Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

In a very rare move for me, I picked up The Obelisk Gate on my visit to the library after reading The Fifth Season. N.K. Jemisin’s sequel picks up where it leaves off, with a little backtracking to fill in Nassun’s story. Short review? If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one. The mysteries of this world deepen, the characters grow and both gain and lose. Longer review? Well, keep reading.

Spoilers…

Lizard Radio is a lovely, messy, very queer book with queer characters. I enjoyed it and also didn’t, if you know what I mean—I’m glad I read it, but reading it was a bit of a chore, because Pat Schmatz’s style is quite distinctive. This feels more like a novella than a novel to me, despite its length, because it doesn’t quite have the narrative completeness I desire, personally, in my novels. Nevertheless, Kivali’s journey…

I'm not sure if it's a positive or negative that I read Too Like the Lightning so soon after reading Ilium. That is, Ada Palmer’s writing here reminds me a lot of Dan Simmons’ writing: science fiction heavily saturated with literary and philosophical references. In this case, Palmer grounds her story in the duelling philosophies of the Enlightenment—humanists vs rationalists, individualists vs collectivists—while simultaneously springboarding us into a vision of a future for humanity…

I was excited to read a YA novel with an Indigenous protagonist, because there aren’t enough of those. Killer of Enemies is an action-packed dystopian thriller from Joseph Bruchac. Yet what it gains from tense action sequences it loses in sloppy writing elsewhere.

Lozen is the eponymous Killer of Enemies, a post-apocalyptic job position that involves being sent on hazardous missions away from the haven of Haven to kill dangerous beasties that might otherwise threaten…

As with The Fifth Season I’m very late to the party with this one. So many more books in this series! But I finally got around to All Systems Red, and it was every bit as enjoyable as I was led to believe it was, even if it wasn’t quite as memorable as I’d like. Then again, considering this is a novella, I will cut Martha Wells some slack. Indeed, I appreciate how skilfully…

Longtime readers of my reviews will recall I have a tumultuous relationship with Dan Simmons’ books. I didn’t like The Terror or Drood, but I warmed up to Simmons through his epic Hyperion Cantos. In my review for the final book of that cycle, The Rise of Endymion, I commented, “Even if you don’t like the series, it is hard to dispute the scope and style of it.” Simmons lives up to…

Matt Haig surprised me with the unexpectedly sweet How to Stop Time. So, of course when I learned he has a novel involving a mathematician who might have proved the Reimann Hypothesis, well … I just had to read it! The alien as fish-out-of-water is a tried-and-true trope of science fiction these days, allowing authors to comment on how wacky some human social and cultural conventions would seem to a true outsider. Haig seizes…

Every single review panning this story for not making sense is entirely deserved. Time travel stories are difficult to write and, even when written well, difficult to parse and read. If it’s not your thing, that’s fine.

But Permafrost is so very much my thing.

In structure, it reminds me of Palimpsest, by Charles Stross. Both are novellas with a single protagonist recently initiated in time travel. Both are fairly convoluted in terms of…

Time travel stories are tricky. The best ones give me a headache but not too much of a headache. I guess it’s the literary equivalent of the adrenaline rush one gets from momentarily being upside down on a roller coaster (which is definitely not for me): I want my brain to hurt as I contemplate 4-, 11-, or 22-dimensional spacetime … but I don’t want to get so confused that I feel the author could…

Why does AI always end up being the bad guy? Because we love to explore evil in the form of the Other. Also, it usually turns out that the bad guy was us, the creators of the AI, all along! Anastasia Slabucho’s Waterdown retreads these ideas but within the context of the climate change crisis we currently face. She posits that someone might have the right combination of drive, ingenuity, and wherewithal to create an…

I received this book from Tiny Fox Press and NetGalley in exchange for a review.

Apocalypse How? is a messy trainwreck, and if that’s your style, you’ll probably enjoy it. For the rest of us … let’s just say that I kind of knew how I felt about this book less than 50 pages in, and maybe I should have stopped there. This is basically “Indiana Jones in space” but make Indiana a young woman…

I love fierce sister duos. You know, the kind where the two sisters have complementary skills and get on each other’s nerves yet always have the other’s back? That kind.

Yeah, Shadow Captain isn’t quite that kind of story.

Adrana and (Ara)fura Ness have managed to dispatch the fearsome space pirate Bosa Sennen, taking her ship in the process. These young women are way out of their league, however, and now that they are in…

I’ve had Jumper on my computer for a while now and never got around to reading it, not sure why. Sometimes with books like that, I feel extra trepidation going into it. Why haven’t I read it yet? Is it because I can sense it’s bad? What if I don’t like this book?? I’m on vacation; I want my reading to be good!! Fortunately, although by no means a home run—by dint of Gould’s somewhat…

Labyrinth is a short Miles Vorkosigan adventure that starts as a simple covert pick-up and ends with a new recruit for Miles’ Dendarii mercenaries, not to mention some romance for one of the side characters. There’s a lot to like about this novella: it’s paced quite well for its length, and although very science-fictional, it’s definitely more special-ops thriller than anything else.

Labyrinth shows why Miles is the hero of this series. He’s capable of…

Okay, so instead of five years passing between re-read books, I’ve only let a year elapse. That’s not too bad on the Ben Scale of Book Series Completion! My reception of Second Foundation is much more positive than my review of Foundation and Empire, in which I skewered Isaac Asimov’s writing style. Honestly, I found this book to be far more readable and even enjoyable at points!

As with the previous book, this one…

It’s fashionable among a certain throwback segment of science fiction fans to claim that the entrance of so many new women writers to the field has somehow diminished the quality of stories being published. This, despite the fact that women have always been writing in science fiction from its inception. But whatever—all I have to say is I don’t know what SF they’re reading, because much of the best SF I have read in recent…

It seems like every time I review a short story anthology I always start with a disclaimer about how short stories, and by extension, their anthologies, are not really “for me.” In this case I need to say it because How Long ’Til Black Future Month? is one of those rare exceptions where I … I actually liked pretty much every story in here. Not equally, of course. But there were only one or two…

First, huge shout-out to the Oxford comma lurking in this title. Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is an anthology of queer Indigenous science fiction and fantasy by Indigenous authors. That’s it, and yet it is so much more. I really liked Hope Nicholson’s comment in her foreword about how some stories aren’t meant to be told, or at least, do not need to be shared with just…

As much as I think the finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might be one of the best TV finales ever, I do wish we had seen (canonically, on screen) what the aftermath of the Dominion War brought. It’s one thing to tell a war story—and DS9 told it well—and another to talk about after the war. About picking up the pieces, rebuilding, and healing wounds of all varieties. Aftershocks is exactly that kind…

How to Stop Time is an unexpected jewel of a book. Matt Haig hits just the right buttons for me. There’s a sliver of that beautiful British humour, yet it never pitches over too far into the absurdity of, say, Christopher Moore—which is not a bad thing for Moore, but for this particular story, would have been over the top. It has moments of deep, abiding sadness and grief, yet it also rides to the…