The Last Colony
{4.5/5} “Humans — the few who knew the story anyway, — naturally regarded Boutin as a traitor, a man whose plan to topple the Colonial Union would have caused the slaughter of billions of humans. The Obin equally and naturally regarded him as one of their great racial heroes, a Prometheus figure who gave them […]
The Ghost Brigades
{4.5/5} “On the fourth day the members of the 8th asked for tried to tell each other jokes they found on the Phoenix data net, and mostly failed to make them work; by the time their BrainPals unpacked the context of the joke, it was no longer funny. Only Sarah Pauling seemed to be laughing […]
Star Trek: Devil’s Bargain
{4.5/5} “A Vesbian must not be away from the local ecology for more than a few weeks. If one of us is, he or she will develop a rapid autoimmune collapse that will bring on death within days… We need the biosphere of this world. We are genetically engineered to need it, and this process […]
Star Trek: In the Name of Honor
{4.5/5} “‘The legend of Kahless,’ Koloth continued, ‘is the foundation upon which the Empire stands. Without his guidance, we are doomed to a fate of self-destruction. For a time, that was forgotten by many Klingons. Other, selfish concerns blinded us to Kahless’ teachings, but that is beginning to change.’” Star Trek: In the Name of […]
Vortex
{4.5/5} “The famous ‘fourth stage of life,’ the adulthood after adulthood, had entailed changes to the brain that modified aggressiveness and promoted sympathy for others… Nowadays — assuming you had serious money and the right contacts — you could buy yourself an extra twenty or thirty years of life while avoiding that awkward surge of […]
Axis
{4.5/5} “You get off the boat for the first time and you realize you’re literally on another planet — the air smells different, the water tastes different, the moon’s the wrong size and it rises too fast… After a few weeks or months people get disoriented on some deep level. So they turn around and […]
Spin
{5/5} “Suddenly I was running a fully functional family practice, and most of my patients were people who had looked deeply into the Reality of the Spin and confronted it with courage and resolve… Before long I began to consider myself one of them, part of the work of extending human influence into the raging […]
Star Trek: Crisis of Consciousness
{4/5} “Instinctively, the Captain knew not to ask her who she was to try, convict, and carry out a sentence for past crimes. The consciousnesses within Zhatan probably remembered the atrocities they suffered. To her — to all of them — this was not something from a school lesson. It was their personal history.” Star […]
Foreigner
{4.5/5} “And yet, whoever the ark-makers were, they, too, had failed. One of their arks had crashed, the crew killed, its cargo of lifeforms never released. If something could defeat the ark-makers, what chance did Quintaglios have against the fate that awaited them?” Foreigner by Robert J. Sawyer, published in 1994 Novato is exploring the […]
Fossil Hunter
{4.5/5} “We’re trying to save our entire race! It’s only knowledge that will let us do that. We have to shed our superstitions and fears the way a snake sheds its skin. We can’t cower in the face of what we might discover.” Fossil Hunter by Robert J. Sawyer, published in 1993 Afsan had convinced […]