This is an astounding bit of high-concept sci-fi. Imagine a world where crossing a border literally split your body in two. A young woman emigrates from South Korea - one version of her stays in Seoul, another version goes off to live in New York. This is the way humanity has always existed. People bifurcating and dealing with the consequences. It is heady stuff. The book spans life, love,…
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This is an an interesting and varied set of sci-fi/fantasy stories. Some barely a couple of pages, others cutting short at just the right time. They are all on a similar theme - the strife between parents and children. Whether it is a twisted take on classic fairy tales, or a dive into the far future - there's always something interesting going on. Samantha Mills has a excellent eye for…
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This is an intriguing and mostly satisfying sci-fi tale. It has shades of Oryx Crake mixed in with A Canticle for Leibowitz - we are mere observers of the tattered remains of humanity. Watchers guide scattered settlements as they strive to evolve and understand their place on a corrupted Earth. The writing is dreamy and hazy - reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It isn't…
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This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble. She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts; the dream-guide neuromesh of her personal AI; the interviews, fan messages, reviews—food for her vanity, training data for her egolets. Fab! But, for all that, it's p…
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I can confidently declare that Lower Decks is the second best Star Trek series after The Orville. Lower Decks has always been bags of fun with a good emotional core. Now your favourite sci-fi capers are available in handy comic book form! Second Contact is a compilation of Lower Decks issues #1–6. You get a bunch of stories spread out over 145 pages. The great thing about a comic of a cartoon i…
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I'm reasonably sure I've read all the "Old Man's War" books. As the last one was published a decade ago, you'll forgive me if I don't remember all the intricacies of galactic politics and interpersonal intrigue. Thankfully, Scalzi has carved off a side character from a previous book and given them a brand-new adventure. There's enough exposition to tickle the parts of your brain that go "Ah,…
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No book has the right to be this good. It's the sort of howling sci-fi satire that Ben Elton used to excel at - a novel set five minutes in the future with a eye firmly on today's problems. The plot is delightful - what if carbon credits extinction credits were the new capitalist plaything? What second, third, and forth order effects would that have on the world? The worldbuilding is sublime -…
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This is a lovely and twisted anthology of stories. Each presents a "historic" robot - be they an automaton, a puppet given life by the gods, or a resurrected villager. Some, like the Mechanical Turk, are historical fact but others are invented just for us to gawk at. The stories are mostly dark and brooding, with the macabre turn. They're fun - but the constant theme is "what if I, an…
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There's a fine line between genius and madness - and I'm not sure where this book lies. It dives right in with some splendid technobabble: The base model TM-31 runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built on a quad-core physics engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered…
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This is a fun bit of sci-fi. A bit tropey in places, but an excellent sense of world-building and a vicious cast of double-crossers. The protagonist is best described by one of the character's off-hand remarks about her being “The very best space fascist girl scout of them all.” Can you feel sympathy for someone who has been manipulated into being evil? What about if given every chance to cha…
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This starts out as a delightfully silly and charming book about the bureaucracy of Time Travel and ends up as something darker and more thought provoking. What would happen if the UK Civil Service had access to TIME TRAVEL!?!?! It's a brilliant idea for a novel and is written with a seemingly-real understanding of the number of forms, systems, emails, and subterfuge needed to set up such a…
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Neal Stephenson's "Seveneves" is one of those massive, crushing, momentous, century-spanning and era-defining hard sci-fi novels. It starts with the immortal line "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." Classic! It dives into a world plagued with Kessler syndrome and the grimly inevitable consequences for the future of humanity. Scalzi's latest book is cheesy homage -…
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