Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
Anathem
{5/5} “People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you […]
Mirror Mirror
{4.5/5} “The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, […]
All Flesh is Grass
{4.5/5} “Even in the face of potential danger, should we bar the way to them? For here was an alien life, the first alien life we’d met. Here was the chance for the human race, if it would take the chance, to gain new knowledge, to find new attitudes, to fill in the gaps of […]
Generation A
{4.5/5} “How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It’s a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.” Generation A by […]
Weaver
{4.5/5} “As for the project we’re engaged in here, well, the threat you’ve hinted at seems rather bizarre, but the country is awash with rumours about Hitler’s super-weapons. A Nazi time machine isn’t even top of the league table of outlandishness, believe it or not. If only for the sake of morale, the government must […]
Navigator
{5/5} “You see, Orm, I’ve found a rent in the tapestry of time…. And through that rent I have glimpsed horror. But from that horror I have conceived an ambition as big as the world, Orm. It is nothing less than the final defeat of Islam, and the preservation of Christendom into the far future.” […]
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
{4.5/5} “I’ll bet I’m late for work, he said to himself, slid from the bed, and tottered to a standing position with eyes shut, keeping himself from being sick. For all he knew he was several hours’ drive from his office; perhaps he was not even in the United States. However he was on Earth; […]
The End of All Things
{5/5} “Obviously because whatever plans Equilibrium has, they deviate substantially from our own. What they are, I cannot even begin to tell you. All I know, Ambassador, is that I was used. My government was used. My planet was used. And now all of us are going to pay for it.” The End of All […]
The Human Division
{4.5/5} “If things continue as they are, based on historical CDF fatality rates, in three years we’ll no longer have sufficient forces to defend our colonies from predation and genocidal agression by other races… From there, our best estimate is that the Colonial Union as a political entity collapses within five to eight years. Without […]
Zoe’s Tale
{4.5/5} “Actually, Enzo had a perfectly good reason to be utterly terrified of Hickory and Dickory, who were already vaguely suspicious of him and would happily cycle him out an airlock if he did anything stupid with me. But there was no reason to let him know that yet. Good rule of thumb: When your […]