Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders
{5/5} “James T. Kirk could no longer count the number of planets he had visited in his lifetime of careening about the galaxy, but he knew of very few with any size of human population that did not have an Italian restaurant.” Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah, published in 1984 Kirk, […]
Star Trek: The Last Roundup
{4.5/5} “It’s noble to die for a friend, for someone you love and value. But how much nobler — and harder — is it to die for a stranger? Commander Sandra Lower died for people she had never met. And she made that choice freely. Now that, cadets, is a command decision.” Star Trek: The […]
Death’s End
{5/5} “Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about […]
The Dark Forest
{4.5/5} “Once the Wallfacer mission and identity were granted, they could not be refused or abandoned. This impossibility was not due to any individual’s coercion but because cold logic, as determined by the project’s very nature, meant that once someone became a Wallfacer, an invisible and impenetrable screen was immediately thrown up between them and […]
The Three-Body Problem
{5/5} “But I can sense the plan, a very comprehensive, intricate plan: damage scientific research installations, kill scientists, drive scientists like you crazy and make you commit suicide — but the main goal is to misdirect your thoughts until you’re even more foolish than ordinary people.” The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, published in 2006 […]
The Compass of the Soul
{4.5/5} “How consensus was reached is unknown, but somehow it was eventually accepted that the catastrophe would result from the arts or their practice. How else could they have arrived at the decision to erase the arts from this world? To hide their last vestiges for the good of the earth, perhaps for the good […]
Beneath the Vaulted Hills
{4.5/5} “Do you ever feel that we are at an end of a chapter of history, Mr. Flattery, and that the world as it existed before was so much more alive with marvels? I almost feel this stranger was left from that period. Like lizards are the tiny remnants of the great beasts that disappeared.” […]
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
{4.5/5} “Our species — no, forgive me, our cultures — aren’t the same at all. Quelin fear outsiders because we use them as scapegoats for the things we fear about ourselves. We bar cultural exchange because change frightens us. Whereas your people… You fear outsiders because they gave you no choice in the change they […]
Black Wine
{4.5/5} “I cannot keep thinking in the language of cruelty in which I was born… But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good. I will will learn the subtle words, the nuances of meaning, and I will be able to think thoughts I […]
Memory Wire
{4.5/5} “I think they simply wanted to make us whole… to cure what they saw as our tragic failure. Failure of memory. Which is failure of conscience. They were surprised, I would guess, by our capacity for aggression. For ruthlessness, for inflicting pain. Conscience is memory… and the stones would restore it.” Memory Wire by […]