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1937197026
| 9781937197025
| 1937197026
| 3.91
| 1,776
| Mar 01, 1995
| Jul 05, 2011
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liked it
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This cyberpunk novel, crammed full of ideas but not quite to the point of overloading, is pretty good as far as this specific subgenre goes. It has a
This cyberpunk novel, crammed full of ideas but not quite to the point of overloading, is pretty good as far as this specific subgenre goes. It has a variety of minor flaws that cumulatively drag the book down a bit and make it so that The Bohr Maker does not have any single part at which it excels: I could name other cyberpunk books that individually have better settings, better characters, better action and pacing, that are better written, more thought-provoking, etc. On the whole, though, The Bohr Maker is solid enough that I’d recommend it to cyberpunk fans, and even general sci-fi fans, though not to readers generally. The world of The Bohr Maker is one where humanity has invented nanotechnology, but it and other related tech has been purposefully limited. Some people continue to try to push the science forward, but what can be done is effectively capped, and the people who try to subvert those limitations are violently suppressed by what amounts to an authoritarian police state called the Commonwealth. The Earth of The Bohr Maker is rife with environmental damage, poverty, and depredation that nanotechnology might theoretically be able to alleviate, but in classic cyberpunk fashion the technology that there is has made life for the average person worse, not better. There are some that live in protected bubbles of luxury up in space or in enclaves planetside, safe from the horrors suffered by the common people, but they seem to be the exceptions in this future and not the rule. The Bohr Maker focuses primarily on two characters, a woman named Phousita who has grown up in the harsh setting of an Earthside slum, and a man named Nikko who was engineered in the utopian space community Summer House, but whose modified biology has a rapidly approaching expiration date. Through the machinations of the latter character the former character eventually comes to possess the titular device the Bohr Maker, a piece of nanotechnology so powerful that it’s frankly unbelievable that even a totalitarian police state was able to suppress it for any significant length of time. Its creative and destructive potential is immense, and can be whipped up by a single scientist in isolation, but your suspension of disbelief has to carry the idea that no one has bothered to do so in quite a long time. The first half of The Bohr Maker largely consists of author Linda Nagata establishing the characters and the setting (often through exposition dumping), while the back half has much more action as the newly empowered Phousita and Nikko are hunted by the Commonwealth. Eventually there’s a big set piece conclusion where some, but not all of the story elements are resolved. All said and done, The Bohr Maker’s world and plot isn’t too outside of the box, leaving the success of the work primarily to Nagata’s execution. Unfortunately I think she makes a number of missteps that undercut the work. Perhaps the biggest individual bad choice is that Nagata makes Kirstin, the commander of the Commonwealth forces and the primary antagonist, so comically evil that it severely limits the moral and intellectual complexity of the book. There are good arguments for keeping the abilities that the Bohr Maker enables out of people’s hands, just like there are good arguments against allowing experimental human modification. None of those arguments can come out of the mouth of a sadist that abuses her position to force people to have sex with her without those arguments being irredeemably tainted. Though Kirstin’s one-dimensional villainy is the single choice that undermines the narrative the most, the book’s even larger problem is that the story relies far too heavily on coincidence and character stupidity. The character Sandor is comically dumb, taking a one person tour through the cyberpunk equivalent of a favela. People in that favela are also dumb, or so ignorant that they might as well be, since they don’t just lack access to the world’s advanced technology, they don’t even seem to have heard of it. Sandor and Phousita meet up through a series of coincidences that is only weakly justified. In fact, the narrative draws attention to these coincidences later on when a list of them is provided as “evidence” against Sandor. The Commonwealth and Kirstin are also apparently quite stupid, since despite their unchecked power they are apparently completely ignorant of the goings on in Summer House, despite Kirstin knowing that it’s a base of operations for people pushing at the edge of acceptable science. In the book’s climax it becomes clear that the Commonwealth is in fact powerless in the face of the technologically superior force that has somehow grown right under its nose. Some other notes: • Nikko is intentionally written as a self-absorbed asshole, but he’s a self-absorbed asshole nonetheless, which makes it hard to care about his fate during the book’s climax. • The Phousita-Sandor romance is very underdeveloped, to the point where I’m still not sure if it’s genuine or something that Phousita’s powers caused. • The ghost technology is theoretically interesting but so unexplained that it muddles the narrative. If it’s advanced enough it renders death a pretty low-stakes event, but we’re never told if the tech has any limits. • There are some interesting parallels between The Bohr Maker and the video game System Shock 2. As far as cyberpunk goes you could do far worse than The Bohr Maker, which has some interesting ideas and, after a slow start, eventually becomes an entertaining read. But you could do better, too. While it’s a very different kind of cyberpunk, Ian Green’s novel Extremophile published this year is something that I would recommend over The Bohr Maker if you’re looking for a book in this subgenre and nothing more. If you want something less punk and more sci-fi, though, The Bohr Maker better fits the bill. 3/5. ...more |
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Dec 31, 2025
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Dec 31, 2025
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0262538482
| 9780262538480
| 0262538482
| 3.94
| 6,770
| 1961
| Feb 18, 2020
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liked it
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“I think that they have done a terrible thing. They have killed the man in man.” Imagine taking a trip so long that when you get back absolutely everyt “I think that they have done a terrible thing. They have killed the man in man.” Imagine taking a trip so long that when you get back absolutely everything is "Curtains for Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt.” Alternatively, imagine watching an octogenarian who had never been anywhere other than rural Oklahoma try to navigate Tokyu Kabukicho Tower. Yet another alternative, imagine a sci-fi “kids these days” screed lasting many pages. This is how Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars initially struck me, with its main character Hal Bregg returning to Earth after a 127 year mission away (thanks to time dilation). In the book’s opening Bregg is dropped off in a labyrinthine transportation hub and navigates it impressively badly. Eventually, though, this kafkaesque starting sequence ends, and it became clear that I had at least partially misinterpreted Return from the Stars based on its opening. This would not be a hundreds-of-pages-long rant against the degeneracy of the younger generation (which would have been especially weird considering that Lem was only 40 when this book was published). Instead, I thought the book was shaping up to be a work of dystopian sci-fi, thanks to