Star Trek Titan: Fallen Gods
{4.5/5} “‘We destroy only that which now offends the Whetu’irawaru,’ Fy’ahn said, hir voice like rasps being dragged across flint. ‘Only that which the Fallen Gods now must regret having created in the first place. Only that which would bring still more of their wrath down upon us.” Although the Titan is boldly going where […]
2312
{5/5} “You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance… […]
Marooned in Realtime
{5/5} “Castle Korolev was typical of the flamboyance of the advanced residences. The underlying stonework and statuary — modeled vaguely on Angkor Wat — had been built half a thousand years earlier, then left for mountain rains to wear at, for moss to cover, for trees to penetrate. Afterwards, construction robots hid all the subtle […]
The Peace War
{4.5/5} “Confinement spheres — bobbles — are not so much force fields as they are partitions, separating the in- and outside of their surfaces into distinct universes. Gravity alone can penetrate. The Tucson bobble was originally generated around an ICBM over the arctic. It fell to earth near its target, the missile fields at Tucson. […]
Her
{5/5} “Sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.” Theodore works at a company that creates handwritten letters that their clients get to send to their loved ones. Theodore has been writing the […]
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon
{4/5} “We abhor violence. The fact that you can be induced to inflict it upon yourselves, is, to us, proof that you are food, less-than-Krundai. If you and other races did not spare us the necessity, we should be forced to kill our own food like beasts. But the Great Brood saw our needs and […]
The Reality Dysfunction
{4.5/5} “When their full size has been reached they slide up out of the water to range through the planetwide jungle. Gills adapt to breathe the harsh musky air, tentacle muscles strengthen to support the drooping limbs away from the water’s cosy buoyancy. And they eat, rummaging through the matted undergrowth with insistent horns to […]
Expendable
{4.5/5} “There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage abruptness or the stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If […]
Author discovery of the year
2013 was a great year of reading for me, and in particular a great year of discovering new authors. The winner of my author discovery of the year is Iain M. Banks. I read three of his books, including the brilliant The Player of Games. Runner ups are Sarah Zettel for A Sorceror’s Treason, Michael Swanwick […]
Gold
{4.5/5} “It seems to me, then, that the best one can do is to present one’s story as a struggle between sides which are both mixtures of good and evil (thus placing it somewhere between the extremes of utopia and dystopia), and don’t make the odds overwhelming in either direction. One can then proceed to […]