Category: Science Fiction
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Nimbus by Tony Marturano
Book Title: Nimbus Author: Tony Marturano Year Published: 2001 Publisher: Glacyk Publishing Rating: 2/5 Nimbus is… just another self-published thriller, I’m sorry to say. I had to read it for a science fiction book club, and while many of the scenes were amusingly campy, it’s too badly put together to win the title of “good”. The editing…
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The City & The City by China Mieville
Book Title: The City & The City Author: China Mieville Year Published: 2010 Publisher: Random House Rating: ☆☆☆✮✮ I read this book for science fiction club. I’ve seen news about China Mieville on a lot of literary scifi blogs, so I was looking forward to reading this one because I thought the prose would be a…
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On Basilisk Station by David Weber
On Basilisk Station is the first book in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. It’s a classic space opera written in 1993 that follows the eponymous heroine, Honor Harrington, as she rises through the ranks of the Royal Manticoran Navy (RMS). The book starts off a little slow with a prologue that doesn’t click into place…
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A Brother’s Price by Wen Spencer
Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price is the story of a boy named Jerin who falls in love with a girl named Ren. It’s set in a vaguely Victorian/Wild-West/Steampunk alternate history where the ratio of boys to girls is 10:1 (because of some hand-wavey genetic quirk, more girls are born than boys). It’s an interesting world…
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a fun, short novel written by a writer skilled in coming up with science fiction ideas that comment on ordinary life. I encountered Philip K. Dick once before with Martian Time-Slip, but I found that I liked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a lot better because it…
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Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear
I really fell in love with this book, but after talking to people about it at our scifi book group I’ve heard all kinds of reactions. Some people really liked it, some not so much… it’s a 100-page book, so the plot is very simple. It’s about an Earth soldier who crash-lands with a Drac…
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The Martian by Andy Weir
The Martian by Andy Weir is one of those rare cases of indie success that’s turned into mainstream success. Weir wrote the book for fans of his personal website, and thought his book would appeal mostly to hardcore science nerds. When a reader suggested he put it up as an ebook on Amazon, it climbed…
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A Canticle for Leibowitz
A/N: Spoiler text in white, highlight to view. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a novel about Albertian monks living in a post-nuclear-apocalypse world. It is by turns funny and dark – there’s a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in the dialogue, but the setting, plot, and narrative passages between sections can get pretty brutal. This novel…
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The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells is my favorite author, but when I tried to read this in high school I had to put it down after a few chapters. The first bit of it is extremely slow and if you’re not reading it closely it comes off as very racist. I must have been really tired the first…
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Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein is a bit of a genre-founder, but politically bizarre. It has the prototype of men in powered space-suits fighting an insectoid enemy (“The Bugs”) which would remind a modern reader of StarCraft, but it also has repetitive scenes of the characters in a classroom being lectured to on what may…