The SCIFI Reader

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...

Linesman by S.K. Dunstall My rating: 3 of 5 stars For this review I'd like to invite spoilers into the comments.... if you have an idea about what the fkn "lines" are please enlighten me. Don't fear for spoilers in the review though because I couldn't spoil this story if I tried. I'm trying to write a speedy review because I'm nearly late for work (squeezed this in so I can read something else when I get home).... which reminds me. There's a quote on the cover which claims this is a fast-paced story and I don't think that's entirely true. It dragged for me. I'll admit there were some sudden changes and some events which were dealt with super briefly. For example, there was an execution which took place over the course of a single sentence. The mystical "lines" seem underdeveloped to me. They somehow represent sections of spaceships; line 1 for crew, line 5 or 6 was comms, line 10 the ship itself...

Redshirts by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well this is an obvious win for me. I like Scalzi, I like Trek and occasionally I also like to laugh at silly things. Scalzi seems to have a special knack for the light hearted stories and while reading this I was reminded of how much fun I had with his 'The Kaiju Preservation Society', another fun story that didn't take itself too seriously at all. In fact, when it began to take itself a little more seriously in the three Codas at the end, that was when I began to lose interest. A good reading friend of mine split this story into three sections for his review and I'll copy that. The first introduces us to the ship and the characters and the larger setting of the Universal Union (aka Dub U). I liked this a lot, I was fully immersed and enjoyed the light hearted banter. 5-stars. The second takes the characters on a mission to save themselves by affecting the real life production of the f...

Child of Two Worlds by Greg Cox My rating: 5 of 5 stars Loved it entirely. I found so much joy in returning to the Pike era post-Talos IV through this story and I enjoyed the many little details that the author included from across the various parts of the franchise. For example, TOS and ENT era Klingons were both honoured in a simple and non-convoluted way. "Ridges on his forehead indicated that he’d escaped the genetic disorder that had given many of his contemporaries more human features." While we're talking about the Klingons... I'm NOT the best at lore by any stretch, but I was surprised to read that Klingons have 3 lungs in this story. I don't remember that detail being mentioned anywhere else, before I read it here. That one is probably on me (and my poor memory) though. I enjoyed the many cultural references and snippets that we got in this story. Merata mentions at one point a Klingon folk-story about a warrior who was...

Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds My rating: 4 of 5 stars So I don't know what to say about this one. I liked it but I could barely articulate why. I didn't really like the set-up of Terminal World, and I certainly paid very little attention to the mechanics of the zones and how they shift around. I'm not even going to jump into the question of whether or not this is scifi or fantasy, but this is clearly an attempt to sketch out a semi-plausible steampunk future. Anyway, even without following along closely the ending was still meaningful and mostly enjoyable. The only thing I didn't particularly like was the whole "chosen one" vibe about it, although that's essentially dismissed in the final moments. The story as a whole though was very entertaining, with excellent characters and a steadily engaging plot throughout. I actually loved the pacing too, you'd get a bit of a sense of a secret (or find out that someone i...