Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

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…

This is exactly what I needed: a fast-paced mystery novel wrapped in the goodness of cyberpunk science fiction. Altered Carbon is an enthralling read.

The main character, Takeshi Kovacs, is an ex-United Nations Envoy, a sort of borderline psychopathic personality who went into messy situations and cleaned them up using any means necessary. As an ex-Envoy, Kovacs has had a hard time adjusting to civilian life, so the book starts with him as a fugitive.…

This is one of the most disturbing posthuman science fiction stories I've ever read (that's a good thing). In Nothing Human, aliens known as the "pribir" arrive in 2005, just as humanity is beginning to tinker with genetic engineering in earnest. Having prepared for their arrival by tweaking the genes of several in vitro babies, all of whom are now thirteen years old, the pribir communicate by sending olfactory information (smells) that these "pribir…

In the sequel to Hidden Empire, Kevin J. Anderson offers us glimpses of the galaxy's past even as we look to its future. Dark secrets of the Ildirans,the hydrogues, and even the worldforest on Theroc are revealed throughout A Forest of Stars, and soon humanity realizes it isn't alone in this galactic conflict. That's really what the second book of the Saga of Seven Suns is about: ramping up the scope.

The natural…

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…