Sci-Fi

** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic ** Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. * Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines. ...

** 12th book of 2021: Sci-Factoids ** To be a nerdy American millennial is to have unprecedented privilege in asking ‘what if?’ Not only do we benefit from sci-fi’s boom in American pop-culture, but wikipedia and search engines enable curiosity about time-paradoxes or quantum theory to be answered in an instant. So despite, or perhaps because of my proclivities in such pursuits, I found Exhalation underwhelming. As written in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling: We are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What sets a story apart from a wikipedia article is the setting and the characters, which allow synthesizing human emotion with interesting idea. This is Chiang’s achilles heel: settings were often flat and characters felt recycled from story to story. ...

72nd book of 2020 - Nice Escape. It’s November 3rd, as the American republic follows perilously close to last days of the Roman republic: a contested election, extreme partisanship, and cries of criminality. I’m having flashbacks to 2016 when my candidate didn’t get elected and my girlfriend at the time left without warning. But wait! What is that coming in outside of the object of Jupiter? Surely, just because we can’t explain the strange trajectory or lack of spin that doesn’t mean life… but when the photos come back the evidence is clear. ...

27th book of 2020. You would think that the narrative of a grumpy antisocial robot who just wants to get back to watching TV serials would get boring after a while. It doesn’t. I keep reading these books as they come out.

68th book of 2019 When I’m bored and on a plane, sometimes I write book reviews (i.e. right now). Other times I watch marvel movies. This book fits squarely with the Marvel movies. Welcome to the helicarriers… I mean Rife’s Raft… I mean Endura: the floating city of cliche scythe plots and Chekov’s guns locations. Despite the fact that GRR Martin can’t seem to put out more than one book a decade, plots like this remind me why a decade is worth the wait. ...

67th book of 2019. Scythe – an interesting, somewhat meditative YA scifi novel on death. The premise was fun, and I appreciate how the author went to pains to tell a utopian story. In some ways it’s a trick on us, being able to find enough misery in such a utopia to fill the pages of a novel. But I digress. The characters were ok but nothing special. The plot moved along though I felt like the author tipped off upcoming twists a bit too clearly, such that none of them ended up a surprise. Maybe that means I’ve just been reading too much Scifi. ...

55th Book of 2019 “There’s never a right call, just people who make hard ones.” At this point in the series, our heroes are no longer heroic, nor do they get plot armor. Indeed, hero status is not sufficient to guarantee a heroic death, many die in vain or for no reason. Reading a few other reviews, I expected this to be a seriously dark book, but I found it instead to be two clicks more realistic than previous installments. The plastic coating of this universe has been taken off, and there’s grime underneath. ...

The premise was great, and the focus on everyday Medieval life was fascinating, but I disliked every single character from the future timeline (i.e. just about all the main characters). They kept acting in dumbfounding ways, such that by the time I was halfway through I was rooting for reality to win and one of them to die due to their mistakes. Alas it never happened, and I lost interest about 2/3 of the way through.

45th book of 2019 Came into this book with a strong recommendation from a friend thinking that I would get a novel similar to Foundation or Childhood’s end. Instead it was a collection of short stories, pretty depressing, confusing, unbelievable, or all three. Considering all the higher ratings from people I respect, that must be some sort of literary value to this book that I’m missing, or some higher art form that I should enjoy, but I just haven’t been able to get into it. Bailing.

45th book of 2019. A unique take on first contact, perhaps the perfect antidote to (三体) the three body problem. In the hundreds of sci-fi books I’ve read, I can’t think of any we encounter truly benevolent and advanced aliens. It’s so obvious in hindsight as to be surprising. Themes around the progress and stagnation of human civilization, rebellion against authority, dissatisfaction with even the highest standard of living and even mass suicide all get little more than a page each as Clarke steamrolls through with the main story, but part of me wishes this was more of a GRR Martin style epic told with painstaking detail. ...