Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
Expendable
{4.5/5} “There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage abruptness or the stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If […]
Why We Make Mistakes
{4.5/5} “Many of the qualities that allow us to do so many things so well contain flip sides that predispose us to error. We happen to be very good, for instance, at quickly sizing up a situation. Within a tenth of a second or so after looking at a scene, we are usually able to […]
In the Beginning… was the Command Line
{4.5/5} “Even the least technically minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your […]
The Princess Bride
{4.5/5} “Fool!… You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well known is this: ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.’” Buttercup is the most beautiful woman in the world. Westley is […]
Gold
{4.5/5} “It seems to me, then, that the best one can do is to present one’s story as a struggle between sides which are both mixtures of good and evil (thus placing it somewhere between the extremes of utopia and dystopia), and don’t make the odds overwhelming in either direction. One can then proceed to […]
Sphere
{4.5/5} “Wear these at all times, even though they’re just a precaution: the alarms trigger automatically if life-support conditions go below optimum. But that won’t happen… Every single major system is redundant. We can lose power, we can lose air, we can lose water entirely, and we will be fine for a hundred and thirty […]
The Postman
{4.5/5} “All considered, it was amazing a man like him had lived this long. Everyone he had known or admired as a boy had died, along with all the hopes any of them had had. The soft world made for dreamers like himself broke apart when he was only eighteen. Long since then he’d come […]
Shadows in Flight
{4.5/5} “The human race had encountered only one alien species, ever, and had fought a war of extinction with them. According to a story told by the writer of The Hive Queen under the pseudonym ‘Speaker for the Dead,’ the Formics had not meant to wipe out the human race at all. But Carlotta wasn’t […]
Star Trek Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship
{4.5/5} “In many ways… Venetan culture is a better fit with the Tzenkethi than the Federation. Both civilizations are very stable and achieve that stability through a certain degree of conformism on the part of their members rather than encouraging individualism… Your Federation explorers and we Ferengi entrepreneurs are perhaps somewhat baffling to the Venetans. […]
Star Trek Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn
{4.5/5} “In a career that had taken him from the lowest foot soldier to the supreme commander of the Romulan military forces, the admiral had learned to identify most of the real enemies in the galaxy: ego, arrogance, self-righteousness, a hunger for power, a lack of compassion and perspective, an unwillingness to understand. In his […]