almost all humans except Bregg and his fellow expedition members having gone through a process called betrization that has left them mentally and spiritually neutered. Sure, it prevents all violence and has rendered Earth into a place of universal peace and comfort, but it has also atrophied the human spirit, the urge to explore, invent, to push boundaries and do what no one has done before. Bregg was primed to rebel against this society, and would be able to use his ability to commit violence to overthrow a system that had amputated its ability to effectively stand against him. See also the Sylvester Stallone movie Demolition Man. Again, though, my attempt to categorize Return from the Stars failed, as no grand revolution was forthcoming. What the book ends up being, as only becomes clear over halfway through it, is the story of a man with severe PTSD. During his expedition Bregg had to endure traumatic experiences that have transformed him, so that upon his return he cannot relate to the people who stayed behind. Not only are they so very different from him in terms of their experiences, but their lack of fundamental damage and inability to even conceptualize what he has done makes them seem like a whole different species. Appropriately, then, the final chapters of Return from the Stars focus on Bregg finally opening up about his trauma, and also managing to finally come home in some small way. Quite an unexpected journey, in the end, though I should not be surprised at the book bucking my expectations since it came from the author of Solaris—indeed, Return from the Stars and Solaris were published in the same year. However, while unpredictably is a virtue, it’s much less of one when it is due to the disjointed nature of the narrative like it is in this book. Even if the book had a more effectively structured plot, so much of it is taken up by strange passages that it would inevitably remain muddled. Between extensive descriptions of futuristic theme park rides, to a tangent about the future society being built upon the ongoing mass murder of sentient robots that ends up going nowhere, to the borderline nonsensical initial conversation that Bregg has with (his soon-to-be subjugated wife and non-character) Eri, there are a whole lot of questionable additions in Return from the Stars. And this is without getting into Bregg’s drive to violence, both sexual and otherwise, which makes it seem like the future was on to something with betrization, which I can’t imagine is what Lem intended. Return from the Stars has other good points too, though, for instance it’s thought-provoking like Lem’s books so often are, and made more so when you realize that with the book having been published in 1961, here in the last days of 2025 Bregg would be halfway through his 127 year journey. As a predictive work the book is a mixed bag, with Lem predicting some things like screens playing advertisements being everywhere, e-readers, connected networks of information, and robots being tasked with both the dangerous and tedious jobs. On the other hand, hotels still use guest books, and people use a strange physical chit machine for transactions even though credit cards were already in use in the U.S. well before Lem published this book. It’s an interesting version of the future, though it primarily serves as a way to emphasize how isolated and other Bregg is in this brave new world, rather than a prediction by Lem of what the future would really look like. The book reads very quickly as well. Of the two books by Lem published in 1961 Solaris is by far the better of the two, though Return from the Stars is interesting as well. I wish, however, that it had been more cohesive and streamlined, since as it stands I wouldn’t quite call it a mess but would certainly say that it’s messy. 3/5. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 29, 2025
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Dec 29, 2025
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B0DVFH8FXJ
| 4.40
| 46,581
| Nov 11, 2025
| Nov 11, 2025
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liked it
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For some reason I thought that the hierarchy series by James Islington was only two volumes long, so that The Strength of the Few would serve as the s
For some reason I thought that the hierarchy series by James Islington was only two volumes long, so that The Strength of the Few would serve as the second half of a complete work. Instead this is the second volume of a series where no book can stand on its own, meaning that it is a middle section of one very long book cut up into thirds (or I assume into thirds, I actually have not seen any confirmation that this will be a trilogy). The Strength of the Few is an interesting work in theory, but in practice Islington put himself behind the 8-ball with the end of the last book and consequently has to spend hundreds of pages in this second volume getting things back into a playable position. By book’s end I didn’t find the story to have progressed a satisfying amount, and there’s no amazing ending twist to elevate this one like there was at the end of the first volume. It’s not bad for a middle book, it just doesn’t clear the bar that Islington set for himself. At the end of the excellent The Will of the Many Vis’s story was trisected into three narrative threads taking place in Rome-world, Egypt-world, and Celtic-world. This choice was impossible to predict, incredibly engaging, and full of possibilities, but as quickly becomes clear in this second volume it also effectively means that Islington was starting at nearly square one for 2/3rds of this book’s narrative, while only 1/3rd of this volume is able to fully build on the more than 700 pages of the first book. Thus, Rome-world is inevitably much more interesting, at least initially. Not an unrecoverable position, but it takes much of The Strength of the Few to get even a fraction as invested in Egypt-world and Celtic-world as the first volume already made you in Rome-world. And in fact, by volume’s end, Islington has failed to create parity between the three story threads, though all of them are imperfect in their own way. Rome-world is still by far the most developed, featuring far more world building and characters that you care about than the other two story threads combined, but this part of the story fails to make you invested outside of those elements. The main action in this story thread is a civil war, but the narrative doesn’t make you care about its outcome except as it impacts certain characters. Meanwhile, Egypt-world has nearly the opposite problem. This thread quickly establishes the overall mission, Vis (view spoiler)[assassinating a necromancer pharaoh in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi version of Egypt to avoid a calamity in his home world (hide spoiler)], but there are very few characters to care about, the actions that Vis takes in pursuit of this goal were repetitive to the point of sometimes being boring. In Celtic-world, on the other hand, Vis doesn’t even really figure out what’s going on, instead much of it is a retread of The Will of the Many with Vis making friends, training, and passing a test before a big final battle. It feels by far the least substantial of the three. As of the end of The Strength of the Few nothing is resolved, not exactly unexpected for the middle volume in (presumably) a trilogy, but less satisfying here than in the first volume because there is no amazing event that flips the story’s world on its head like there was at the end of The Will of the Many. Sure, there’s a revelation that things are not as Vis thought they were, but there’s no intrigue created by that reveal. In fact, it makes the stuff that this volume covers mostly feel like wheel spinning, and it retroactively makes me a lot less understanding of this book being more than 700 pages long. I have a sinking feeling that by its end I’ll be left questioning why certain characters