I would give this a solid 4.5 stars (rounded up here). This book has been on my to-read list for over a year, and I finally was able to walk away from my ongoing series to listen to this one. It was an excellent audiobook, I really enjoyed the narration. Short synopsis: It’s the end of the world as we know it… there is a virus that wipes out 99.99% (est.) of the human population. The book primarily follows a few key characters throughout their […]
A sci fi master’s earlier work
The best way to describe Harlan Ellison’s prose would be “lyrical.” This short collection of stories varies from from a hopeless, post-apocalyptic landscape to the a contemporary California in an emotional spiral after his divorce. Just describing the plot likely won’t hook you. It’s Ellison’s words that do all the heavy lifting in his stories. This collection of stories was published in the late 1960s and Ellison’s views on women tend to reflect this. But this shouldn’t let it deter you from reading one […]
A new to me and unusual science fiction saga.
My friends L and M recommended the Vorkosigan Saga to me a few years back, and I finally got around to reading it this year. I’m not always a huge fan of fantasy or science fiction, but I take my friends’ recommendations seriously, and I enjoy a good story. While the first novel, Shards of Honor, was not my absolute favorite science fiction story, it was engaging, unusual, and interesting. I’ll be curious to see how the rest of the books develop the world. This […]
Would you stay if she promised to you heaven?
Psych! Rhiannon is totally a dude. At least in this one. This is a pulpy sci fi/fantasy novel from the early 1950s. Leigh Brackett is most famous for writing the screenplay for The Big Sleep and for an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back before she died in the late 1970s. But this novel is more in the vain of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Princess of Mars) and Robert Howard (Conan), than space operas. It’s space in the sense that it takes place on “Mars” but it’s […]
Fifties and Sixties Time Travel
Time-Jump by John Brunner (1973) I know I’m reliving my youth, but I picked up “Time-Jump” by John Brunner for some classic science fiction. It was published in 1973 but contains his pulp science fiction stories from the periodicals of the fifties and the sixties. This is a short collection of ten of his time-related tales. At first glance, you’d think “these stories have all been done before” until you realize that these classic tales are the originals. Written before Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, […]
“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.”
When I first re-discovered reading for pleasure as an adult, I happened upon a bizarre book called The Flame Alphabet. I was tremendously intrigued by the concept of language being used as a weapon, but was ultimately VERY disappointed and confused by The Flame Alphabet (because it’s weird, y’all. Super weird.) Fortunately, book lovers were there to point my uninitiated self in the direction of Snow Crash and this book. Turns out, “language as weapon” is a veritable sci-fi subgenre! Lexicon is, easily, the most […]
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