Rating: 7.2 (out of 10) Eric Brown’s Binary System is as old fashioned as sci-fi adventure gets. Its cliffhanger thrills and heroic derring-do recall the pulp-era storytelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic strips of the 1930s, though the mostly hand-wavey science is convincing enough to pass the post-golden... Continue Reading →
Rating: 7.1 (out of 10) No one who reads Skyfarer will ever accuse Joseph Brassey of being hip; this novel is so unabashedly dorky, it reads like something dreamed by a Mountain Dew guzzling twelve-year-old hooked on Star Wars and Final Fantasy. This sword and sorcery space adventure stands apart from everything else currently out... Continue Reading →
Rating: 7.0 (out of 10) A former professor of mine was fond of saying that great art is not merely engaged with, but surrendered to. That particular quality of experience – the willing submission of the viewer to the mastery of the art object itself – is hard to nail down in words; so then,... Continue Reading →
Rating: 2.5 (out of 10) Fiction can do quite a lot of things, but most often it aims to entertain or to express ambitious ideas. Great authors do both of those things brilliantly and produce great works, but great authors are few and far between. Good authors tend to excel at one of those aims... Continue Reading →
Rating: 6.1 (out of 10) Peter Clines’ Paradox Bound reads like an extended pitch for a tv series. The silly-but-catchy premise has a pair of time travelers zipping around American history in search of the American Dream (literally), pursued by faceless monster-men who want to stop them. Along the way they predictably encounter figures from... Continue Reading →
Rating: 7.9 (out of 10) On the surface, the mythology surrounding alien abduction is no different from any other conspiracy theory: the complete lack of physical or circumstantial evidence, wild speculation in place of verifiable fact, sophisticated (but easily debunked) pseudo-scientific hypotheses, and, most importantly, a deep emotional attachment by conspiracy theorists to their “truth” – a... Continue Reading →
Rating: 4.6 (out of 10) Pawn is the story of Nicole, a teenage alcoholic and sometime criminal who is whisked away by aliens from her dead-end life on Earth to a living spaceship called the Fyrantha, where she discovers she is a Sybil – a rare human with the ability to communicate with the ship. Working... Continue Reading →
I’m pleased that two of the four works that I nominated made the final ballot; sadly, the two that didn’t make it were my personal favorites. I did not find the other four nominated stories to be award worthy (one of which cannot even be taken seriously enough for me to bother reading), therefore only... Continue Reading →
Rating: 4.4 (out of 10) Now that A Closed and Common Orbit has received a Hugo nomination for Best Novel, it would seem that Becky Chambers fandom is inescapable. That’s really not such a terrible thing. She’s basically invented an entirely new sub-subgenre of science fiction – the Rainbows & Hugs Space Opera (RHSO, for short)... Continue Reading →
