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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Asbestos was the material that built the future! Strong, long lasting, fire-proof, and - above all - completely safe for humans. Every house in the land had beautiful sheets of gloriously white asbestos installed in the walls and ceilings. All the better to keep your loved ones safe. The magic mineral was woven into cloth and turned into hard wearing uniforms. You could even get an asbestos…
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As every good geek knows, Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope was originally called… "Star Wars". That's it. No subtitle. No episode number. When Empire Strikes Back came out, it was called "Star Wars Episode V" - which necessitated rewriting history and calling the original film "Episode IV". But at what point did the second Star Wars movie become known as Episode V? I've been reading "The M…
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Everyone on the spaceship was dead. And I can't help wondering if it was my fault. "So, Macy, I understand something funny happened to you while you were filming a scene on your latest movie, right?" The talk-show host is warmly genial and his generous smile hides the dead eyes of boredom. "Hey, yeah! So, me and Hank were trying something new and he turns and says to me..." The starlet bursts …
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