This book is part of my effort to read a few books in the science fiction genre, and while I loved Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Side of Darkness, Stranger in a Strange Land left me bored and disappointed. Yes, this book is over fifty years old and the imagined future is not the present, yet it seems so incredibly dated. It felt very black and white, bouffant hair-dos, white lab coats intermingled with flying taxis and space travel. The story begins with a human mission […]
A Martian MacGyver for the problem-solving sci-fi fans among us
This is going to be a hard book to top for me this year. I LOVED The Martian! I haven’t read science fiction in many decades, but I’m an old aficionado from my early years, and this book had me panting with excitement and anticipation throughout. Some have compared The Martian to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and while I can fully understand the comparison, I much prefer the image of a Martian MacGyver, for those of you who remember the television show from the late eighties. […]
Potatoes in Space: The Perfect Book for your Inner Astronaut
(I bought this because of alibaba77’s review.) This is a great book. If you’re at all into astronomy, stargazing, astronauts, science, or good books, you should read it. Mark Watney, our hero, is MacGyver on Mars. His Mars mission crew colleagues presumed him dead after an accident in a Martian storm. He has to figure out how to survive until the next Mars mission or until NASA figures out a way to save him sooner. He’s got a few potatoes, some duct tape, and a […]
You gotta learn to play the game.
You know how sometimes you go to review a book and you just can’t figure out what to say about it? For, like, weeks on end? And meanwhile you keep reading, and your stack of things-to-review just keeps growing. And growing? And grooooowwing. This is one of those times. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts and feelings, and not that I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did and I do, but I’m having a hard time getting up the energy to condense and organize all […]