I don’t know how to really describe this book other than really weird. The general plot is that a representative of a federation of worlds, lands on a planet to convince it to join their federation. That all sounds fine and normal for sci-fi, but the planet (called Winter by the alien envoy) has a … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Science Fiction
Book review: Stranger in a Strange Land
I didn’t grok this book at all. That folks, is a hilarious joke about the most annoying literary device I’ve come across in all the books from the list. Grok, you see, is a Martian word for…something. Like knowing or understanding or something so deep we can’t possibly translate it with our pathetic language. AND … Continue reading
Book review: Lucifer’s Hammer
Where do you start. Maybe I’ll start with the tiny bit I did enjoy and then rant on from there. The last 100 pages were okay – it had some dramatic tension and all that jazz. They had a big battle and that was kind of fun. However. This does not make up for the … Continue reading
Book review: Contact
I think this is the first Carl Sagan I’ve ever read cover to cover. I have owned Cosmos but never read it. Anyway, if you’ve seen the film, it’s actually a lot like it. They compress various characters into one (in the film) and in the end (in the book) 5 people are sent in … Continue reading
Book review: The Mote in God’s Eye
So, when I read Dune I realised that I hated the idea of some vast space empire built on heredity. I mean, Star Wars has an empire but we know it was because of Senator Palpatine. This book’s central government is a vast space empire, with a royal imperial family, that has other aristocrats afforded … Continue reading
Book review: Starship Troopers
You know when you like something and you know you shouldn’t? This was kind of like that (a lot like the film actually). Surprisingly, it’s quite similar to the film – some people have been conflated they don’t have power-assisted suits in the film – but otherwise, it kind of follows the same trajectory. The … Continue reading
Book review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Right. So this is another bloody weird book. It follows some of the same plot as Bladerunner but it is significantly different in many ways. The world is a bit fucked, most of humanity has left for Mars while Earth slowly succumbs to ‘the dust’. The basic plot of having to track down and retire … Continue reading
Book review: Cryptonomicon
I think the point where I went from being merely frustrated and annoyed at the overly long, pointless and most often trite passages of this book came around page 484. This is because the next 7 or 8 pages are solely about Randy (one of the main characters) eating Cap’n Crunch. At this point, I … Continue reading
Book review: The Martian Chronicles
So this was all good except for the casual sexism and occasional threat of domestic violence. So, there isn’t really a plot as it’s a collection of short stories about Martians, people going to Mars, people leaving Mars and a few people going back to Mars. Some of them were really quite creepy and others … Continue reading
Book review: 20,000 leagues under the sea
That was such a hard slog. We can probably cut ol’ Jules Verne some slack given he helped start the genre but holy crap that was quite tedious. So, first off, I don’t think there is one single woman in the book (there are crowds of people on a boat but there’s no single defined … Continue reading
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