The SCIFI Reader

Sisters of the Forsaken Stars by Lina Rather My rating: 3 of 5 stars Hmmm, something is up with the writing. Or maybe some thing's up with this reader today. I could practically copy/paste my review of book one here and it would work for book two. I still love the detailed world setting, I still think the characters have been fantastic and I'm even willing to add that the plot was a bit more interesting this time, but it's still not engaging with me. On the other hand there are moments like the opening paragraph, which just draw me in and make me want to keep reading: "SISTER FAUSTINA WATCHED on the screen as the orbital station grew closer. She turned off the propulsion and let the ship drift into the docking bay until the skin found the airlock, connected, and made a seal. The ship jolted, and she startled, but all was well; it was still young and had a tendency to overreact to unfamiliar stimuli. Soon it would settle into itself. ...

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather My rating: 3 of 5 stars "The Reverend Mother shook her head at her crucifix. She and the small Lord, they shared an understanding." Although it does say it right there in the title, before I actually opened up the book, I was not expecting to read 'Nuns in Space.' That's on me. "Before she took vows, Sister Gemma had grown up on a shipyard in orbit around Saturn. Her first job, ...was coaxing juvenile ships from their larval stage ...to the stage where they could be introduced to the vacuum." The ships are alive which is cool and we get to learn a lot about their reproduction and life cycle. This story has a fascinating world and great characters but a bit of an odd plot. There's a plague about and worlds or colonies are being quarantined but the nuns aboard Our Lady of Impossible Constellations want to help anyway. They've been clandestinely working on a cure and they w...

Astounding Science Fiction, February 1944 by John W. Campbell Jr. My rating: 3 of 5 stars This review is for 'Off the Beam' by George O. Smith. "We can check the solar electrostatic field to about seven decimal places right here, and any deviation in the field to the tune of a couple of million electron volts at a distance of a hundred million miles will cause a distortion in the field that we can measure." Well, I loved it but this was very technical writing. It had a very realistic feel I thought, but not a very dramatic one, given the situation. The best way I can think to describe it was that it was like you were actually on board the ship but that it wasn't really in trouble. Or perhaps that's more like being on board a flight simulator. I suspect that's due to presuming too much about the ending but also probably because we don't get to know the characters very well in this story. "I remember when we used ...

Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a great story. The Enterprise E crew find a derelict ship with some of its passengers in stasis. Crusher inadvertently begins reviving the frozen crew when another vessel arrives demanding custody of the derelict and its occupants. The two groups of aliens are enemies of a long and brutal war and the derelict appears to be a time traveling weapon of mass destruction. What are Picard and the crew going to do now they've unwittingly and unwillingly become entangled in this feud? It's a classic type of scenario made a little unique by the use of the time traveling weapon, although (as pointed out in the story), it does have similarity with elements of the Xindi threat. The war has been fought for so long now that its original purpose no longer has any meaning and continues mainly because it seems that it must. Both sides desire an end to the war but both are also convinced th...

Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Part of this style of humour is generated from the absurd asides and random twists and I think it was done ok here but it's not that easy to pull off well and I think the series came with some awkward moments; sometimes it's a fine line between silly and stupid. "I hate tech that’s indistinguishable from magic, she thought, pursing her lips like she’d sucked on a naranja agria." However, I think Valdes' writing really excelled at emotional awareness, down to the micro details. I was regularly impressed by the use of subtle gestures and multi-layered emotional expression. "The fish tank whirred, releasing a burst of bubbles like an underwater fart. Eva’s brain did the same, more or less." The adventure ends with a big old "kum ba jah" moment that wraps up the series neatly and then briefly discusses what each of the individual characters think about the...

Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars "A slow smile spread across Eva’s face as she had a wonderful, awful idea." Shenanigans in Space. All non-stop action, non-sense decisions and crazy outcomes. I still think these are a bit long but they are packed full and this was just as much fun as the first story. "Eva had a bad feeling about all this, but she told herself that was just her own enormous sense of shame talking." Captain Eva didn't come across as very likeable in book one, I thought, but as part of her growth in this novel she was put in a few emotionally challenging and ethically ambiguous positions so she has started to grow on me. There's something not quite amazing about these, the occasional odd phrasing or cheap trick, but overall these are a great deal of fun to read. View all my reviews

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars The story is about as absurd as 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' if not quite as cleverly constructed but the crew and events of this plot reminded me of 'Firefly' most of all. Especially at about half way, when the captain is considering her crew as her family and she is privately recollecting how they had each joined her, the characters here felt very familiar to those aboard Serenity. I liked the crew more than the captain but I think that's the point of her character. It probably went on for a little too long but is fun and entertaining. I quite liked the scent decoder device and there was heaps of other quirky tech in this story. I had figured out the "switcharoo" well before half way and although I usually don't mind when that happens, in this book it felt like it dragged until it was finally revealed at about three quarters. I liked the book, ...

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys My rating: 3 of 5 stars An alien object has been discovered on the moon and it's acting like a death maze. Each time the artefact is approached the person can get a little further than the previous attempt before being killed. The head researcher, Hawks, teams up with the human resources guy to hire a psychopath, Barker. The plan is to clone Barker by some method that leaves him telepathically connected to his clones and to send the clones into the artefact one after another. None of the characters are sympathetic to readers; Hawks is happy to repeatedly kill his subjects, the HR guy keeps a list of psychopaths on call for odd jobs, Barker is, well, a fkn psycho and his girlfriend is just trying to bang everyone. A lot of the narrative has little to do with the actual psychological experiments and I found most of the story was rather boring as a result. It's an excellent premise but the story focused on adding backg...

Thorns of Barevi by Anne McCaffrey My rating: 2 of 5 stars The planet Barevi is described really well and is very alien. It's a slave camp world I guess where the Catteni keep slaves of many varied species. We follow the story of a Terran girl who seems to be roaming free and wild, when she helps to revive an exhausted Catteni male who had crashed while being chased. Then he rapes her to say thank you as a matter of Catteni honour. This ending sucks. View all my reviews

The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings My rating: 3 of 5 stars The "Girl" is Lilda and the "Golden Atom" is her subatomic home at the bottom of a valley carved out by an indentation on a gold ring. We find out about her by way of The Chemist, as the story begins he is recounting his discovery to a bunch of the lads; The Doctor, The Wealthy Businessman, The Banker and The Very Young Man. To my best recollection their names were never given and these descriptors were how they were referred to throughout the story. While peeking around the surface of his gold ring under a microscope The Chemist discovered the world which Lilda inhabits. After perving for a little too long one afternoon, the lenses of his microscope unexpectedly shatter and instead of recreating the experiment, he sets his mind to developing a drug which can reduce size instead. He also synthesises a pill to do the opposite and a pill that simulates death but fro...

The Listeners by James E. Gunn My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a wonderfully plotted first contact story, with a lovely secondary plot featuring thoughtfully drawn up characters but unfortunately its presentation is bulked up with a dry delivery of just about every quote which ever considered a topic related to SETI. The book is filled with chapters called "Computer Run" which were just piles of these quotes and the end result is that this feels more like an essay than a novel. "It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite." The first contact story is told over two generations. Old MacDonald receives a first intelligent signal of extraterrestrial origin while manning the listening post at what is essentially the SETI Institute, but then be...

The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the most irresponsible time travel story that I've read to date. It's a no consequences adventure story that mucks about with only the fun possibilities of time travel, so buckle up, forget about all your ethical questions and spare no thought for the preservation of the timeline! Summary: - Professor needs funding to turn his mini prototype time machine into a full size working time sled. - Barney is a director for Climactic, a film company at risk of being shut down if their next flick isn't a roaring success. - LM is the producer at Climactic and Barney convinces LM to endorse the Professor's project and to payroll a new movie using the technology to film history "on location." So after a little demonstration LM greenlights the project and starts outlining the film with Barney. On a test run, they kidnap a viking and with a little training (and...