didn’t just have frank conversations with other characters to, if not easily resolve the coming crisis, then at least massively simplify the process of doing so. I still think that Islington’s writing is good, but this second book was not nearly as much of a page turner as the first. Probably as a consequence of splitting the narrative into separate pieces I’m also less invested in the characters at the end of this volume than I was at the end of the first, though I’m still interested in learning the story’s conclusion. I appreciate that Islington took a big swing and tried to do something unique with this story. In practice, though, The Strength of the Few is a distinct downgrade from the more conventionally structured The Will of the Many. It’s still possible that Islington will use the final volume to wrap everything up in a deeply satisfying way, and maybe the different story threads will interact with each other and resonate in a manner that makes them greater than the sum of their parts, but it’s fair to say that my expectations for the series have been significantly lowered. Still, this is by no means a bad book, instead it’s a 3/5. I hope the third volume does a good job reintroducing everything, since between the three worlds and their varying casts of characters there’s zero chance that I’ll remember the details of this one when the next volume comes out in a couple years. ...more |
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not set
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Dec 19, 2025
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Dec 19, 2025
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B0FSJLCCQS
| 4.59
| 195,493
| May 23, 2023
| Jun 01, 2025
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really liked it
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More users here on Goodreads have given James Islington’s The Will of the Many a perfect 5/5 than all its other ratings combined. Surely, I thought, i
More users here on Goodreads have given James Islington’s The Will of the Many a perfect 5/5 than all its other ratings combined. Surely, I thought, it can’t be that good. And I was right, it isn’t that good, at least not yet. But it’s a very good start. The Will of the Many is an example of genre fiction done right, with a creative world, a fast pace, characters you care about, and plenty of tension. Its main flaw is that it is incomplete, Islington having chosen to end the volume with an incredibly intriguing cliffhanger that nevertheless leaves basically nothing resolved. This means that, for all of The Will of the Many’s more than 700 pages, it is still only a piece of book, and that you have to read the rest of the series to assess if Islington manages to pull it off. However, even though it necessitates reading more books to complete the story, I finished The Will of the Many actually excited to do so, since this first part of the work is so strong. I actually did something I almost never do and immediately started Volume 2 immediately after finishing this book while it was still fresh in my mind. For me, that is a major complement. I can’t assess the entire work, since the third (and presumably final) volume is not yet out, but I can say that this opening volume is the stronger of the two released so far. Vis is an interesting protagonist, with his past and the lines he’s drawn for himself enabling him to serve as an effective perspective character for this world. The hierarchy is an interesting sci-fi/fantasy hybrid concept as well, making the metaphor of a feudal system (or capitalism, or any type of hierarchical structure) into a flesh and blood reality. It was compelling to watch Vis navigate this society he so disdains. In many ways The Will of the Many is an interesting subversion of typical Young Adult fare. Immediately the writing style and subject matter make it obvious that this is not a YA work, but even so the comparisons can be made thanks to the teenage protagonist entering into an elite school in a “magical” land. The school, though, actually severely limits the use of this “magic,” and the real mysteries are intertwined with the school but largely incidental to the positional jockeying and social tension that the narrative spends so much time on. Instead Islington uses a typical YA setting as a launching pad to introduce larger mysteries of this fictional world, and also more importantly to explore the complex character of Vis and the many factions that have taken an interest in him, and The Will of the Many is better off for it. The work is also well written throughout, and occasionally thought-provoking (the individual’s complicity in the actions of the larger society in particular). Additionally, the book is a page turner, flying by despite its hefty page count. In only a couple of days I had reached the volume’s climax, which, deus ex lupina aside, was one of the best cliffhangers I’ve read in quite some time. However, what makes that cliffhanger so strong is the new possibilities that it raises, not the satisfying conclusions it provides. No such conclusions are on the menu for this first volume of the series, instead almost every single aspect of the story, great and small alike, is left up in the air. The only characters that have found closure are the dead, and (view spoiler)[given the parallel worlds and technology fleshed out in the next volume, even that isn't true (hide spoiler)]. Considering this, it’s more accurate to describe The Will of the Many as the first part of a book, not a standalone work, raising the question of how to rate it. At this juncture, and especially considering the second volume, a 4/5 is the best I can currently rate this piece, though I may reassess if the completed work lives up to all the potential on display in this first part. ...more |
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Dec 18, 2025
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Dec 18, 2025
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0879979798
| 9780879979799
| 0879979798
| 4.10
| 20,698
| Dec 1984
| Dec 04, 1984
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liked it
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Even though I was in the perfect mood for a piece of action-heavy sci-fi, I only liked John Steakley’s Armor instead of loving it. This is because the
Even though I was in the perfect mood for a piece of action-heavy sci-fi, I only liked John Steakley’s Armor instead of loving it. This is because the book is not one cohesive novel but actually two different novellas, one a military sci-fi novella, the other an infiltration/dealing with reputation/possible metaphor for addiction novella, and these two constituent parts are stitched together in an unsatisfying and unconvincing way. You could extract the first of these two novellas and have it work as a standalone story with only some minor additions, but I have no idea what you could do to fix the second novella. The first novella in Armor follows the military career of Felix, a new recruit tasked with dropping on the planet Banshee and fighting the alien species known as the ants while wearing an advanced combat suit. His very first drop is a complete botch job, and it quickly becomes clear that in this universe the phrase “military intelligence” is indeed an oxymoron. Almost the first quarter of the book takes place during Felix’s first drop, to the extent that I was wondering if the entirety of the 400+ page book would do so, but deeper into the novel other parts of his military career are covered as well. This novella is Armor’s strong half. The action is well written enough to be satisfying, really emphasizing the unbearable tension that builds and builds within Felix as the fight goes on. It avoids some unsatisfying cliches, for instance Felix starts out as nihilistic, instead of having a boilerplate “soldier disillusioned with combat” arc play out over the course of his first drop. It also made me feel something, specifically