Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
The Autobiography of Mr. Spock
{5/5} “The universe is a vast and wild place, and in this chaotic variety lies not disintegration, but the means to realize a fuller, more sustained unity of self. In embracing what is different in others, we become more fully ourselves.” The Autobiography of Mr. Spock by Una McCormack, published in 2021 Before his mission […]
The Silent City
{4.5/5} “‘The cities are a relic of the past.’ The program has said it over and over. ‘A buried past, Elisa, a disastrous past. The humans now living don’t need them. They have the right to live their own lives, to decide their own fate. Some legacies can be crushing.’” The Silent City by Elisabeth […]
The Child Garden
{4.5/5} “Milena sat on the bus in her boiled gloves and saw a nervous light in the eyes of the actors, a fervour for accomplishments completed in youth. She saw the unfailing smiles of people in the markets, and the smiles seemed to be symptoms of disease. It seemed to Milena that nearly everything she […]
Industrial Magic
{4/5} “Vamps are dead already, remember? So where do the dead go when they die? There’s a stumper. All I know is there are no dead vampires in the ghost world. My opinion? This is their afterlife.” Industrial Magic by Kelley Armstrong, published in 2004 Paige Winterbourne builds web sites for people — she’s also […]
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
{4.5/5} “I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I couldn’t resist the bait, and as I marshaled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. ‘So you’re saying that if […]
The Children of the Sky
{4.5/5} “Broodkenning was an essential part of Tinish civilization, a cross between marriage counsellor, animal breeder, and reconstructive surgeon… It took real skill to properly recommend which puppies should go with which packs or whether a whole new pack should be made. It took ever greater talent to create well-functioning packs from adult singletons and […]
A Fire Upon the Deep
{5/5} “Old of heart traveled to the town, and came back not just younger, but smarter and happier. Ideas radiated from the town: weaving machines, gearboxes and windmills, factory postures. Something new had happened in this place. It wasn’t the inventions. It was the people that Woodcarver had midwifed, and the outlook he had created.” […]
Behemoth Book Two: Seppuku
{4.5/5} “He should have known it would be no use arguing with her. She wasn’t interested in assessing the odds of success. She wasn’t even balancing payoffs, weighing Atlantis against the rest of the world. The only variables she cared about came from inside her own head, and neither guilt nor obsession were amenable to […]
Behemoth Book One: B-Max
{4.5/5} “It’s not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It’s not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a write-off. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running […]
Maelstrom
{4.5/5} “She’d been astonished to learn that there was life on the moon: microscopic life, some kind of bacterium that had hitched a ride with the first unmanned probes. It had survived years of starvation in hard vacuum, frozen, boiled, pelted by an unending sleet of hard radiation. Life, she’d learned, could survive anything.” Maelstrom […]