Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

This review will be shorter than usual because I broke my elbow and have one hand in a cast.

Trouble Dog is a sentient warship that developed a conscience after directly participating in a genocide that ended the last war between two human factions. Since then, she has joined up with the House of Reclamation, a kind of interstellar Red Cross, in an attempt to atone. The latest distress call she and her crew respond…

(A much shorter review than usual, since I have broken my left elbow and am typing with one hand in a cast.)

Not a particularly original story or even mash-up of tropes. Walking to Aldebaran piggy-backs on that time-honoured sub-genre of Big Dumb Object stories. Lots of cool ideas and set pieces from Adrian Tchaikovsky, but very little that is surprising or truly interesting above and beyond the skill of the writing style itself. Thanks…

I stuck it out for 50 pages or so but was pretty sure 10 pages in that Space Opera isn’t for me.

Surprised? Me too. This has everything I usually like in humorous, Douglas Adams–inspired science fiction: lengthy infodumps, absurd alien species, human characters so over the top they might as well be on Everest … but it just … didn’t work.

Catherynne Valente’s prose just tries too hard for me. That’s not really a…

Ever since the first Binti novella came out, I’ve been hearing all about it. I jumped at this collection when I saw it at the bookstore, then, because I find it difficult to grab hold of novellas otherwise. I don’t care if Tor.com pushes them on me for free sometimes: I need it in my hands or on my device or else I just … read other things. And I’m glad I read Binti and…

At least one book’s length, if not a whole library of, encomia of Ursula K. Le Guin has already been written by people far more learned than me. It’s so tempting to take this collection of her novellas and use it as an excuse to praise Le Guin as an author in general. Yet there isn’t much I can hope to add to that conversation. Yet The Found and the Lost, as a collection…

Time loops. An English country house murder mystery. Shifting identities and allegiances. Yes please. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has so many things that attract me to a novel. For the most part, Stuart Turton’s execution kept me riveted: I inhaled this book over the course of two days, stopping only because I really did need to sleep.

A man comes to consciousness in the middle of a forest. All he remembers is the…

Not exactly what I was expecting from Alastair Reynolds (though I should probably know better) but maybe what I needed. It has been a hot 5.5 years since I read one of his books, and that is too long! I finished off the trilogy of main Revelation Space novels at the extreme tail-end of my enjoyment of high space opera. So it is fitting that, with Revenger, Reynolds introduces what might be a good…

Kind of space-opera, kind of not? Off Planet intrigues me because it’s kind of about interstellar war, or at least the tricksy politics that can lead to an interstellar war, yet its main characters aren’t (with a few exceptions) soldiers or politicians. The protagonist is literally just trying to live her life, mind her own business, but others can’t have that. Aileen Erin crafts some fairly interesting and intense situations and brings a fair amount…

People love to joke about being addicted to their devices. Yet addiction and dependency, as serious medical issues, have specific definitions. There’s a lot of debate right now about whether one actually develops addictions to the Internet, or to the use of one’s phone—and if so, what do we do about it in a society that not only rewards but often requires the use of these tools? Wired establishes an addiction to such communications and…

It has been almost exactly two years since I gave Zenn Scarlett a rather mediocre review. In fact, I almost didn’t bother reading Under Nameless Stars. I’m glad I gave it a chance though! Although I don’t remember much about the first book, this sequel feels punchier, faster-paced, and more interesting than that one.

This book picks up where the first left off, so spoilers for the first book but no spoilers for Under…

Well, here we are. Almost four years ago I started re-reading Animorphs. I had been wanting to do this for a while, and then my Goodreads friend and occasional Twitter DM enthusiast Julie started her own, finally galvanizing me to just do it, as Shia Le Nike says. (You should also read Julie’s review of #54: The Beginning as well!) It has taken me considerably longer than Julie to finish re-reading this series, but…

I read #53: The Answer and #54: The Beginning back-to-back because this book ends on a cliffhanger. Like the rest of my reviews of Animorphs, I’m not really flagging this as having spoilers despite discussing the plot, because I figure that if you’re reading this review of the end of a 50-book series 20 years later, then you probably don’t care that much about spoilers.

ALSO, weirdly enough, very specific spoiler for Buffy season…

So many mixed feelings about this one! The cover caught my eye while at Chapters shopping for books for my Dad. I read the first few pages and, honestly, was kind of hooked by Christina Dalcher’s writing. So I bought it and kept reading. Vox asks us to consider what it would be like if we used technology to literally silence women (at least in the United States).

Dr. Jean McClellan is our first person…

It has been somewhat more than a year since I read The Revolution Trade. Meanwhile, almost 20 years have passed between the events of that story and Empire Games. Miriam Beckstein, considerably older, is now a Commissioner in the revolutionary government in the timeline formerly hosting New Britain. Her adopted-out daughter, Rita Douglas, is about to be recruited by the U.S. government as a clandestine agent. Everything else is ready to go pear-shaped…

If it feels like just yesterday that I read The Calculating Stars, that’s because it practically was! I seldom read sequels so close together, but once in a while I manage to buy them at the same time. In this case, I rushed out and bought The Fated Sky the weekend after I finished the first book and very deliberately made this my first book of 2019—I like to start my reading year off…

How much did I love The Calculating Stars? When I picked this up at Chapters, I didn’t realize that its sequel was already out! So when I finished this on the evening of December 28, I was very tempted to rush out and buy that sequel right away. But Chapters was closing in 20 minutes, so I waited until the next day, and then I bought The Fated Sky with the intention of…

Haha, so it seems like only yesterday I was talking about how Saga, Volume 8 was a refreshing respite from the dark, downer moments of his series.

Oh boy.

I get it, those 1-star and 2-star reviews from people throwing up their hands in the air and saying, “I just can’t even with this anymore.” That is a legitimate point of view and valid criticism of this book. Saga, Volume 9 takes any of the…

Reader, I have done something I didn't think I would ever do. Not only have I had to DNF another book just before the end of the year, but I …

… I skipped to the end!

Yes, I know! Sacrilege! But I could not finish Crosstalk. The constant storm of interruptions from Briddey’s phone and the people in her life was literally causing my introvert brain to feel anxious and stressed. If…

Did … did good things just happen to our protagonists?

Excuse me while I check if I’m actually reading Saga, Volume 8 and not some impostor. Because … because … GOOD THINGS HAPPENED, FOLX. I mean, yeah, shitty things happened too. Don’t get me wrong; there’s still conflict and loss here. But … good things! And Ghüs!! I missed Ghüs!!

This volume opens with Alana and Prince Robot looking for medical help in … Abortion…

Because there’s nothing like reading some Animorphs books out of order …

#51: The Absolute is where the proverbial manure hits the air redistribution machine. I mean, I haven’t generally been marking these reviews with spoiler alerts, because I feel like if you’re reading a review for book 51, you’re either in way too deep or you don’t care about being spoiled. But I had to flag this review, because this …

… this…