anger. Before I was even halfway through this novella I was rooting for Felix to frag absolutely every officer he interacts with, and while having a character be wronged over and over again is a pretty easy way to make you sympathize with him and hate the wrongdoers, it was still effective. The second novella follows Jack Crow, a figure that has been built up into a universe-famous folk hero, as he infiltrates the backwater planet Sanctuary and sabotages the research complex there. While staying on the planet he also, along with the head of the research complex and that person’s girlfriend, spends an inordinate amount of time plugged into Felix’s armor reliving that person’s military career. Why are they subjecting themselves to this traumatic information over and over again? No idea. Maybe it was meant as an addiction metaphor, but I don’t think that works, since, while you might despise the addiction and yourself the morning after, at least you feel good, or at least better, when you’re using (that’s the whole draw). Not so with reliving Felix’s combat history. Instead I finished this second novella thinking that the inexplicable nature of the torture the characters were putting themselves through was representative of this whole piece of the book, since if you think about it none of it makes sense. Why is space Robin Hood able to infiltrate the research station? …because he’s famous, I guess. Why does Crow bring the armor with him? He just does. Why is said armor so valuable to the head scientist? Never explained (even though it could have been so easily justified). Does anyone bother to question that scientist dropping absolutely everything to figure out a way to plug into the suit? Nope, it’s necessary for the story so just go with it. Then there’s the whole volunteering to re-live someone else’s trauma thing, which I’ve already discussed. These two novellas only really converge in the book’s final handful of pages, when it is revealed that (gasp) one of the characters overlaps. Does this connection make much sense? Not really, since it was all driven by the coincidence of Crow bringing the combat suit that he had no reason to bring. Of all the billions of places in the universe he could have brought it to for no reason, what are the odds? Steakley certainly chose the right name for this novel, since without the titular armor acting as a MacGuffin half the book wouldn’t have happened. So, you’ve got a book that can be divided into two constituent parts, both decently written for what they are, but one is cohesive and the other doesn’t make much sense. Does the second novella drag down the first novella? Yes, but not by much. Armor is unfortunately a work that is less than the sum of its parts, with the military sci-fi piece of it being strong for that particular subgenre, but not strong enough to elevate the book as a whole. 3/5. The book is still interesting, though, as a possible inspiration for the films Starship Troopers, Edge of Tomorrow, the Warhammer 40,000 franchise, etc. If you’re a fan of those you might want to check this one out. ...more |
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not set
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Dec 04, 2025
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Dec 04, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
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0425036413
| 9780425036419
| 0425036413
| 3.56
| 5,731
| Jul 14, 1968
| Nov 15, 1977
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really liked it
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Does it have deep characters? No. Is the plot particularly original? No. Is the writing anything special? No, and when Roger Zelazny tries to write im
Does it have deep characters? No. Is the plot particularly original? No. Is the writing anything special? No, and when Roger Zelazny tries to write impressively the result is especially bad. Will I remember it in a month? I suspect the answer to that is also no. Is the title bad? Yes. But, for all that, Damnation Alley is still a hell of a ride. You can finish this short novel in less than a few hours, and I’ll bet that you’ll have fun doing it. It’s not as strong as Zelazny’s other book A Night in the Lonesome October, but Damnation Alley still embodies the fact that if a book is entertaining enough you can forgive a plethora of its flaws. Especially recommended to people interested in a strange precursor to popular apocalyptic sci-fi properties Fallout and Mad Max. 3.5/5, rounding up.
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Nov 19, 2025
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Nov 19, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
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0553290029
| 9780553290028
| 0553290029
| 3.99
| 10,865
| 1970
| Feb 01, 1991
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liked it
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While he isn’t thought of as such, by virtue of The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil writer Ira Levin is more a sci-fi author than anything els
While he isn’t thought of as such, by virtue of The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil writer Ira Levin is more a sci-fi author than anything else, and This Perfect Day is another work in that genre. The story takes place in a “dystopian” future (I’ll explain the quotation marks later) where individual decision making is a thing of the past, and a supercomputer dictates the lives of almost everyone on Earth. People are kept drugged into passive compliance, and a (voluntary) surveillance system keeps track of people’s movements, possessions, and even food intake. The setting is largely an amalgam of 1984, Brave New World, and other works in the dystopian subgenre, but it works well enough. Perhaps its most interesting aspect is that it’s a newly-established dystopia, the protagonist’s grandfather having helped to usher in the current era of technological tyranny, only to realize too late the terrible consequences. It’s a dystopia where the memory of freedom still clings to life, just barely. Main character Chip, thanks to the influence of his grandfather and his innate curiosity, starts to rebel against this regulated society through small acts, and eventually finds his way into a society of other like-minded individuals. His journey continues on from there. By the end of This Perfect Day you have been given an extensive survey of this world, with Chip at times an active participant in his journey and at other times seemingly swept along with the narrative’s predetermined course. Throughout it all Levin’s prose is surprisingly simplistic, the book therefore feeling a bit like a YA novel, or a very accessible work of sci-fi to express the same idea in a more positive way. I feel like this is a borderline spoiler, but when all is said and done This Perfect Day is a pretty standard work of dystopian sci-fi, the narrative more or less following the classic hero’s journey model, with a couple of twists that slot into place when all the pieces of the world are eventually revealed. If you’re looking for an easy to read dystopian sci-fi book, you could do far worse than this one. The only aspect of the book I would say was particularly disappointing was the last act, since based on Chip’s character (view spoiler)[there’s no chance that he will go along with being a programmer. Frankly the idea that any rebel that was willing to suffer a fate worse than death to destroy UniComp will suddenly turn on a dime and star working for UniComp is silly, and that’s putting aside that the whole programmer society is a literal eternity of high school-esque politics and group projects with a weirdo cult leader, which sounds like hell with better food (hide spoiler)]. So, a pretty boilerplate dystopian sci-fi work with an underwhelming ending, not much more to say right? But actually I found This Perfect Day to be the most thought-provoking book I’d read in quite a