Towing Jehovah
{4.5/5} “‘Glad you’re here, Ockham,’ said the creature in the sort of thin, scratchy voice Thomas associated with early-thirties gangster movies. His skin was astonishingly white, beyond Caucasian genes, beyond albinism even; he seemed molded from snow. ‘I’m told you are at once devout’ — he stood on his toes — ‘and smart.’ Whereupon, to […]
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
{4.5/5} “In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it’s far more common for human beings to turn into rats.” Iris is a young girl just arrived in Haarlem in Holland. She fled England with her mother and sister because […]
Recent SF books with big ideas
If, like me, you’re interested in science fiction novels with big ideas, you might want to check out this list from io9: 10 Recent Science Fiction Books That Are About Big Ideas I can recommend Spin, Blindsight, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects. I hadn’t heard of Feed, Wool, or Super Sad True Love Story. […]
Revelation Space
{4.5/5} “It was not something to which she was ever going to become totally accustomed, Volyova knew, but in recent weeks visiting the Captain had begun to take on definite tones of normality. As if visiting a cryogenically cooled corpse infected with a retarded but potentially all-consuming plague was merely one of life’s unpleasant but […]
Permanence
{4.5/5} “The mountains were gorgeous, all limpid shadow and fogbound majesty and she found it easy to forget her problems here. Sheer rock walls rose from the plains to ice-capped peaks, sunlit on one side during the artificial day, long shadows sloping into apparent nothingness on the other side. Half the sky was a gorgeous […]
Battlefield Earth
“I really look forward to getting back home where you can walk around without a suit or mask, where the gravity gives you something to push against, where everything is a beautiful purple and there’s not one bit of this green stuff. My papa used to tell me that if I wasn’t a good Psychlo […]
A Fine and Private Place
{4/5} “Caring about things is much more important to the dead because it’s all they have to keep them conscious. Without it they fade, dwindle, thin to the texture of a whisper. The same thing happens to people, but nobody notices it because their bodies act as masks. The dead have no masks.” Jonathan lives […]
The Sirens of Titan
{4.5/5} “Winston Niles Rumfoord had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum two days out of Mars. Only his dog had been along. Now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena — apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun […]
China Mountain Zhang
{4.5/5} “I am impure, a mongrel. I am an imposter. And there is more that he doesn’t know. When I tell him what I am, he will look foolish because he has mistaken me for Chinese, he will lose face. We will pretend that nothing was ever said. Then when this job is finished he […]
Dandelion Wine
{4/5} “So, with the subtlest of incidents, he knew that this day was going to be different. It would be different also, because, as his father explained, driving Douglas and his ten-year-old brother Tom out of town toward the country, there were some days compounded completely of odor, nothing but the world blowing in one […]