Tag: science fiction
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Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Probably the most disappointed I’ve been in a book in a long time. In short: The moon suddenly breaks into seven pieces because of a collision with some unknown thing, and it turns out that Earth has 2 years before it becomes uninhabitable. Science to the rescue! The first 2/3 of this book is oustanding —…
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Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
I am way late to the Ray Bradbury party. I’ve been reading old sci-fi since I was young, but other than Fahrenheit 451 in grade 10 I never opened another book of his until a couple of years ago. Don’t be like me, start today. Start with this one or Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury is the…
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Prey by Michael Crichton
Surprisingly current, despite being more than 20 years old. A lot of the discussion of the science here is similar to what’s happening in AI right now – neural networks, deep learning, algorithms that become unpredictable over time, etc. The book itself is peak Crichton – cool science, stock characters, casual misogyny (but this time…
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The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel
The world in this book is extremely well-realized. Michel must have spent a ton of time putting together the details of it. You could carve a half-dozen dystopian novels from elements that this book treats as ephemeral. It’s a hellscape of corporate ownership, environmental disaster, body modification and surveillance. So much of the world building…
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…ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
Charlie Stross (whose books I’ve never read, but will now) shares the text of a recent speech about the origins of today’s tech leaders and their ethos. We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus: I’d like to talk about something that I personally find much more worrying: a political ideology common among silicon valley billionaires…
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The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
This was very close to a William Gibson novel (there’s even a character named Case, which is surely a callback to Neuromancer). It’s a rough book to start – the world is fully formed and a lot is left to the reader to figure out – slang, political alignments, technology and recent history for example…
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Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This was a huge letdown and I have been trying all day to figure out why. I think in the end it’s kind of death by a thousand cuts. It did lots of things competently, but nothing particularly well, and the sum of it all is unsatisfying and forgettable. It’s a watered-down imitation of much…
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Rosewater by Tade Thompson
This is on a lot of ‘best cyberpunk’ and ‘best sci-fi since 2000’ lists, and it took me a while to track it down. It’s a first-contact trilogy that takes place in Nigeria, where a town is built around a weird alien that opens once a year to heal those around it (and also reanimate…
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Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Though I haven’t read too many of his books, I’m a fan of Scalzi the person (blog, bluesky, twitter), and his last two books (this and The Kaiju Preservation Society) just overwhelm with charm and fun. For some time, I guess, Scalzi has done away with physical descriptions of characters. I didn’t notice it in Kaiju…
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1Q84 by Hiroki Murakami
This is simply too much. It’s repetitive and unrewarding. Maybe if it had been published as 3 separate volumes, it would have worked better, encouraging readers to let some time pass between sections. As a single serving it was like trying to eat a whole roast alone — it doesn’t matter how good it is,…