I haven’t read a lot of science-fiction, I was never interested in it when I was a kid even though my dad tried to get me into it. But I also don’t decide what to read based on genre. If something sounds appealing I will read it, I don’t care what genre it is supposed to be. As for this novella, I don’t even remember how I found it but the summary sounded amazing so I decided to buy it. And I don’t regret buying […]
Constraint is creativity
Wow. I was struck speechless by this book. Mark Watney is stuck on Mars. His crew thinks he is dead. He knows another mission should arrive in about four years. It’s an equation. X food + Y Oxygen – Z Carbon Dioxide + A Water = B Survival Solve for all variables. Inputs to the matrix include available tools and materials, constraints include limited living space, a longer mission time than anything you’re working with was ever designed to function, and a planetary environment that […]
“…do something to a cadaver, it will do something back to you.”
I have yet to be disappointed by a recommendation from the NPR best books concierge, and Three Moments of an Explosion may be my favorite so far. A collection of sometimes sci-fi, sometimes fantasy, sometimes horror short stories, Three Moments starts with a base of a very realistic world, and adds in each of its stories an element of something beyond, something more magical or sinister. The stories in the collection typically start with or are based in a real object, or a regular person, that has become corrupted […]
“Just once, Ofelia would have liked people to see her as she was, not as their ideas painted her.”
Ofelia is a woman in her 70s, living with her tiresome son and his tiresome wife on a planet chosen for colonization by a soulless company. When the company decides the colony isn’t thriving (after 40 years), they decide to pull the plug, put everybody into cryo, and send them to another planet to try again. After 70 years of dancing to other people’s tunes, Ofelia decides enough is enough, and all she wants to do is work in her garden and be in charge […]
Just who is running this show?
3.5 stars. To be completely honest, I’m not sure I would have kept reading this if I wasn’t listening to it on audiobook on loan from my library. It didn’t suit my mood, which like many Americans (and let’s be real, world citizens) at the moment, is dark, dark depression. I powered through Sleeping Giants at 1.6x speed and unlike most times I think of giving up on a book and then don’t, I didn’t regret it. Sleeping Giants begins with a flashback as a […]
An Elevator to Heaven
There are people within our time that just can see way ahead in the future and do some genius predictions, even though normally they end up wrong on the time frame. Take Phillip K. Dick and his androids from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” that later became Blade Runner. The technology is right, if there weren’t any moral restraints on our cientists, but the timing is wrong. Arthur C. Clarke was a futurist. He loved to try and predict what would mankind be doing […]
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