Machine is a far superior story, hands down.

I'm not even going to touch the whole "time travel" concept as Wells presents it in this book, both because it was written in 1895 and because science fiction has…

From the first line, this book hooked me: "The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd." A post-Singularity descendant of humanity, the Festival, arrives in orbit around the backwater Rochard's World. The Festival's willingness to share anything in return for information results in economic and social upheaval as the repressed citizens of Rochard's World find they can have anything they want: technology, money,…

It's easy to be a jaded reader of science fiction, especially if you grew up with the conveniences of Star Trek, Star Wars, and the reality of spaceflight. So it's important to remember that writers like H.G. Wells never got to see the famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth; they never got to see what our planet looks like from space—something most of us take for granted in this era. This awareness, our…

For some reason, we tend to consider the terms "bounty hunter" and "empathy" as oppositional; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick manages to make them seem like nothing of the sort. This book both entranced and disappointed me; your mileage may vary.

The key to any futuristic, post-apocalyptic world is establishing a lack of empathy among its citizens—that is, dystopias come about because the government suddenly starts ruling people instead…

The trouble with reading good books is that any review one writes feels insufficient. It's not just finding the right words to describe how such books make one feel that's the challenge ... it's organizing those words in such a way to convey the breadth and scope of moving literature. Neuromancer poses such a problem. Writers trade in stories and ideas; while a case can be made that Neuromancer is deficient in some respects of…

I won a copy of Stones of Time through Goodreads' first reads giveaway.

This is the sequel to Demons of the Past, and immediately I liked Stones of Time better. Although Demons of the Past was OK, I felt that its plot did not delve deep enough into the social ramifications of this neo-medieval America, nor was the plot complex enough to make up for the dearth of dimension in Durante's characters. Stones…

Four hundred years have passed since the fall of civilization As We Know It, society has reverted to a series of medieval monarchies, where technology has become magic and the genetic mutant experiments who now roam the Earth are the eponymous "demons of the past." Our protagonists are on a quest for a magical ocarina needed to refresh the magical barrier keeping more demons from escaping their four-hundred-year-old prison. Of course, soon we learn…

Set in the 2170s, Julian Comstock depicts a fallen America. Hit hard by Peak Oil and global climate change refugees, America has re-imagined itself as an officially Christian nation. With technology and social norms on par with the nineteenth century—which the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth extols as the perfect template for contemporary American society—this is a profoundly different society from our own, but it strikes a chord because it may not be far…

While I've been meaning to read more by Philip K. Dick, Counter-Clock World is worth skipping. It's a mildly-interesting premise lengthened into an uninteresting novel. In fact, the premise is pretty much the only part of the book I enjoyed (and only because of suspension of disbelief). I can't say I cared for either the plot or the characters.

The Hobart Phase that causes everyone to live their lives in reverse is somewhat unlikely, but…