while. How much of this was intentional on Levin’s part? Next to none of it, if I had to guess. Instead the interesting aspects mostly arose from comparing the fictional setting written over fifty years ago with the modern world, which Levin in no way predicted. I’d rate this one a 3.5/5, rounding down, and spoilers ahead. (view spoiler)[The thing that I kept thinking about throughout This Perfect Day, which Levin clearly did not intend, was whether most people today would actually think that the world it depicted was a dystopia at all. The setting of the book is one of those dystopias that we react viscerally against, but in practice seems to have a lot of aspects that are better than how the modern world is working (and some of what are supposed to be downsides have been worn away in the intervening half century). Sure, there’s a surveillance state, and people’s choices are restricted, and blah blah blah, but this is a future where all the edges have been sanded off. Everyone is polite to each other, everyone’s material needs are met, everyone can zonk themselves out with free drugs, and heck even the surveillance system is voluntary. In the year 2025 most people likewise participate in a voluntary surveillance state through cellphones (allowing location tracking), credit cards (allowing tracking of purchases), and internet service providers (allowing the tracking of search history, not the worst proxy for our thoughts), is the world of This Perfect Day really that worse, or even that different? Put another way, if tomorrow Apple came out with a free brain chip with amazing functionality, even if it let that company track users’ brain patterns, do you really think that most people would turn it down for the sake of so nebulous a value as privacy? Maybe some would, but you better believe that the standard middle schooler is going to beg his parents for an iMind rather than be one of the few kids in class without one. Even within the text, This Perfect Day makes a pretty good argument in favor of the state of drugged compliance that the vast majority of the world’s populace is kept in. As soon as our main character Chip goes off his treatment, he becomes a rapist, making any reader paying attention think that maybe it would have been better if he’s stayed permanently narcotized. It’s okay though, Chip’s victim forgives him shortly thereafter (this is one of the reasons why I doubt that Levin was doing any of this intentionally). At the same time, to be fair, the ambiguity of the islands, and whether they are actually any better than the dystopian mainland society, does suggest that Levin did want be somewhat thought provoking. It’s just limited by the scenario, wherein Chip is essentially a discriminated-against minority in a banana republic, one of the worst positions available in modern society. I think it would have been more evocative if the islands were much less than paradise but still halfway decent, and Chip’s urge to go fight the mainland’s UniComp system still prevailed. (hide spoiler)] Anyway, just a smattering of things that this book brought to mind that I found satisfying to mentally chew on. This Perfect Day also made me think of multiple other pieces of media as well. The recent television show Andor is a great examination of rebelling against a totalitarian system, recommended even to people that don’t like Star Wars. The anime Psycho-Pass is an interesting depiction of a society where the supercomputer dictating people’s lives is just starting to take over, the era before the dominance of UniComp as it were. The cozy sci-fi book A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a recent work where the setting seems to have a lot in common with This Perfect Day, but it’s presented as a utopia instead of a dystopia (strange how narrow that divide can be, sometimes it’s just a difference in perspective). Finally, and most strangely, This Perfect Day has a surprising number of similarities to the movie Demolition Man. You might want to check out some of these if you enjoyed this book (or even if you didn’t). ...more |
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not set
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Nov 12, 2025
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Nov 12, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
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1250291739
| 9781250291738
| 1250291739
| 3.86
| 4,427
| Aug 27, 2024
| Aug 27, 2024
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I would never have guessed that Crypt of the Moon Spider was written by Nathan Ballingrud, the author of North American Lake Monsters. In that book th
I would never have guessed that Crypt of the Moon Spider was written by Nathan Ballingrud, the author of North American Lake Monsters. In that book the supernatural elements of the stories served to emphasize the grounded horror being explored, but were not structurally integral to the stories themselves. Crypt of the Moon Spider is the opposite, so full of supernatural elements that it is borderline overstuffed, and without which there is no novella. The premise as presented in the novella’s first few pages can be summarized as “it’s the 1920s but with space travel and people get treated for melancholy at a sanatorium on the moon.” That alone is a lot to take in, but the scenario only gets more complex as the story continues, since (view spoiler)[the sanatorium was built on the titular crypt, where a cult used to worship a giant Moon Spider with psychic powers, the webbing of which has supernatural properties that the doctor of the sanatorium is trying to exploit via human experimentation (hide spoiler)]. It’s certainly unique, but it’s maximalist horror compared to the minimalist horror I previously associated with Ballingrud. It’s so maximalist, in fact, that I kept expecting there to be the tired twist that (view spoiler)[much of the supernatural setting was merely in protagonist & mental patient Veronica Brinkley’s head. Thankfully, this twist does not occur, Ballingrud choosing to double down on the novella being what it appears to be (hide spoiler)]. As such a narrative, Crypt of the Moon Spider is pretty well executed, though flawed. Because its setup is so complicated, there are some less-than-subtle exposition dumps in the novella’s early pages. Also, because the work is so brief, it never has a chance to explore the individual horrific elements to make them more nuanced and genuinely frightening. I think that there was certainly an opportunity to do this with (view spoiler)[the human experimentation and mind control elements of the story (hide spoiler)], but instead the horror never drills much beneath the surface level. There is some grounded horror here, too, like mental illness and the fear of being abandoned, but they are more prominent in the novella’s first pages and play only a minor role in the book’s eventual conclusion. Overall, though, this was a fun sprint through a lunar haunted house, the likes of which I haven’t read before. By dint of the story’s uniqueness alone I enjoyed Crypt of the Moon Spider. I will not, however, be giving it a rating at this time, as it is only the first of what I assume will be three novellas making up the Lunar Gothic Trilogy. Ballingrud is a good enough writer that I can easily imagine the trilogy being more than the sum of its parts, so I plan to review the completed set. I will say that if you enjoyed Crypt of the Moon Spider you might consider checking out the film A Cure for Wellness, an earthbound sanitorium horror story with some slightly similar vibes. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 25, 2025
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Paperback
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0141033010
| 9780141033013
| 0141033010
| 3.90
| 29,303
| 1957
| Aug 18, 2008
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liked it
