Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — The Siege
{4.5/5} “Ever since we discovered that wormhole, it’s been both a blessing and a curse. Without it — frankly, and nothing personal intended — things would be pretty… boring around here. On the other hand, it’s the equivalent of staring down the barrel of a gun. Any time at all, something very large and very […]
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
{4.5/5} “Adeline looks out the window at the sinking sun, and doesn’t listen to the words, but she can hear the light in her mother’s voice, the vindication in it. Even in her father’s eyes, there is a measure of relief. Their daughter tried to carve her own road, but now things are being set […]
Moving Mars
{4.5/5} “I go to Earth hat in hand, to avoid disaster. We are only five millions. Earth is thirty thousand millions. Earth wants access to our resources. She wants to control our resources. The only way for us to maintain our freedom is to put our house in order, concede to Earth enough to put […]
Jade City
{4.5/5} “Shae had never intended to move back. She’d been full of anger and optimism, determined to forge a new life and identity for herself in the great wide, modern world beyond Kekon, away from anachronistic clans and the outsized male egos of her family. Once in Espenia, she found it harder than she’d expected […]
The Kaiju Preservation Society
{4.5/5} “First, understand that when we say KPS is an animal rights organization, we are actively engaged with these animals — very large, very wild, very dangerous animals. We will train you on how to interact with them, and we maintain stringent safety protocols at all times. But you can get injured, severely, and if […]
The New Moon’s Arms
{4.5/5} “Anybody who work in the sea around Cayaba will buck up one eventually. Fishermen, Coast Guard, Emergency Services. Not the doctors, for the most part. They scarcely do outcalls. Even the police know about this. We all know it. We just don’t talk it. But they real. The sea people? They real.” The New […]
Elder Race
{5/5} “When I appear, everyone abruptly defers to me, and I realize that I, as the putative victim of their crimes, am expected to have some hand in the judicial process. This is, of course, just piling contamination on contamination. I am, frankly, not only the last but the worst anthropologist. I’m lucky nobody is […]
Activation Degradation
{4.5/5} “It hadn’t been tasked with reconnaissance. It had been tasked with termination. It was to kill, not study. Why did so many of Unit Four’s instincts contradict its direct orders?” Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter, published in 2021 Unit Four is a robot who is periodically reassembled anew. It works at a mining […]
Project Hail Mary
{5/5} “They have some of the best supercomputers in the world. I needed their supercomputers and engineers to try all kinds of scenarios and propagation models for how Astrophage could get around in the galaxy. Back to the point: These local stars have been dimming for decades. And the rate of dimming increases exponentially — […]
The Future of Another Timeline
{5/5} “Watching women demure to men in public and suffer the consequences of their abuse in private, it was hard to believe we were at a transition point in history when women’s growing power could unsettle a long-established social order. But change is never linear or obvious. Often progress only becomes detectable when it inspires […]