Category: Science Fiction
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Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Rating: 4/5, good I first read this book when I was seventeen, as part of summer reading before senior year of high school. It’s a short book, but very dense and philosophical. It was a bit hard to read and I remember not quite getting it, but the idea that religion is human-constructed and shouldn’t…
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Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Rating: 4/5, good Eversion is the mathematical problem of turning a sphere inside out without breaking it. In the 2022 book Eversion, the crew of a ship finds a mysterious structure that appears to be in the middle of that process of turning inside out. The protagonist Silas Coade, the ship’s doctor, is trapped in…
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The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Rating: 3/5, average TW: sexual assault If this book wasn’t chosen for book club, I would have never picked it up. I’m Jewish and not terribly religious, so when I hear a book is about Catholic priests, I’m immediately turned off. I got in the habit of tuning out Christian stuff by skipping out on…
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Lightning Strike by Catherine Asaro
Rating: 3/5, average This one I read with the local book club. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, and I might have even skipped it if I didn’t know it was by a woman writer with a PhD in Chemical Physics. The cover on Amazon looks really cheesy, but the writing isn’t too…
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Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis
Rating: 2/5, bad WARNING: ALL OF THE SPOILERS!!! I love Lindsay Ellis’s channel and was super hyped for this book but I thought it was extremely boring, if intricately conceived. Here’s a basic summary: Axiom’s End is about a 21-year-old woman named Cora who is aimlessly drifting through life working temp jobs. Her dad, Nils,…
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Chthon by Piers Anthony
Rating: 3/5, average TW: rape This book is either brilliant or stupid and I’m not sure which one… possibly both. I saw this as #1 on a list of Weirdest Science Fiction some years ago and tried to read it, but only got about 30% in because there’s a pretty brutal rape scene that seemed…
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The Murderbot Diaries vol. 1: All Systems Red
All Systems Red by Martha Wells Rating: 3/5, average I really loved the concept of this, but I wasn’t crazy about the execution. All Systems Red is about a nonbinary asexual robot who went berserk in their last job and killed a bunch of their employers, so in their head they call themselves “murderbot”…
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Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon
Rating: 3/5, average Warning: This review contains spoilers! It really ended up being more of a summary than a review because I was having a hard time understanding the plot and I thought others might benefit from seeing the story written out. It’s well-written but there’s a lot of complexity in the language as well…