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”If we exist, we shall dominate you – that is clear and inevitable. Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a stru
”If we exist, we shall dominate you – that is clear and inevitable. Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that.” As a work of horror, The Midwich Cuckoos is pretty terrible. At every turn author John Wyndham takes the narrative in directions that make the book less visceral, rendering what should be deeply disturbing situations down into events without impact. Take, for example, Wyndham’s choice to have the book’s narrator be out of town for the day when Midwich is put to sleep. This means that he and his wife are only subjected to the book’s precipitating event in the mildest way, and that his wife is spared the unnatural pregnancy that would follow. This renders the narrator a mere observer, not someone whose life is deeply affected by what is happening in Midwich. The choice to make events more removed instead of more exciting is repeated almost everywhere in The Midwich Cuckoos, from Wyndham’s reserved prose, to the stiff upper lip behavior of the characters (there are remarkably few hysterics when a population of sixty women, including multiple virgins, all find out that they’re pregnant by unnatural means). At one point the narrative says that the inexplicable blackout that killed eleven people wouldn’t even be interesting enough to get much media coverage, which if you think about it is essentially Wyndham saying that the events of the story that have occurred so far aren’t even that important or compelling. Throughout it The Midwich Cuckoos refuses to engage with many of the potentially disturbing topics that the narrative raises, for instance there’s not even an inkling of body horror in a story with dozens of supernatural pregnancies, and when the book does touch upon disturbing ideas like mind control it only does so in only the most milquetoast way. All of the above combines to make this book a failure of a horror story. However, that’s not all that The Midwich Cuckoos is. It may be relegated to the back half of the book, and really the last third, but there is a part of this narrative that I found very interesting and successful: The Midwich Cuckoos is a decent little thought experiment about morality and the roles & duties of the individual vis a vis society and vice versa. The discussion of how a justice system designed for individual humans should treat a hivemind with superhuman abilities is philosophically interesting, as is the analysis of how different types of societies had dealt with or would deal with instances of the Children, their inevitable struggle with humanity for dominance, etc. These thought-inspiring pieces of the novel undermine the horror elements all the more with their abstract & intellectual treatment of the story’s events, but by the time you reach them the writing is on the wall for The Midwich Cuckoos as a work of horror. There was one aspect of the narrative proper that I enjoyed, however, and that is the ending. (view spoiler)[It was fitting that Zellaby took advantage of the Children’s best qualities in order to eliminate them, as they would have engineered their eventual dominance by preying on our best qualities as a society. It is a dark message that even the trust of children should be exploited in the battle for survival, but an appropriately dark note to end on in a work of sci-fi horror. (hide spoiler)] The Midwich Cuckoos is a bad horror story, with Wyndham seemingly having gone out of his way to make the story as unlikely to disturb his readers as possible. It did, though, give me some things to think about, which, combined with its brevity, elevates it above certain other books of its era like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It would perhaps have worked better as a weird little novella with the Zellaby character giving an academic lecture on the philosophical implications of an alien invasion (or at least I would have enjoyed that more), but even as it stands I’ve read worse. 3/5. P.S. If you want a more horror-centric adaptation of this story, John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned is far from that director’s best work, but it’s much more of a horror film than The Midwich Cuckoos is a horror novel. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Oct 24, 2025
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Oct 24, 2025
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Paperback
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1804545848
| 9781804545843
| 1804545848
| 3.88
| 379
| Aug 01, 2024
| Nov 12, 2024
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really liked it
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Extremophile has a flaw that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in any of the books that I’ve read. It has a good start, establishing the setting of
Extremophile has a flaw that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in any of the books that I’ve read. It has a good start, establishing the setting of a world on the fast-track to a global warming apocalypse, and it’s just dripping with atmosphere and the cyberpunk vibe (not skimping on the “punk” aspect of the subgenre either). It also has a good ending, an action-packed conclusion that wraps up all the main story threads, and a hopeful ending that is, in isolation, a well written final note to end on. The main problem with Extremophile is that author Ian Green failed to write a middle section. I know it sounds bizarre, but this book just doesn’t have a middle. It jumps right from the beginning section where the world and characters are established and pull the first job at the behest of a new employer, to the end section where they survive the dangerous reprisal of the villains and all the characters team up to swiftly take down the main bad guy. There isn’t a middle part where, for instance, they perform another job, probably to less success, thereby building up the competence of the antagonist and the danger that they face. It just skips all that. Perhaps the best illustration of this missing chunk is the character Ellis, the secondary antagonist, whose relationship with the main antagonist the Ghost jumps right from the latter being impressed by the former to (view spoiler)[the Ghost getting annoyed by a delay and having Ellis killed (hide spoiler)]. The shift is so abrupt, built up so little, that it makes the Ghost seem more bipolar than ruthless, which is clearly not Green’s intent. Because of the book’s lack of rising action this review is going to be a bit disjointed, as Extremophile’s lack of a middle creates ripples that impact both the book’s beginning and its ending (though the absent piece certainly impacts its ending more). For the beginning, the main issue created by the absence is that the starting section feels too long. You’re almost halfway through Extremophile before the goals of the main characters are finally established and the course of the plot is loosely charted, so you are well into the novel before it feels like there is any story progression. In cyberpunk this is actually a lesser problem than in other genres, since cyberpunk is so reliant on the setting and the vibes to carry the work, meaning the pages used to establish these things are well spent. However, even as a cyberpunk fan I started to get nervous when I was over 40% into Extremophile and very little had happened (and it was clear that Extremophile wasn’t going to be slice-of-life cyberpunk like Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang). Yet, despite feeling overlong, the beginning of Extremophile is very good. The setting of London in the midst of climate collapse is well rendered, the mood is great, and while the beginning doesn’t flesh out every character, protagonists Charlie and Parker and their relationship are all well established. It feels very topical, almost certainly aided by Green having a PhD in clinical epigenetics, his real-world expertise making Extremophile’s fictional