Take a shot every time Chiang brings up God (Tower of Babylon, Division By Zero, Hell is the Absence of God), writes about characters trying to be or become God-like by breaking through some kind of barrier, mental or physical (Tower of Babylon, Understand, Story of Your Life, Seventy-Two Letters), a scientist does science/deep-thinking, maybe discovering some new technology, and tries to convince the reader that said science will completely change everything they know to be true (Understand, Division By Zero, Story of Your Life, Seventy-Two Letters, Liking What You See: A Documentary) .
You will plastered out of your mind.
What if you combined:
The Running Man-esque gladiatorial combat as entertainment
with some Battle Royale
with some pro wrestling theatrical vibes sprinkled on top
with some Naked and Afraid
and light it all up?
You get Chain-Gang All-Stars, that’s what you get.
The king was pregnant.
An anthropologist-like character lands on a planet with people who exhibit sexually differentiated physical characteristics, male or female depending on the circumstances, for a few days every month.
Genly Ai’s task is to convince them to join the coalition of planets he comes from.
Le Guin uses this framework to explore the various ways in which this physical ambisexuality affects their society and, in doing so, explores how sex and gender affect our own.
The much more interesting but lesser known dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell’s 1984.
Not as prophetic as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but it’s more consistently well written and has mostly aged better.
It’s more open to interpretation than I was expecting.
In working through my thoughts after reading this trashfire of a novel, I wrote five first drafts of a review. They’re incomplete but I’m posting them here mostly un-edited (just some typo fixes) for posterity. They’re either too incomplete, too snarky, too snooty or too mean-spirited to post on Goodreads.
I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games! Especially the third one. It’s a game I always come back to over the years.
Reading through the original inspiration for the games was a real pleasure.
A Memory Called Empire has big “Hugo award winner” energy: an interesting premise, consistent and intriguing world building, a promising start and a propulsive ending.
I loved my time with it and very excited to dig into the next book in the series although I suspect that it won’t be as good.
Stanislaw Lem pops off once again. I’m blown away at how he can integrate all these disparate emotions and ideas into one novel.
The best “second novel in a trilogy” that I’ve read in a while. To no one’s surprise, Adrian Tchaikovsky is responsible.
Eyes of the Void clicked for me when I realized that Adrian Tchaikovsky is an avid tabletop roleplayer and this novel comes alive because he’s basically role-playing (to perfection) all of his characters.
He’s thought about (and nailed) the way each character thinks and speaks based on where they’re from, who they are, their culture, etc. He’s great at this and you can see this in all of his work but The Final Architecture series feels built for him to flex his ability to write great characters.
An astronaut is abandoned on Mars after a dust storm separates him from his crew. Through journal entries, he tells the story of how he tries to survive.
I was blown away by the premise of Dawn (the first novel in the trilogy) and its execution. The remnants of humanity, after a nuclear apocalypse occurs, are “saved” by aliens and forced to choose between mating with their saviors or never being able to have children again. The rest of the novels didn’t hit me as hard but they were interesting nonetheless.
Not my favorite John Scalzi novel but it was fun. I prefer when he doubles down on the absurd and comic modes.
This series is not that, although it does have its funny moments, but it’s an enjoyable romp.
Big robots,
fighting off aliens,
piloted by pairs of young men and women (mostly boys and girls), with the men draining the life force from the women (often killing them in the process).
Wu Zetian, eventually becoming the Iron Widow, is sold to the army by her family to become a concubine-pilot. She has a plan to avenge her sister, burn the system to the ground and build it back up again.
Dayummmmmm this was good.
This book is a joke and not a very funny one. It fails completely in its stated goal of being funny.
The tonal clash between the comedic intent of the author and the violent story centered around a group of janitors trying to stop a genocide is jarring.
The characters are nothing more than caricatures and this is a trainwreck waiting to happen given the inclusion of a comic relief autistic character.
