Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes
{4.5/5} “Everything he said sounded fantastical and unreal. The sea was little more than a myth, and the idea of crossing it to another land was the stuff of childish dreams. But next to Feather sat a man who had been walking the Wall, so everything was possible.” The Forest of a Thousand Eyes by […]
Murder by Memory
{4.5/5} “Murder trials were quite different when the victim could be brought in to testify in court — or when the shipmind could subpoena the killer’s own memories as evidence. One victim had even been able to name her murderer, since she’s realized she’d been poisoned and managed to make it to the Library and […]
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
{5/5} “‘But I have his name and the sound of his voice, and the order of his words. He is a fool but he is alive, with eyes to see and weep with, hands to carry a baby and kill a man, a heart to love and hate, and a mind to use, after a […]
Star Trek: The Rings of Tautee
{4.5/5} “The bridge crew’s expressions were tight, focused. They knew there was a high risk in this rescue operation, especially since there might not be anyone left to rescue. They were willing to take the chance. They trusted Kirk. They always had.” Star Trek: The Rings of Tautee by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn […]
System Collapse
{4.5/5} “(For however many corporate standard years, all I got from humans was ‘Run in there no matter how likely you are to get blown to tiny pieces when a quiet tactical approach has a higher percentage of success’ and now it’s ‘Oh no we’re fine, we can hang out in this objectively terrifying immediately […]
Fugitive Telemetry
{4.5/5} “It’s usually easy to make friends with low-level bot pilots, but this one had been coded to be adversarial, directed to operated in stealth mode, and was wary of incursion attempts. It tried to alert its onboard SecSystem, but a the old saying (which I just made up) goes, if you can ping the […]
Network Effect
{4.5/5} “If you put everything that had happened to me on a scale of awfulness and assigned exact values to each incident (which I had done once, it’s in my archive somewhere) dealing with corporates who exploited failed colonies, and probably went through SecUnits as fast a Amena did fried vegetable crunchy things, was in […]
Exit Strategy
{5/5} “I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and appearance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials… But the interpretation I wanted to make of Bharadwaj’s vid statement was that Mensah was being held by GrayCris, who had threatened her life if Preservation didn’t make a formal […]
Rogue Protocol
{5/5} “I considered telling Miki that I was here to collect data on possible alien remnant violations by GrayCris… But if Miki told Abene, she would ask how it knew, and I knew Miki would tell her about me. It wouldn’t lie to a direct question. Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present […]
Artificial Condition
{5/5} “I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.” Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, published in […]