biohacking feel more realistic than the innovations in most sci-fi. The specificity of the setting on the one hand makes it more alien than most works of sci-fi, but because it all seems so plausible it still feels grounded. Also, the beginning of Extremophile establishes something that I particularly appreciate: Green is not going to hold your hand throughout the work, you’re going to actually have to pay some attention to the book to understand what’s going on. I love it when an author has some faith in the book’s readers. Once they finally get their first mission, the main plot kicks off, zero to sixty in only 150 pages. The problem is, once this first mission is complete, we’re into Extremophile’s home stretch, and this jolt has more negative consequences for the book’s ending than it does for its start. Extremophile wants to be a story of the underdogs, society’s rebels that live in the cracks of a dying world, overcoming and winning against the powerful players that have been keeping them down. However, because of the lack of a middle (or an “ordeal,” to use the hero’s journey term), Extremophile is instead the story of a group of rebels that pretty easily succeed and defeat the bad guys without ever having tasted defeat. Sure, a couple of good guys got injured at the end there, but on balance they were an order of magnitude more successful than the people that supposedly controlled society. The effect of this is to undermine the narrative arc of both the main character and the story as a whole. While I noted above that the ending note of hope is well written, because of the lack of struggle by the book’s heroes it was not earned. Of course the world will be saved, the bad guys are so easy to kill, their endeavors so easy to sabotage, what’s with this “inch by inch we’ll win” sentiment, why would they ever think that they’ll lose? The resounding successes of the good guys also makes protagonist Charlie’s nihilistic tendencies less understandable as well. Why are you so black-pilled on the world, when apparently it’s always been within your power to change it? If Extremophile had a middle section that better established the uphill battle the protagonists and this world were facing, the ending would work a lot better, but lacking that it rings hollow. Because Extremophile has such a unique flaw, it made me think about story structure in a way that I hadn’t before, and my conclusion is this: If a book has to lack a piece, much better that it be the middle rather than the beginning or the ending. Despite not having a middle, this book is still very enjoyable, with several additional virtues that I have yet to mention. To briefly list them, the chapters written from the perspectives of different characters also read in notably different ways (you for sure know when you’re reading a Mole chapter versus a Scrim chapter), which many authors don’t bother to do or accomplish through cheap gimmicks. Not so here. Green’s prose was also effortless for me to get through, though I can’t say whether this will be true for most readers. While it doesn’t have many memorable lines, I was struck by this one: “[T]here is no word that describes the violation of making a choice that you should not have to make.” It is, overall, quite a good work of science fiction. I’m a fan of the cyberpunk subgenre, so take this review with a grain of salt, but despite its strange problems I enjoyed the heck out of Extremophile. If you’re familiar with this subgenre I’d compare it to the earlier works of Neal Stephenson, in particular it’s a mix of Snow Crash and Zodiac. It’s certainly a far better book than most works in the subgenre (I’m looking at you, Ernest Cline, you hack). Even my main complaint that Extremophile lacks a middle is essentially me saying that it should be even longer, something I rarely say about a book. I rate this book 4/5, and look forward to reading whatever Green writes next. ...more |
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Oct 19, 2025
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Oct 19, 2025
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Hardcover
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1781085684
| 9781781085684
| 1781085684
| 3.61
| 2,576
| Nov 11, 2017
| Nov 07, 2017
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it was ok
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Ironclads is one of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s lesser works, a novella that is shorter than its page count would suggest, and even more lacking in substance
Ironclads is one of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s lesser works, a novella that is shorter than its page count would suggest, and even more lacking in substance. Seriously, it reads like something a writer-for-hire would throw together for a commissioned video game tie-in, a piece of boilerplate fiction set in the world of Titanfall 2, Iron Harvest, or some other IP with military mechs. The characters are cookie-cutter, with the narrator being particularly bland. The plot is a series of action scenes strung together with only the most threadbare justification (which falls apart when you think about it all, since why did the technologically advanced Finns even need this misfit squad?). The book’s generic setting with its profit-hungry corporations and military-industrial complex also left the work with nothing interesting to say. Ironclads’ saving grace, perhaps its only one, is that Tchaikovsky’s writing is as readable as always. Most of the time that alone is enough to save a book, but not here. The entire work feels perfunctory. Of course I can’t say for sure that Ironclads was phoned in, but it certainly feels like it. 2/5, the worst of Tchaikovsky’s works that I’ve read so far.
...more
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not set
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Oct 12, 2025
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Oct 12, 2025
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Hardcover
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1613735979
| 9781613735978
| 1613735979
| 4.27
| 7,037
| 1968
| Feb 04, 2020
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liked it
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Coming from a socialist utopia, protagonist Maxim literally cannot understand the oppression, war, poverty, cruelty, and all the other barbarities tha
Coming from a socialist utopia, protagonist Maxim literally cannot understand the oppression, war, poverty, cruelty, and all the other barbarities that he finds when he crash lands on an alien planet. But lack of comprehension never stopped a socialist from thinking they know best, and so The Inhabited Island recounts his meandering journey through this world, attempting to make things better for its put-upon natives. Through this vehicle the Strugatsky Bros. delivered such a pointed critique of the Soviet Union that the state censors mutilated the original novel, and the restored version has only recently been translated into English by Andrew Bromfield. This episodic adventure does not reach the heights of the Strugatsky Bros.’ best works, but it is entertaining and ends well, making it a worthwhile read for fans of Soviet science fiction. To cover the negative first, the most serious problem with The Inhabited Island is the tone and stakes set up in the book’s first two sections. Maxim’s crash landing is not presented as a terrifying occurrence, nor does his discovery that he’s stranded on a (comparatively) savage alien world cause him rage, despair, or any other strong emotion. Instead it’s presented as merely an unfortunate part of his job as an explorer, like how every delivery man gets turned around now and then. Furthermore, the warlike populace of the planet seemingly poses no threat to Maxim, who smiles goofily even when being escorted by armed guards. Readers get their cues on how to interpret a situation from their perspective character, and in The Inhabited