Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
The Last Colony
{4.5/5} “Humans — the few who knew the story anyway, — naturally regarded Boutin as a traitor, a man whose plan to topple the Colonial Union would have caused the slaughter of billions of humans. The Obin equally and naturally regarded him as one of their great racial heroes, a Prometheus figure who gave them […]
The Ghost Brigades
{4.5/5} “On the fourth day the members of the 8th asked for tried to tell each other jokes they found on the Phoenix data net, and mostly failed to make them work; by the time their BrainPals unpacked the context of the joke, it was no longer funny. Only Sarah Pauling seemed to be laughing […]
Star Trek: Devil’s Bargain
{4.5/5} “A Vesbian must not be away from the local ecology for more than a few weeks. If one of us is, he or she will develop a rapid autoimmune collapse that will bring on death within days… We need the biosphere of this world. We are genetically engineered to need it, and this process […]
Star Trek: In the Name of Honor
{4.5/5} “‘The legend of Kahless,’ Koloth continued, ‘is the foundation upon which the Empire stands. Without his guidance, we are doomed to a fate of self-destruction. For a time, that was forgotten by many Klingons. Other, selfish concerns blinded us to Kahless’ teachings, but that is beginning to change.’” Star Trek: In the Name of […]
Old Twentieth
{4.5/5} “I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be coming back. Part of that might be my connection with, obsession with, Old Twentieth, when everybody’s life was a rainbow of accomplishments and failures, grounded in the peace of darkness at either end. Another part was simply practical. The trip was a quixotic leap into the unknown…” […]
Among Others
{4.5/5} “It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason […]
Vortex
{4.5/5} “The famous ‘fourth stage of life,’ the adulthood after adulthood, had entailed changes to the brain that modified aggressiveness and promoted sympathy for others… Nowadays — assuming you had serious money and the right contacts — you could buy yourself an extra twenty or thirty years of life while avoiding that awkward surge of […]
Sherman’s Lagoon 1991-2001
{4.5/5} “Sherman, I’m beginning to question my carnivorous lifestyle.” Sherman’s Lagoon 1991-2001 Greatest Hits and Near Misses by Jim Toomey, published in 2002 Sherman is a shark. Megan is his girlfriend, Fillmore the turtle and Hawthorne the crab are his friends, and Ernest is a young fish who’s still in school. Sherman looks after his […]
Axis
{4.5/5} “You get off the boat for the first time and you realize you’re literally on another planet — the air smells different, the water tastes different, the moon’s the wrong size and it rises too fast… After a few weeks or months people get disoriented on some deep level. So they turn around and […]
Spin
{5/5} “Suddenly I was running a fully functional family practice, and most of my patients were people who had looked deeply into the Reality of the Spin and confronted it with courage and resolve… Before long I began to consider myself one of them, part of the work of extending human influence into the raging […]