Tag: science fiction
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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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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…
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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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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…