Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

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…

In what might be one of the most efficient stories in the series, The Diversion delivers an emotionally intense blow to the Animorphs as Applegate hammers home to her readers that nothing will ever be the same.

In Tobias’ last solo turn as narrator, we learn that the Yeerks have finally clued into the possibility that these Andalite bandits are actually humans. So they’ve begun a massive project of sifting through DNA samples, trying…

It was only three weeks into knitting my SEKRIT PROJECT that has left me high and dry for reading time that I remembered audiobooks are a thing … good job, Ben.

Santa Olivia is some dystopian SF from Jacqueline Carey, whom I better know from Kushiel’s Dart and its umpteen spin-offs, as well as the Agent of Hel urban fantasy series (damn, I still crave more of those). In this novel, Carey turns her hand…

It has been too long since a visit to Iain M. Banks’ Culture universe. Inversions has really just made me want to go back and re-read the other novels now. And I may very well just do that this summer, because why not?

For those who aren’t familiar with the premise to this one: the Culture is not mentioned by name at all in Inversions. On its surface, this is a split narrative on…

Decidedly mixed feelings about this one! The Return asks some important questions about Rachel and her attitude towards fighting this war against the Yeerks. It also features the much-anticipated … uh, return … of David, one-time Animorph. Yet, like many Animorphs books, I find that the actual story/plot doesn’t bear up under the weight of the themes the series is trying to explore.

This is a deep cut, even for this series, but I’m really…

One Way is obviously trying to capitalize on the renaissance of Mars fiction, but if I had to liken it to an Andy Weir novel, it wouldn’t be The Martian—it has more in common with Artemis. This is a story of survival on Mars, yes, but it’s also a mystery wrapped up in corporate intrigue. S.J. Morden starts by asking what might happen if we sent convicts to construct a Mars base ……

Here we are, the last of the Animorphs Chronicles books. The impending conclusion of the series feels a lot more real having read this, and not just because the book opens with the Ellimist alluding to one of the Animorphs dying!!111.

Despite the book being set during the final battle of the last book, however, this book was published following #47: The Resistance. Julie, my guru of all things Animorphs, did everything short…