3.5 stars The Water Knife is compelling mostly in its premise: the American southwest — featuring primarily California, Arizona, Nevada, and southern Colorado — is basically bone dry. To sustain their urban populations, these states have employed muscle to go on and off the book and secure water rights, which are primarily proprietary channels drawing from the low but still flowing Colorado River. In the wake of decades of sustained drought, those cities and states that haven’t come out on top of the pile are […]
A truly stunning sci-fi book for the ages
Wow, this book. There are a few technical elements that initially justified me wanting to leave off the fifth star, but the sheer audacity of the story and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about it a month later make Seveneves one of my favorite books of the year, and certainly the most thought-provoking. Effortlessly checking off a list of “stuff I want in a sci-fi novel,” Seveneves is technical and speculative, extrapolating from cutting-edge current science to detail seemingly inevitable future technology. Equally […]
A Recommendation from Gloria Steinem
Woman on the Edge of Time is a sci-fi or “speculative fiction” classic originally published in 1976. Author Marge Piercy has had critical success as a novelist and poet over a span of several decades, and I remember reading some of her poetry in college but it was a recent NY Times interview with Gloria Steinem that brought Piercy and this particular novel back onto my radar. Woman on the Edge of Time is a provocative tale of time travel that addresses poverty, race, sex, politics, […]
If negative stars were possible, that’s what I would give this book.
A brief summary of the plot. An asteroid hits the moon and moves it closer to Earth, causing swelling tides which flood the coasts, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions that put massive amounts of ash into the air, turning summer into winter. The story is told through the diary entries of the sixteen-year-old Miranda, who goes from a normal high school student to a person fighting, with her family, for survival. If you’re like me and you love YA speculative fiction, that sounds good, right? And […]
My skepticism comes first
Disclaimer: I received this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I believe many people are familiar with the meme (courtesy of South Park) that more or less goes: Step One ??? Profit! Well, the minds behind Consilience/Positron in this book have adopted that mantra as a lifestyle and business model. The proposal is this: crime is bad, and in a recession — particularly an extended one as has befallen the world — crime rises, and the jails become overpopulated and create an […]
“Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.”
Writing 52+ reviews is hard. Writing 52+ reviews is harder when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation, and not reviews. Oops! Well, anyway, here we are. The Gone-Away World is a very strange book. It’s also a very good book, but it’s a good book that took me awhile to get into and appreciate. Harkaway’s prose is witty and often nonsensical, filled with non-sequiturs and descriptions that seem to mean absolutely nothing, and yet somehow conjure a well-staged — if surrealistic — scene, and […]