Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
Lovecraft Country
{5/5} “Nature holds itself impervious to the wishings of would-be sorcerers. But… There are cracks. Not exceptions to the rules, you understand — there’s no such thing — but special cases, natural anomalies that can be discovered and exploited by men of sufficient vision.” Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, published in 2016 Atticus returned home […]
Star Trek: The Lives of Dax
{4.5/5} “It was that smile that won me, made me want to know the Trill more deeply. The humor was there, some joke that I could not quite see. And Dax was inviting me to open my eyes, as if he had greater confidence in my potential than I did.” (from “The Music Between the […]
Immunity Index
{5/5} “She had good roommates — but would they want to live with a dupe? If clones weren’t physically handicapped, they were morally deficient, unnatural, and soulless. It would be like living with a known thief, and if the mutiny changed the law, it wouldn’t change minds about the things that everyone knew.” Immunity Index […]
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
{5/5} “The point of a peb exchange is to acknowledge someone’s labor and thank them for what they bring to the community. They didn’t give you thirty-eight pebs because they want you to go out and spend them. They gave you thirty-eight pebs because your work is as important as anybody else’s. It means they […]
The Ten Thousand Doors of January
{5/5} “It was like an earthquake that didn’t disturb a single blade of grass, an eclipse that didn’t cast a single shadow, a vast but invisible change. A sudden breeze plucked the edge of the diary. It smelled of salt and warm stone and a dozen faraway scents that did not belong in a scrubby […]
Gypsies
{4.5/5} “‘You could walk out of the world if you wanted to.’ The Gray Man stopped and bent at the waist to looked into Michael’s eyes. ‘The world has angles other people don’t see. Corners and doors and directions. You could step sideways and never be seen again. Like this.’” Gypsies by Robert Charles Wilson, […]
Pushing Ice
{5/5} “Just one of the spars would have an internal surface area equivalent to fifty thousand Earths. And there are twenty of them. That’s a million Earths’ worth of living space — and that’s if they don’t utilise the cross-struts. If they do, you can easily double that figure… Is that enough room for you, […]
Locklands
{4.5/5} “But then there were the ‘deep commands,’ which allowed one to make a sudden, abrupt, inexorable change to reality itself, an edit so swift and complete that the world never even knew it’d been changed. Yet the deep commands came with a price: human life.” Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett, published in 2022 Berenice […]
Angry Young Spaceman
{4.5/5} “I had decided to go for a bunch of reasons, mostly relating to my dislike of Earth. I chose the most remote planet I could figuring that it’d be the least like the self-proclaimed centre of the universe. But over the past few months, people had responded to the news with shock and wonder: […]
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
{5/5} “Big Semi did not work with scripts and storyboards. It did not give any thought to themes, symbols, homages, or any other words you might find in a film-studies syllabus… It simply evaluated each test screening to see where the response curves still deviated from the target, made big changes and small tweaks and […]