Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

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…

You all might remember how I raved about the Linesman series of books two years ago (OMG, HAS IT REALLY BEEN THAT LONG ALREADY?). That series from sister act S.K. Dunstall literally reinvigorated my flagging love of space opera, no word of a lie. Go read my reviews for more on that.

Stars Uncharted is a new offering in a new universe, and it too is brilliant in so many ways. Far more ensemble in…

So, um, owing to a clerical error on my part, I read this before reading #51: The Absolute. Oops! I will definitely go back and read that before going on, but just keep this fact in mind while reading this otherwise perfect review of #52: The Sacrifice.

Ax has kind of had it with humans in this book, at least at first. Cassie gave up the morphing cube on purpose, and now…

It is with no small amount of regret that I announce I have never been mistaken for a fearsome space pirate. On the other hand, that’s probably for the best. I’m not going to be sent to space army school like Ia Cōcha in Ignite the Stars. The result is an intense story from Maura Milan about divided loyalties and the necessity of questioning authority in the face of injustice.

Ia is seventeen years…

Space is big. Hugely, mind-bogglingly big. Travelling across the vast distances of space is daunting, especially if faster-than-light travel proves impossible. In Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross rejects the luxuries of hyperdrive or warp speed in favour of good, old-fashioned laser-based transmissions of data—and people, who are just another type of data, after all. In such a universe, debt and the tracking of it is of great importance.

Krina Alizond-114 has travelled to the Dojima…

OH. MY. GOD. WHY DID NONE OF YOU MAKE ME READ THIS BOOK SOONER???

I’ve previously read two of Jo Walton’s books. The first, Among Others, was a Hugo-nominated, Nebula-winning novel that I enjoyed but didn’t love. The second, Tooth and Claw, was a more straightforward story which was basically “what if Regency England was intelligent dragons” and, as such, was a delightfully clever romp of a book. My Real Children is a …

For a while now, I’ve been eschewing posthumanism. Walking on the wild side of nanotechnology was starting to get too much like science fantasy for my tastes. The Quantum Magician is an exception that I’m happy I made: Derek Künsken’s story of a genetically engineered con artist is delightful, and it explores posthumanist ideas in a way that feels fresh. Although I wouldn’t say any of the characters (not even the protagonist) endeared themselves to…

Let me explain the Demi-Monde to you. Basically you get plugged into a virtual reality, like in the Matrix, except instead of being in a shitty reproduction of office life, you’re plunged into an urban warfare environment where you basically have to fend for yourself. Oh, and you have no memory of who you were, because that makes it more authentic, see? But it’s all designed to help the US Army train its soldiers in…

The kind of dystopian novel I’m often lukewarm about, The Unit has a blurb on the front cover from Margaret Atwood, which really tells me all I need to know. It’s science-fictional but also hangs on to that notional “literary fiction” tag, as if it doesn’t want to stoop too much into the genre ghetto. Whereas Kazuo Ishiguro’s dive into organ donation is a meditation on personhood, Ninni Holmqvist is more interested in the value…

Surprisingly the first Anne McCaffrey book I’ve ever read! Just never got into Pern…. Anyway, The Ship Who Sang is a collection of shorts following Helva, a person born with so many congenital defects that her body was installed into a shell so her mind could develop and become a Brain Ship. It’s an interesting concept, and each story explores different challenges that Helva faces as a human being with a very different type…

Imagine you live in a world where a significant percentage of the population has a simple but necessary job: they sit in a booth, and every so often, a light comes on, and when it does, they push a button in front of them, and the light goes out. As long as they do that, all day every day, we have electricity and fuel and plastics and all these conveniences we rely on in our…

Mmm mmm mmm, yes indeed. I like superhero novels, but they don’t always work for me, and often I find myself more disappointed and critical of them than I want to be considering how avidly I seek them out. I was nervous starting After the Golden Age finally after having it on my to-read list for years. What if I didn’t like it? Should I even bother? I’m glad I did, though, because I thoroughly…

A long time ago I read The Dervish House and commented that it hacked my brain, and that’s what I feel like Hannu Rajaniemi is trying to do with The Quantum Thief. This is posthumanist SF that reimagines the limitations and extent of a human’s personal narrative in a very extreme, mind-bending way. I don’t entirely understand what’s happening here, and that is kind of the point. Rajaniemi walks an extremely fine line between…

An interesting departure from Miles’ arc in the Vorkosigan universe, Ethan of Athos takes us to the outskirts of Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantastic future vision of a far-flung, loosely-connected group of human societies in space. The eponymous protagonist comes from a planet colonist by an extreme religious group comprising only men; they reproduce through artificial wombs, and Ethan is one of their reproduction specialists. With this set-up, Bujold not only reverses the “planet of a…

Space … the final frontier. Our mission … to boldly go … and steal aliens’ shit…. Gate Crashers is a fun romp, as you might say. Patrick S. Tomlinson writes characters with a combination of humility and hilarity, people who might seem a little larger than life but still all-too-human. This is the Brooklyn Nine-Nine of space opera comedies.

The human exploration vessel Magellan suspends its thirty light-year voyage when it encounters a mysterious device…

Whoaaaaa, it has been five years since I reread Foundation! I didn’t realize how long it had been. I’ve had Foundation and Empire, and most of the other books, sitting in a pile in my old bedroom for a long time. For some reason, I had it in my head that Second Foundation, the one book I was missing, was the second book in the series (I wonder why); I was waiting…

Last Cassie book is best Cassie book.

#50: The Ultimate is, quite simply, vicious. In its final arc the Animorphs series discards any pretense that this is anything less than a series about children being at war. Cassie, Jake, and the other Animorphs are the de facto leaders of a resistance comprising some free Hork Bajir, pacifistic Chee, and their parents (and maybe a peaceful group of Yeerks, but we haven’t heard from them…

Maybe I’m just reading these books in real-time—because it has been nearly 3 years since I read The Lives of Tao and about that amount of time has passed in between books. The Deaths of Tao is a worthy sequel, and arguably it’s better than the first book, though I’m not sure I’ll be as enthusiastic about it as I was in my review of The Lives of Tao. I love Wesley Chu’s creativity…

Honestly didn’t have much interest in reading anything else by Dan Wells—not that I consider him a poor writer, but his particular fare holds little interest for me in general. However, the premise of this book is good enough that I decided, since it was on offer as part of a 3 for $10 sale, I’d give it a try. It pretty much met my expectations: Extreme Makeover is a competent, slightly bizarro SF thriller…

Charles Yu’s characters are not very happy.

I wasn’t enthusiastic reading Sorry Please Thank You: Stories, for I wasn’t much of a fan of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Nevertheless, I’d acquired this collection prior to reading that novel, from a library sale, so I wanted to give Yu a second chance. I don’t think there will be a third.

The stories in here aren’t particularly bad. They just…