Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
Conqueror
{4.5.5} Conqueror by Stephen Baxter, published in 2007 Another tour of the history of England with stops in 607, 793, 872, and 1066. This one shows how invaders become locals within a few generations and then are threatened by other invaders. There’s a different prophecy than in the first book and various people are trying […]
Star Trek: The Wounded Sky
{4/5} “Ever since we came out, I keep expecting to walk through things like a ghost — because I was somewhere so much more real and solid than physical reality that I could see through my hands, couldn’t touch or move anything… The — country — I don’t know where it was. It burned my […]
Emperor
{4.5/5} “Agrippina had seen Gaul; she knew what the future would hold. From this beginning the roads would spread across the country like ivy over a wall, bifurcating and firing off their straight-line segments, until every corner of the land was reached. Messages would flash along the roads fast as thought, and the next time […]
Blasphemy
{5/5} “Lockwood had known all along that he would find the answer by asking Kate. He’d been hired not because he was some brilliant ex-CIA agent turned PI, but because he just happened to have dated a certain woman twelve years ago. He should’ve walked out on Lockwood when he had the chance. But he’d […]
Star Trek TNG: The Body Electric
{4.5/5} “Once, in the Andromeda galaxy, I met eleven alternate-timeline versions of myself and had to persuade them to let me collapse our shared quantum-probability waveform to avoid a temporal paradox. You don’t know what ‘awkward’ means until you’ve persuaded eleven copies of yourself to let themselves be erased from existence while you get to […]
Star Trek TNG: Silent Weapons
{4.5/5} “There was still much to be done on Orion, Konar knew. Before it was over, he and Hain would be called upon to accomplish a feat without precedent in local history, one that would send political aftershocks throughout all of known space. And despite the enormity of what they had been asked to do, […]
Star Trek TNG: The Persistence of Memory
{5/5} “Even if they reached B-4 before the inevitable collapse of his positronic matrix, he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to erase Data’s memory engrams from the android’s brain. He knew that doing so was the only way to prevent the android’s mental disintegration, which would result in the irretrievable corruption of Data’s engrams […]
After the Golden Age
{4.5/5} “She suppressed a vague feeling of abandonment, that she could have died, and now Mentis and her mother were just leaving her alone. But she remembered: the city was more important. And Celia was always saying she could take care of herself, wasn’t she?” Celia is the daughter of superheroes, living in Commerce City. […]
The Fountains of Paradise
{4/5} “Even now, it was impossible to realize the full meaning of the coming revolution. For the first time, space itself would become as accessible as any point on the surface of the familiar earth. In a few more decades, if the average man wanted to spend a weekend on the moon, he could afford […]
The Thief Lord
{3.5/5} “Riccio shook his head with astonishment. ‘No. Why? It’s great being young. You don’t stand out so much and your stomach fills up more quickly. You know what Scipio always says?’ He jumped from the bridge onto the street. ‘Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like […]