Category: Science Fiction
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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Rating: 4/5, good I saw the movie version of Annihilation before I read the book, and I really liked it. The movie does a great job of balancing its horror and science fiction aspects, and has a lot of great terrifying and surreal moments. The book is more Lovecraftian than the movie. It has more…
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Want by Cindy Pon
Rating: 2, bad I almost put this book down at 15%, but I powered through for the sake of my scifi book club. Want is about a teenage boy named Zhou living in futuristic Taiwan where the air is so polluted most people die by the age of 50. The only people who live long…
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Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Rating: 2/5, bad If Red Rising were food, it would be a bloody steak. Partly because much of its appeal is in the prolific and clever violence, but also because it’s left a little undercooked. Red Rising is about a young man named Darrow, a Red miner, who is tasked with becoming a Gold elite…
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Who Fears Death By Nnedi Okorafor
Rating: 3/5, average Who Fears Death is a science fantasy novel by Nnedi Okorafor, PhD, a Nigerian-American writer and creative writing instructor. Who Fears Death has been optioned for an HBO show directed by George R.R. Martin. I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about this book. I’ve been following Nnedi Okorafor on Twitter since…
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Dawn by Octavia Butler
Rating: 4 Warning: this review contains spoilers! The other characters withhold a lot of information from the main character, so discussing the themes of this book is really difficult to do without spoiling it. I’m just not going to bother here, and assume you’ve either read the book or don’t care about spoilers. Octavia Butler’s…
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The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t know how to describe this book other than to say that it’s very, uh… Vonnegut-y. If you’ve read Slaughterhouse 5 or Cat’s Cradle or ”Harrison Bergeron”, you’re familiar with Kurt Vonnegut’s unique combination of satire, pacifism, and accidental time travel. The Sirens of Titan, one of his earliest novels, features the seeds of…
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All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
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Rating: ☆☆☆☆✮ January 2016 I’ve been following Charlie Jane Anders’ career for a couple of years now, and so I was super excited when I heard that she released a science fiction/fantasy novel. She was a writer and editor at i09, a science, science fiction, and pop culture news blog. Charlie Jane Anders is also the host…
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Anything You Can Do…
Rating: ☆☆☆✮✮ Today I have an old one for you. Anything You Can Do… by Randall Garrett was written in 1962 and typifies science fiction of that era. It has telepathy, an alien stranded on Earth, a technologically-enhanced superman (we can rebuild him… make him better… stronger… faster…), and an emphasis on psychology as well as…
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2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Book Title: 2312 Author: Kim Stanley Robinson Year Published: 2012 Publisher: Hachette (Orbit imprint) Awards: Nebula Pagecount: 657 Rating: 3/5 Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the biggest names in science fiction. He’s written three trilogies (the Three Californias trilogy, the Mars trilogy, and the Science in the Capital series) and nine stand-alone novels. I…