Star Trek: DS9 — Sacraments of Fire
{4.5/5} “Being Jem’Hadar had always signified obeisance and obedience to the Founders, and living a soldier’s existence. He could no longer bring himself to practice the former, but he could still attempt the latter. That was why he had elected to turn the scoutship away from the Dominion and towards the distress call’s source. The […]
Star Trek: TNG — Armageddon’s Arrow
{4.5/5} “There were numerous stories and tall tales shared by senior cadets alleging that the simple matter of naming a new vessel ‘Enterprise’ brought with it the jinx of being plagued by all manner of time-based trickery, and that the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations even had a special group, ‘Section 1701,’ dedicated to nothing […]
Star Trek: The Next Generation — Takedown
{4.5/5} “This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise… Aventine, you are ordered to stand down immediately. I repeat, stand down immediately, or we will fire!” Star Trek: The Next Generation — Takedown by John Jackson Miller, published in 2015 Admiral Riker has been sent to a peace conference that will be attended by […]
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — The Missing
{4.5/5} “A careful student of other worlds and cultures quickly learns to look beyond the formal face presented to discover what he or she can about the ordinary people — or, even more wisely, the marginal. One learns the true nature of a civilization from the way it treats its sick, weak, and poor.” Star […]
Author discovery of the year
I didn’t happen to read many new authors in 2015. I spent a fair amount of the year reading 4 series by authors I’d read before — Dune, The Quintaglio Ascension, Spin, and Old Man’s War. The big winner is Charles Stross for Accelerando and the runner ups are Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson […]
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, […]
Authors you can’t go wrong with, part 7
This list continues from part 6. Peter S. Beagle Beagle also wrote the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Sarek.” Masterpiece The Last Unicorn Good book A Fine and Private Place Christopher L. Bennett Bennett’s Star Trek books are always worth reading. Great books TOS: Ex Machina TNG: Greater than the Sum TITAN: Orion’s Hounds […]
SF & fantasy collections & anthologies
Collections Best of the best I, Robot – Isaac Asimov Nightfall – Isaac Asimov Virtual Unrealities – Alfred Bester The Golden Apples of the Sun – Ray Bradbury Keeper of Dreams – Orson Scott Card Maps in a Mirror – Orson Scott Card Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang Expedition to Earth […]
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 […]