A great space opera by the king of writing alien aliens. It’s a fantastic romp where we follow free adventures of a ragtag group of scoundrels doing their best to save the universe.
What could have been just “another one of those” is greatly elevated by the Adrian Tchaikovsky touch.
Fantastic genre-bending sci-fi.
My mind’s eye has never been very good so I rarely latch on to descriptions of the spaces that characters find themselves in. But, the descriptions of Solaris’s space station and the planet it’s orbiting were so vivid and interesting that it elevated the story for me.
The space station’s color scheme of white combined with stripes of vibrant colors lit by the alternating blue and red hues of the system’s both suns was breathtaking.
The Light Brigade is a story about breaking people down and putting them back together again, both mentally and physically, to turn them into perfect soldiers/monsters.
It’s a wild ride that kept me hooked all throughout. It subverts many of the science fiction tropes you’re familiar with to keep you guessing.
Felt more like a soap opera than a space opera at times.
There’s a lot of people thinking about, talking about and having sex. There’s a lot of scheming and plotting that sometimes makes sense but often doesn’t.
So I rolled with it, strapped on my suspension of disbelief pants and enjoyed the ride.
In fair puzzles there should always be a way out. But I saw no doorways in the sand, and try as I might I could not make the puzzle fall fair.
Doorways in the Sand tells the story of Fred Cassidy the “Eternal Student”, a man who’s spent 13 years of his life as an undergrad.
He does everything he can to avoid getting a degree so he can continue benefiting from his uncle’s generous will, predicated on him being in school (once he graduates he’ll be cut off).
Fred’s idyllic existence is disrupted by the theft of a priceless alien artifact, the star-stone. He’s a person of interest for reasons outside of his control and so he is pursued by humans and aliens alike who think he can help them find the stone (can he?).
“You are a living example of the absurdity of things.”
Hijinks ensue.
Humm…
It was OK.
Unlike The Galaxy and The Ground Within (also written by Becky Chambers), this novella doesn’t have a lot of space (see what I did there?) to develop its characters and have you care about them.
All Systems Red is about a sentient robot-human hybrid, calling themselves Murderbot, a slave to a mega corporation, tasked with protecting the humans it’s told to protect.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a science fiction novel about a diverse cast of characters from all over the galaxy, stuck at an inter-planetary truck stop for an indeterminate span of time, getting to know one another and helping each other overcome (or make peace with) problems in their personal lives.
As the characters learned about each other and gradually opened up about themselves, I started to see parts of myself reflected in them making me feel invested in the mostly low stakes interactions occurring between the characters.
“We’re going on an adventure!”
If you liked the previous novel in this series, Children of Time, you’re likely to enjoy this one just as much if not more (I definitely did). If you haven’t read it, I suggest you start with that one (also great) and then read this sequel. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out.
A very human story with Alien aliens, AI/human constructs and time “travel”.
The first Adrian Tchaikovsky story I read and perhaps the best. Once you pick this book up, you won’t be putting it back down until it’s done.
To Hold Up the Sky is a collection of short stories from Liu Cixin who’s mostly known for his Three Body Problem trilogy.
This collection is a mixed bag. The stories range from very bad, to middling to great. Two (out of eleven) stories really spoke to me and the rest were mostly meh.
The Annihilation book was OK but the movie is better.
Please do yourself a favor and do not read the rest of the novels in this series.
Brave New World is a dystopian novel from 1932 about dystopian shit and it has a lot to say about the dystopia we’re currently living in.
A collection of science-fiction short stories that’ll make you go “huh, interesting…” and might encourage you to think about how technology affects your life currently and how it might affect it in the not so distant future.
Aliens on Earth in the early/mid 2000s and everything that follows from that. Sequel to Axiom’s End, continues Cora’s story and adds some new fresh characters (alien and otherwise) into the mix.
Set in 2007, the novel is about a U.S. government coverup of contact with extraterrestrial life. You follow the story of Cora, daughter of an exiled whistleblower, who finds herself in the middle of the whole ‘alien’ situation.