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Nothing couldn’t be and if it shouldn’t be then it generally was." This was fun. It's not perfect, but all I wanted was to spend a bit more time with the gang and that's what we get. Practically everyone is in it, including one of my favourites Bowerick Wowbagger and in a bit of a weird move to perhaps drag in some Dirk Gently connectivity, we also get some Thor action based on Asgard. "The Vogons were not bad people as such. It was true to say that nobody liked them, and that their inter-personal skills didn’t extend much beyond trying not to spit on the person they were talking to, but they weren’t bad. That is, they would not blast your planet into atoms without the proper paperwork. With the proper paperwork, however, they would travel to the end of the Universe, and to as many parallel ones as necessary, to see the job done." Discovering that the humans stil...

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip José Farmer My rating: 3 of 5 stars Folks, have you ever finished a book that you enjoyed thoroughly and then thought to yourself, "I'd like to read that again, but not written as well?" No? Me neither, I must admit. Alright, it's possible that I've finished a book and thought, "could have had more aliens in it." Well, that is what we have here. It's not a bad story in concept, Farmer retells Phileas Fogg's famous journey but imagines aliens are involved. Unfortunately, the result isn't very impressive. It comes across to me like the sort of writing exercise we might have had at school, not the kind of thing you'd publish and charge readers good money for. Farmer's prose doesn't come close to matching Verne's, I don't think any effort was made in that regard and I personally found that rather dissatisfying. A lot of the charm of the original journe...

Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy by Johannes Kepler My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is probably not the first work of science fiction ever written, but it does gets bandied about as being so by some enthusiasts. I don't care very much about the distinction which mainly comes down to how you define your scifi. However, pondering that question is how I came to find out about the book, during the first lecture of TTC's 'How Great Science Fiction Works' by Gene Wolfe. Wolfe notes that if 'Somnium' fits your definition of scifi simply by virtue of being about a journey off of this planet, then it is indisputably not the first of its kind. It also contains a bit of the supernatural which would tend to disqualify its being classified as scifi for many readers. Much of a muchness, wouldn't you agree? I'm here because reading a work of fiction about a trip to the moon that was written in 1634 sounds fun no...

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Autistic is different, not bad. It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong." The protagonist, Lou, is described very well by the blurb and it was a genuine delight to follow his thought processes. This review is chokkas full of quotes from the book because you don't need to be autistic to relate to many of the introspective observations: "It would be simpler if people said what they meant." Actually if you haven't read the blurb you ought to, I'm not even going to try to summarise it. The scifi here is about possible medical achievements which may improve quality of life for future generations while skipping over a generation of individuals who were the last to be born without genetic selection. This is my second book my Moon and I was expecting a very personal narrative which is exactly what she delivered. There are some stand...

Weird Tales v26n04 October 1935 by Kurtis Krimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars This review is for C.L. Moore's 'The Cold Gray God.' Northwest is on Mars again, again.... again. Which is fine but I really wanted to head back to Venus. Anyway, at least it's not the same old dusty environs, here we start with a snowy setting on "Righa, pole city of Mars." Otherwise, it's a bit of a classic start for a Northwest. He spots a beautiful woman standing out from the crowd and she asks "will you come with me?" Of course, Northwest knows what she means by this, because apparently he could tell that she was no ordinary lady of the streets, but this reader could not parse any deep meaning from the exchange. Naturally, he follows. Well, at least to half satisfy my Venusian dreams, the lady in question is "Judai of Venus [who] had been the toast of three planets a few years past." Her songs once celebrated through to the ...

