Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

I'd like to love Coyote Rising more; Allen Steele has created a very original tale of interstellar colonization. Unfortunately, I found the plot and the characters lacking the substance required to truly distinguish a novel, no matter how original its premise.

The first book in the series, Coyote, depicted a fantastic new world, Earth-like in so many ways yet also devastatingly alien. Even as the original colonists began to settle the planet, more ships…

In Coyote, Allen Steele demonstrates the versatility of science fiction as a medium for storytelling. There are no advanced alien species (that we know of so far), no ray guns, and no evil battle droids. Instead, Coyote is a pioneer tale set in a very distant, very exotic locale. In fact, it's interesting that I chose to read it, considering my distaste for "pioneer" and "survival" type literature. Nevertheless, Steele's writing and the story…

I read Soon I Will Be Invincible in a single sitting (although the two-hour rain delay before the ball game began helped). It has an easygoing, tongue-in-cheek style that makes it a pleasure to read. Sometimes it feels like a comic book, other times it feels like a parody of the superhero/supervillain genre in general. In making an effort not to be too serious, Austin Grossman has created a literary mélange of Douglas Coupland–style humour,…

When I first started reading this book after borrowing it from the library, I did a double-take. I had this book down as being recommended by one of my favourite science fiction blogs, yet the book's description mentioned nothing that made it sound like science fiction! So I had to go back and read the article that mentions this book before I realized what was going on (the Library of Congress cataloguing information also…

There are many flavours to science fiction, something that omnivorous readers adore and sceptics of sci-fi forget. Not all science fiction is Star Wars (which is arguably science fantasy), with action heroes, fast ships, and big guns (or, you know, swords). Not that there's anything wrong with those stories—but those who pan The Left Hand of Darkness for lacking such things tend to miss the point. It's not supposed to be like those stories;…

Books with adjectives like "fast-paced adventure-filled thrill-ride" are usually overhyped. Usually. In this case, The Walls of the Universe deserves such tags. It is fast-paced, adventure-filled, and thrilling. I finished it in a day--and it's a fair sized book--because I had trouble putting it down.

All of the main characters, with the possible exception of the villains, are complex. Melko sets up the story so we at first believe it will be John Rayburn versus…

I read this book in a single night, which is a pretty good testament to how much I enjoyed it. I won't be the first person to compare Little Brother to George Orwell (Doctorow himself does it, alluding to it in the story by giving his protagonist the handle w1n5t0n and through the title of the book itself), but it's a very apt comparison. Little Brother is 1984 updated to take into account September 11th,…

Nanotechnology is to contemporary society what space flight was to the society of the ’50s and ’60s—achievable but not quite viable yet. And just as space flight inspired some of the ’50s and ’60s most chilling sci-fi horror stories, nanotechnology serves the same role in the 2000s. Alas, while M.M. Buckner’s Watermind has an intriguing concept, it fails to deliver anything resembling a good story.

The eponymous Watermind is a semi-sentient, self-emergent neural net that…

Replete with political intrigue, a powerful alien aggressor, and parables of human folly, The Saga of Seven Suns has everything a reader wants from an epic science fiction adventure. Kevin J. Anderson has created a vision of humanity's future both comfortable and unique. While adhering to many established tropes in space operas, including a handwaved FTL drive and form of instantaneous communication (sort of), Anderson has crafted interesting political entities and distinct cultures with often-conflicting…

Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga is an example of how science fiction isn't necessarily a genre; it's just a setting. Kirinyaga is technically science fiction, because it involves colonizing another world (the eponymous planetoid Kirinyaga, named for the mountain upon which the god of the Kikuyu, Ngai, lives). However, Kirinyaga isn't about spaceships or combat with high-tech weaponry or vast, evil empires. It's a collection of fables, and an extremely well-written one at that.

The narrator of …

The genius of The Gone-Away World sneaks up on you in a loud and bombastic way. Nick Harkaway's writing reminds me two Douglases who are masters of the absurd and apocalyptic: Douglas Coupland and Douglas Adams. Sardonic and observant, Harkaway tosses off scene after scene of unrelenting zany fun. Yet when the smoke clears and the score is tallied, The Gone-Away World is ultimately, like jPod or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, about…

I entered the Metaverse ignorant of the fact that Snow Crash was first published in 1992 (i.e., pre-Internet). Hence, it took some time for the book to endear itself to me, because my reaction to the Metaverse, a virtual reality, was filtered through my experiences with the Internet. As such, I first found Neal Stephenson's depiction of virtual reality as camp, reminding me much of Net Force and its ilk. In other words, Snow Crash…

A blend of semi-hard, semi-sweet science fiction with historical fiction, Eifelheim comes across as intelligent yet smug. Michael Flynn concocts a "perfect storm" of coincidences, particularly for the two present-day main characters, to carry his narrative. While every story will rely on coincidence in some fashion or another, Eifelheim's plot resembles a meticulously constructed house of cards built in the windiest location on Earth (a quick Google search turns up no consensus on this…

Karl Schroeder demonstrates an impressive capacity for worldbuilding and imaginative hard science fiction. Sun of Suns is truly awesome in the scope of its technological milieu. The civilization of Virga, with artificially-generated gravity, is as alien to us as the idea of "Artificial Nature" is to the isolated Virgans. Set against this majestic backdrop, the protagonist, Hayden Griffin, is on a mission of revenge that quickly becomes complicated.

Quixotically, Schroeder spends very little time actually…

Perhaps the best science fiction book I've ever read that so elegantly reverses our contemporary notions of gender. Not so great as a novel, unfortunately.

In Glory Season, David Brin depicts a world with an intensely matriarchal society. The majority of the population of Stratos consists of female clones, "sparked" in winter by male sperm, but genetic copies of their mothers. Men and "variant" girls are born in summer. Designed this way the founders…

It's been several years since I first read Watchmen, so I decided to read it again in preparation for eventually seeing the film. Lauded on the cover as "One of TIME magazine's 100 best novels" and a "Winner of the Hugo Award" it's easy to get swept up in the love-fest that is Watchmen. While it's true I loved this book (as shown by the five star rating), I'm going to try to…

Overall, the word I'd use to describe this book is "shallow." Clarke and Pohl, two big names in SF, have managed to take two interesting concepts (Fermat's Last Theorem and alien sterilization of Earth) and turn them into a boring book. It's as if they said one day, "Well, we've succeeded at everything else in literature; now we have to succeed at writing a bad book!"

My major problem with the book is the lack…

George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books were some of the first fantasy I read, back when I was in grade seven. One of my friends introduced me to fantasy by way of The Belgariad, and after polishing that off, I read the first three A Song of Ice and Fire books (yes, all three were out then, and the fourth one just came out recently!). Martin is one of my…

Shriver's use of a parallel universe structure is masterful and makes the book quite interesting. In fact, if she had not written the story in such a manner, I don't think the plot would have been as worthwhile--it would have just been another tired "should I or shouldn't I?" morality play.

My favourite aspect of the parallel universe structure was watching how characters react differently to Irina or to other characters depending on what choices…

Fairly predictable as a mystery, Blasphemy is an interesting hypothetical progression of hysteria surrounding a fictitious particle accelerator that is suspiciously similar to the Large Hadron Collider. Preston combines a lively mix of physics, religion, and espionage to generate an exciting page-turner.

Seriously.

My favourite characters were mostly antagonists. Their outrage at the ISABELLA project was wonderfully telegraphed through both dialogue and actions; sadly, these sorts of people do exist in real life.

Unfortunately, I…