The SCIFI Reader

Translunar Travelers Lounge: Issue Seven: August 2022 by Aimee Ogden My rating: 2 of 5 stars I read 'Raindrop Doughnuts for Women Raining Inside' by Jana Bianchi. So. I wanted to give this a 1-star but I guess I should reserve that honour for books I truly hate. I didn't hate this story, but I really nothinged it a lot. I got nothing at all out of it. I found it a complete bore. I read it because it came up as our weekly short story in the Science Fiction Book Club on fb, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I'm intrigued by the generally positive response. I'd genuinely like to know what makes this story work for others. I read it twice, just to be sure, but it didn't feel like science fiction and it didn't feel meaningful at all. To me, anyway. View all my reviews

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. My rating: 4 of 5 stars Probably more of a 3-star than a 4-star but I've been feeling generous and despite its flaws I quite enjoyed the read. This is old as heck and it shows, in the sense that it does a whole lot of "explaining" the thing in question by having the characters make increasingly wild guesses. Something that I don't think authors can get away with anymore. Anyway. The concept of the alien in the story is quite good. I have got a copy of the movie 'The Thing' but I haven't actually watched it yet. It's in my pile of things I'd like to watch eventually. Regardless, it seems to me that this simple story has inspired at least a few other ideas... I'm thinking of at least one episode of 'The X-Files' and some other movie that I saw at the cinema in my teens. I'm glad to have read the story before seeing either of the two films directly based on it....

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. My rating: 4 of 5 stars Probably more of a 3-star than a 4-star but I've been feeling generous and despite its flaws I quite enjoyed the read. This is old as heck and it shows, in the sense that it does a whole lot of "explaining" the thing in question by having the characters make increasingly wild guesses. Something that I don't think authors can get away with anymore. Anyway. The concept of the alien in the story is quite good. I have got a copy of the movie 'The Thing' but I haven't actually watched it yet. It's in my pile of things I'd like to watch eventually. Regardless, it seems to me that this simple story has inspired at least a few other ideas... I'm thinking of at least one episode of 'The X-Files' and some other movie that I saw at the cinema in my teens. I'm glad to have read the story before seeing either of the two films directly based on it....

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. My rating: 4 of 5 stars Probably more of a 3-star than a 4-star but I've been feeling generous and despite its flaws I quite enjoyed the read. This is old as heck and it shows, in the sense that it does a whole lot of "explaining" the thing in question by having the characters make increasingly wild guesses. Something that I don't think authors can get away with anymore. Anyway. The concept of the alien in the story is quite good. I have got a copy of the movie 'The Thing' but I haven't actually watched it yet. It's in my pile of things I'd like to watch eventually. Regardless, it seems to me that this simple story has inspired at least a few other ideas... I'm thinking of at least one episode of 'The X-Files' and some other movie that I saw at the cinema in my teens. I'm glad to have read the story before seeing either of the two films directly based on it....

Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo My rating: 4 of 5 stars When I finished this book last night I was grumpy. I hated the ending, so I slapped a 3-star rating on it and immediately distanced myself from it by running headlong into my next book. To be fair, the story wasn't just good, it was great, so today I've corrected my hasty rating but I'm going to make it clear that the end of this story is a major let down. As soon as I started this story I was hooked. The writing is anything but fancy and yet the plot continually emerged and evolved so naturally from the simple narrative and it kept my interest all the way through to the crushing disappointment of an ending. From the way the story is told, the twists really do seem to come from out of nowhere and over the course of your journey through these pages you'll realise that there be dragons in the unexplored regions of this newly imagined world. Humanity seems to have largely left E...

Arkfall by Carolyn Ives Gilman My rating: 5 of 5 stars I may be getting a little carried away, with my 5-star rating here, but this was just wonderful. Deliciously written descriptions of a very alien seascape, this story is part travelogue and partly a cute little story about three people who found what they needed on an unplanned expedition. View all my reviews

Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman My rating: 5 of 5 stars Oh gee, I need to convey how much I loved this book to you but I must admit that I found it a terribly tedious read at times. I suppose I might sum it up by saying that it's just the kind of thing I look for in scifi while also being almost exactly not the kind of thing I'm looking for in storytelling. I'm going to start with what I loved about it because the story deserves that and I'll probably bang on long enough so that most people won't read to the bottom of this review. But first, a quick warning. There's a whole chapter that describes a vicious gang rape and some readers may be advised to skip it (chapter 4). I believe you'll still thoroughly enjoy the book without putting yourself through that chapter. Alright. I love that this is so far in the future that Earth doesn't even come up. There's a society on Gammadis and another on Capella. It's s...