Weird Tales v24n02 August 1934 by Farnsworth Wright My rating: 3 of 5 stars This review is for C.L. Moore's 'Dust of Gods.' "Yarol the Venusian" is drinking whiskey with Northwest in a Martian saloon. Low on funds they are privately deliberating over which stupid idea should be their next escapade when a stranger at another table overhears and chirps in. Such a classic trope now but for all I know it first appeared here, 90 odd years ago. Probably not. Anyway, our stranger whispers legends of ancient Gods that long ago abandoned all interaction with mortals and then offers the down-and-out pair a gig they can't refuse. Mostly because they REALLY need some cash. This Northwest adventure is more adventurous than the previous episodes with our pair travelling out to explore the uber-ancient remnants of what was once Mars' most holy city. A lot like an Indianna Jones adventure. "Great Pharol—dust upon a throne." It...

Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven by Larry Niven My rating: 4 of 5 stars When I start making notes for collections, it's always "I'll just make a few brief notes about each entry" but before long it has ballooned out of proportion and I'm... sorry about the length of this review. 0. A collection of stories set in Niven's 'Known Space' universe. I have read and enjoyed 'Ringworld', the first book of the series, but not for a few years and I didn't recall very many details before starting this collection. There's a meaty introduction by Niven himself, although I decided to skip it. My experience would seem to indicate that the stories here can be read and enjoyed without much knowledge of the 'Known Space' universe and in fact did a fine job of introducing it to me. I'm a sucker for good world building and this series appears to provide an enormous amount of that. These stori...

Upgrade by Blake Crouch My rating: 4 of 5 stars Gene editing is the name of the game, and clandestine gene labs are the meth labs of this future. "If I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone was trying to turn you into a superhuman." The story initially gave me a 'Flowers for Algernon' vibe. We meet Logan, an agent of the Genetic Protection Agency (GPA), recovering in hospital a month after he was intentionally infected with a Scythe virus during a bungled mission. As we get to know our protagonist they are undergoing a sort of similar awakening scenario, their mental capacity expanding rapidly with the infection and Logan must learn to control the incoming flow of new data. In this it's not so much about processing the information for the first time, but about processing much more information at once than ever before. "Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patent...

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein My rating: 3 of 5 stars When a book is generally regarded as a great classic scifi it can feel superfluous to say anything about it at all. Especially when there is some lingering debate about the author's intent. I don't know much about any of that. From what I could gather by reading the least amount about it that I could reasonably manage, the issue of contention has to do with whether this is a pro-militaristic wankfest or a sharp, satirical piece. Well, here's my two cents: It doesn't matter folks. I'm going to presume that the author never weighed in on the topic otherwise there'd be nothing to debate. If Heinlein didn't specify either way then everybody is right, that's how the best art works, the audience interpret it as they see it without direction. And anyway, after reading this story I don't see why it couldn't be interpreted as being both of those things to s...

Sunfall by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 3 of 5 stars A series of short stories connected by the theme of being set on an Earth where sun exposure is dangerous, each told in a separate location about unlinked events. Apart from the scifi setting these stories have more of a paranormal vibe and while the writing was marvellously descriptive, right from the prologue, the actual plots of the individual stories were fairly mundane and didn't appeal to me. The stories all started with a description of a city and then veered off to tell an unrelated mild horror short story. I made brief notes for all but two of the stories. The two I haven't commented on were set in Rome and Peking and were about as enjoyable as any of the others in the collection. My favourite was probably Highliner, but only by a narrow margin, and it was perhaps one of the least scifi stories in the set, certainly one of the least paranormal. The Only Death in the City (Paris). This s...

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson My rating: 3 of 5 stars So this really was another accident of the classic "Frank didn't read the blurb before starting" variety and I can tell you that when I did stop to read it, I felt like a bit of a silly billy. As such this "review" (which is far too long) will be, more than usual, a collection of thoughts from a timid (and in this case largely uninterested) observer, after which I'll add a little digression at the end about how this book bounced up into my current reading pile. If you'd like an actual review that brilliantly explains what this book is about look for the review by Claudia on GR which is just spectacular. I was looking for some guidance and read that review when I was about half way through the book and it helped me focus a lot better in the second half of my read through. This is not at all a book for me given my inability to retain historical da...