Sci-Fi

This is not a book, it is a screen saver. Sure, manipulating causality could be clever, but in the end every world visited is intentionally left so vague as to be useless towards my understanding of either events or characters. Our protagonist’s lives of memories, of (presumed) love and loss, are discarded to keep the focus on anachronistically 21st century love letters. If these letters are the through-line, what is a line that connects no points? I don’t understand who these characters are their relationships outside of one another, their true worlds or experiences or memories. Each experience is just a disjointed dream. ...

** Aliens don’t care ** The Zone is neither good nor evil, it just is. * Roadside Picnic, like much of the Russian scifi I’ve read recently, is a refreshing contrast to the romanticized view of the unknown often seen in Western canon. We celebrate exploration as a bold extension of manifest destiny, Russian science fiction, as exemplified by the Strugatsky brothers, presents the unknown as either indifferent to human desires or outright malevolent. ...

Postmodern Xenofiction A book inspired a movie. The movie inspired remakes. One remake inspired a notable soundtrack. The soundtrack I’ve listened to 10,000 times. Even through a 50 year game of artistic telephone, the moods match precisely. Music aside, Solaris fits in with Rendezvous with Rama, Southern Reach, and Roadside Picnic as explorative xenofiction. Like Roadside Picnic, Lem falls on the side of cosmic pessimism, with quotes such as * The time of cruel wonders was not yet over. * Yet the thinking colossus in Solaris only mildly interacts with our society, it is humanity’s struggle and inability to understand that is the focus. * The mere existence of the thinking colossus would not let people abide in peace again. * I couldn’t help but wonder if this is a critique of all science fictions, or even fiction itself, stories we invent to make sense out of the incomprehensible. Our very attempts and thought experiments are absurd, why should the universe make sense? ...

Regrets of a Reader of Pages The premise of Player of Games reminded me of a Dune board game tournament—strategic, layered, and plenty of intrigue. (As an aside, if anyone ever writes a book purely about that, sign me up.) •Thematically, the book didn’t bring much new to the table. •The empire is evil? Check. Its elites are masochistic? Sure, why not. •The idea of a game being central to deciding reality—or being reality itself—is a retread of concepts explored in Ender’s Game decades ago. •The central player’s manipulation by shadowy agents for their own purposes felt similarly derivative. Again, Ender’s Game. •The setting ends on a planet that periodically goes through apocalypse. Not the first time I’ve encountered this concept, not even the first time this week. While there was nothing so glaringly bad as to make me put the book down, there also wasn’t much to make me pick it up again. ...

** 1st Book of 2025: Entirely Forgettable. ** Read through this in one sleepless post-surgery night, and it just felt like a draft of a side-plot from a Stormlight Archives. There’s not much new in the premise of trying to escape dawn, and many other authors have tried to take on stories of mobile cities with much more success. The references to the rest of Stormlight Archive are vague enough that without wikipedia or a recent reread, you’re going to be hard pressed to link this to anything meaningful. Apparently I even reading the entire main series of Stormlight Archive isn’t enough, I should have read Dawnshard as well. ...

** Private Property is my Safe Word ** I have a rule in Sci-fi: If main characters engage in taboo sex while discussing esoteric politics, I’m out. Based on the fast pace and historical bent of Iron Widow, I wouldn’t have guessed the need to invoke this rule, but alas. Most of the pages are like an Ayn Rand novel without an agenda, deliberating personal property vs. private property, fictional revolutionaries vs. reactionaries as well as over-enforcement and the masses vs elites. At the same time, a romantasy relationship develops between Zetian, who spends most pages raging or pouting, and what seems to have been the true brooding main character of the story, Qin Zheng. ...

ChatGPT, write a novella with sad narrator, based on this prompt: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Tea Drinker Reading Inheritor three years after the first two books, I had to reassemble Cherry’s political map from fragments. Like Bren, I often didn’t understand what was happening. What holds the book together is the widening field of conflict. On the human side, factions maneuver against each other. On the atevi side, rival interests circle the center. The multilateral tension gives the novel its energy. No single antagonist dominates. Instead, power shifts through conversation, protocol, and small missteps. ...

Multiple POVs in quick succession dealing with unknown unknowns, not a good book to fall asleep to as I keep getting lost. Someday…

Exactly what I want out of fiction. A well paced plot, a few characters to root for, and surprises that keep the story ahead of, or at least more complex than a readers lazy imagination. Recommended.