If you’ve read any reviews of this book, what I’m about to say is probably something you’ve heard before: This is one of the best film novelizations I’ve ever read, if not the best. Oy, that sounds really hyperbolic, and to be fair, it’s really not a high bar to clear. People aren’t going around screaming for the next great novelization. They just aren’t. Also, the novelization for The Force Awakens was quite terrible, so psychologically speaking, pretty much if this one had been halfway decent I […]
Humans still struggling to learn empathy in 25th century
This one was a friend recommendation as well as a start to my quest for more women-written science fiction, and it did not disappoint. Cat is a psion, a “freak” born of the socially forbidden union between a human and a Hydran, a race of telepathic aliens who have been exterminated by humans. His telepathic powers make him feared and hated, even though a past trauma has left him unable to access his psion abilities. He is recruited/coerced/blackmailed into taking a job as a glorified […]
Thought-provoking and … kind of freaky
I purchased Story of Your Life and Others after I saw Arrival in theaters, which rocked me to my core, and I wanted to see just how it translated from the page to the screen. The answer? Very differently. For one, Chiang is a lot more technical in his descriptions, and I really appreciate the sparse-ness of his language. He does not use wordy descriptions to manipulate emotions out of his readers; he simply lets the readers draw the parallels between the science-y concepts he talking about […]
Why aren’t you guys reading this series?
“That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.” “No. But you can say that if you don’t do something different it’ll happen again, and again, and again, over and over until something changes the game.” “Like the protomolecule?” “It didn’t change anything,” Holden said. “Here we are, still doing all the same things we did before. We’ve got a bigger battleground. Some of the sides have shifted […]
Six books in, and still not a weak link to be found in the series
So, look. Typically in my reviews I go the very remedial route of talking about broad themes from the book, how well the characters and/or worldbuilding were developed, and I comment on the pacing and overall competence of the plot. If I am very lucky, something will stand out that either makes me want to rant, or go on a gushing squeefest, and I can write a better than milquetoast review. When you get to the sixth book in a consistently excellent series, there isn’t […]
A monstrous planetary romance.
Kicking off the year with an intense sci fi exploration of language and Language! Embassytown is a human colony/outpost on a distant planet Arieka—accessible only by a dangerous trip through some timey-wimey wishy-washy-space-travel stuff called the immer. The Ariekei live on Arieka and they communicate with Language: They can only speak literally, with a dual mouth that speaks in unison, and their intent must be known and match the words, or it has no meaning. They cannot lie; they cannot understand human language. So to speak with any creativity, […]
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