Tag: science fiction

  • Foundation by Isaac Asimov

    I read this in high school in the 1990s. It really holds up. A classic among classics, really. Like The Martian Chronicles, this originally was a bunch of short stories. When you look at the dates that these stories were published, the ideas here are eons ahead of their time. Looking forward to the next one.

  • The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

    What made the original trilogy work so well, even when the story started to fall apart in the end, was momentum. They were sparse, aggressively paced books that were very hard to put down. That was missing here. Every time I felt like the story was about to blast off, it stopped dead. There were…

  • Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

    Alzheimer’s is one of the saddest things in the world. Except from one angle it can also be kind of beautiful: Actually, our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, lets us play a bit longer, one last…

  • Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

    This felt like a graphic novel – the vivid descriptions and wild action scenes unfolded in my mind like a comic book. But no comic book has writing like this: Autopsies aren’t as bad as people make out. There’s a stink, for sure. In fact there’s all kinds of stink from all kinds of different…

  • Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    I respect and admire the effort put into this series of books, but for me this was a case of sunk cost fallacy. I loved the first book, I kinda liked the second one, and this one was a full-on slog. So much driving. So much long-winded description of the environment, detailed directions of someone’s…

  • The Marriage Act by John Marrs

    This guy has so many interesting ideas. It’s a bit of a shame that he’s not writing short stories rather than full-length novels. His ‘20 minutes into the future‘ style dystopias are fascinating. My biggest criticism is that so many of them aren’t explored outside of set-dressing. The story itself is kind of fun —…

  • Counterweight by Djuna

    This book was all over the various places I read about books, to the point that I felt left out for not knowing about this mysterious Djuna character (only then to find out that this is their first book published in English). The Book Marks reviews are all ‘rave’s, but on clickthrough the praise is…

  • Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

    I liked the setting that Tidhar built here, but it took me about 100 pages to figure out that there was no plot, in a strict sense. The book is kind of a collection of loosely-threaded short stories, kind of a way of looking at the world from different angles. I wasn’t prepared for that, and…

  • We by Yevgeny Zemyatin

    It’s surprising how long a shadow this book casts. I haven’t read 1984 or Anthem in a long time but both of them came back to me clearly while reading this. And it feels a lot less like homework than Brave New World. It’s also much more interesting coming from the perspective of a Russian…

  • Only Human: Themis Files #3 by Sylvain Neuvel

    This was terrible. It wasn’t that the story didn’t resolve in a satisfying way. That’s subjective. What the letdown was here was everything else: The writing was awful! Like early-draft Project Hail Mary bad. Pointless jokes made at inappropriate times. Weirdly informal snark and sarcasm while the planet is in peril. Ridiculous dialogue acrobatics to fill in…