Book Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
Always read the afterword. John Scalzi has written a another fun book. It almost didn’t happen. It wasn’t on his radar. Rather, he intended to write a more serious, literary, brooding novel. Then, well, 2020. He put that book on hold, perhaps indefinitely, and wrote something fun. Sometimes you don’t want Beethoven’s Fifth, you just…Read More
Book Review: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron
How did I not know about Miles Cameron before now? Maybe because he writes under three names: Gordan Kent, Miles Cameron, and Christian Cameron, depending on his genre. I’ll put my confusion aside for the moment to talk about the excellent book I just finished: Artifact Space. It’s the distant future and humanity has expanded…Read More
Book Review: Spillover by David Quammen
This book was gifted to me by a friend who warned: Don’t be put off by the cover. That’s good advice. The fang-baring baboon instantly gave me the impression that the book was going to have animals attacking people – rabid primates munching on unsuspecting children as they walk to school. That’s not it at…Read More
Book Review: Never by Ken Follett
Not truly sci fi, but…could be. Very near future. Maybe present day. This book is a page-turner. It was very hard to put down. I’ve read some of Follett’s work before and generally loved them. This was no different. My wife also loves Follett and I’m grateful that he lives in a completely different country,…Read More
Book Review: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Alfred Bester published this book in 1956. Let that sink in a bit. It’s over 65 years old. It would have long since retired were it a human. Happily, it’s a book. The copyright has been renewed a few times and Neil Gaiman wrote an introduction in the version I read. That’s impressive given Gaiman’s…Read More
Book Review: The Spheres of Heaven by Charles Sheffield
The Spheres of Heaven is hard science fiction that’s easy to read. Sheffield doesn’t feel the need to club us over the head with how smart he is or how much he knows. The story is set in the same multiverse as The Mind Pool. We’re well into the future. Space travel is routine, and…Read More
Book Review: The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart
The Paradox Hotel is a love story set 50 years from now. The love story part is touching at times, the rest, not so much. The basic premise is that time travel has become a reality, but it’s limited to the US government and the very, very wealthy. Believable so far. I mean, it’s very…Read More
Book Review: Surviving Survival by Laurence Gonzalez
Several years ago, I read Gonzalez’ Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. I thought it had so much to say that I even used it as a case study in seminars. In that book, Gonzalez examines why, in very similar circumstances – sometimes identical – some people make it through, and some people don’t. From…Read More
Book Review: Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams
It’s the far distant future. Unfortunately, it takes a while to figure that out. Williams plunges you mid-adventure into the life of Astride, a scholar cum adventurer, whose alleged goal is to study the ecology of implied spaces. What’s an implied space? They are often unintentional. The legs of a chair create an implied space…Read More
Book Review: The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Not my usual fare for this blog as it’s historical non-fiction, but this book made me reexamine my thinking vis-à-vis our conduct of the air war in Europe and Japan during WWII. Between The War to End all Wars (WWI) and our second global conflagration, a group of pilots tried to reimagine war. The wholesale…Read More