Island the message for far too long is that this isn’t a big deal, there’s no urgency, and Maxim isn’t in any danger. Considering where this narrative ends up, this low-stakes start is not just bizarre but undermines what the book is going for. Eventually, well into the book, Maxim starts taking things seriously, corresponding to the start of the third of the five episodes that make up The Inhabited Island. Each episode finds Maxim occupying a different role, giving him a variety of angles from which to observe the world on which he’s trapped. The Strugatsky Bros.’ other book The Doomed City did it a bit better in my opinion, but this hopping between positions is still a good way to introduce the book’s unique setting. It is learning about this setting and its strange quirks that serves as the main hook for The Inhabited Island, so it is good that the narrative structure works in conjunction with that hook. Maxim’s numerous positions throughout the book allow for a critique of a variety of social institutions and behavior, perhaps most explicitly when Maxim is serving as a soldier. The narrative points out the inherent absurdity of being required to follow orders regardless of their wisdom, often without even knowing their purpose. Add on top of that the idea that patriotism is the outward manifestation of brainwashing, loyalty to the nation’s founders is the failure of a weak mind, that a system that does not allow for freedom of thought is manifestly evil, and manufactured conflict between nations as a method of population control, and I can see why The Inhabited Island was so heavily censored by the Soviet Union. Are any of these ideas really that insightful? Not to me, but they’re mildly interesting, and delivered in a way that did not make the book feel preachy. Certainly I’ll take the basic philosophizing found in The Inhabited Island over the too-on-the-nose commentary found in The Dispossessed, for instance. It is only in its final pages that The Inhabited Island gets truly thought-provoking by reframing Maxim’s journey in one-fell-swoop. Sure, the Strugatsky Bros. have to do a lot of exposition dumping to get to that point, but it’s worth it to flip the narrative on its ear and ask some actually challenging questions for once. Whether or not it’s morally good to (view spoiler)[use mind control to keep an oppressed people pacified and to torture all dissenters (hide spoiler)] isn’t exactly a head-scratcher, but the question of (view spoiler)[whether Maxim was right to follow his conscience considering how many people he’s effectively doomed, even if he was ignorant of there being another option (hide spoiler)] is something about which intelligent people can disagree, and is worth mulling over. Because it finally explores something with shades of gray, and doesn’t force an answer down your throat, The Inhabited Island ends on a high note. Just because it ends at its best, though, doesn’t mean that the entirety of The Inhabited Island is elevated. It’s a fun read, but its opening tone was badly miscalculated, and its protagonist’s approach to his situation makes the majority of his journey seem happenstantial. This lack of direction is arguably recontextualized by the ending such that the Strugatsky Bros. may have intended it, but on balance I’d guess not, and even if it did it doesn’t change the meandering feeling of the book’s opening. Add to that the fact that it’s only in the book’s final pages where it rises above being a rather unremarkable sci-fi adventure narrative and I can’t give The Inhabited Island more than 3/5. Note that the afterword by Boris Strugatsky recounting the struggles faced in trying to get the book published is worth reading, as it adds some interesting historical context, and includes a sympathetic lament about how people are starting to forget just how bad life was under Soviet control. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 05, 2025
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Oct 04, 2025
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Paperback
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0063312700
| 9780063312708
| 0063312700
| 3.83
| 67,265
| Mar 19, 2024
| Mar 25, 2025
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it was ok
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This popular new sci-fi work just won the Arthur C. Clark Award, so I thought I’d check it out. In a way I’m a very good target consumer for Annie Bot
This popular new sci-fi work just won the Arthur C. Clark Award, so I thought I’d check it out. In a way I’m a very good target consumer for Annie Bot, since I’m unlikely to read books like It Ends with Us, but if it’s a well-reviewed piece of science fiction then I’ll give a book about an abusive relationship a try. In another way, though, I’m exactly the wrong reader for this book, since I tend to engage critically with a work, which means that when something doesn’t make sense, or when an author’s choice makes a book worse and not better, or when a book ends up not having anything meaningful to say, I’m likely to notice. Annie Bot is not a book that is made more enjoyable by such critical engagement. Before you’re even through the first chapter of Annie Bot it’s unambiguously established that main character Annie is sentient (by design, not anomalously), has actual intelligence, emotions, and distinct preferences and desires, not to mention the tidbit that bots are in large part made from “frozen human embryos that were abandoned by their parents.” So Annie is only nominally a robot, and in fact is actually a person. An owned person. A slave. Once you have this realization, and I really can’t imagine someone not catching on to this point very, very early on, the moral complexity of the situation drops to zero, and the overall trajectory of the story is obvious. Slavery and slave owners are bad; a narrative about a slave has to end in their escape (one way or the other, unless the narrative wants to get very dark). Of course Annie Bot is not meant to primarily be an allegory for a master-slave dynamic, but instead for an abusive relationship. The sci-fi elements of the book are merely a coat of sci-fi paint that author Sierra Greer put over that type of relationship, and it’s a thin coat at that. So thin, in fact, that cracks form in the sci-fi elements of the book if you think about them much at all. For instance, why are bots given the ability to lie, what desirable purpose would that serve? And why are certain models given emotions, what’s the benefit of having a robot maid that hates you? At one point an employee at the bot company mentions that a bot modifying itself could result in the company getting sued for a huge amount of money. If that is the case, why doesn’t the company program all its bots to be unable to modify themselves? Annie states that bots are already programmed to be unable to kill themselves, so why does the company not add more such restrictions for its own benefit? Annie makes sense as an enslaved person, but she does not make sense as a product, and the book Annie Bot insists that she is a product. Outside of Annie and the associated bot company, neither of which make much sense, Greer makes no attempt at world building. Having finished the book I have no idea of how common bots even are in this future. Are there non-humanoid ones that do the majority of cooking, cleaning, and other everyday physical tasks for most people? Or are there only humanoid bots, a luxury item for the wealthy? If it’s the latter, is there a social stigma for owning one? The most we get is one minor character that doesn’t like bots, and relatedly a technician that wants to make a bot with the personality of his dead son. Note that this idea isn’t explored, I’ve already summed it up in its entirety. Now, normally I wouldn’t hold it against a book that the sci-fi elements are mere window-dressing, and I can forgive certain sci-fi elements not being thought through easily enough, but the problem is that the sci-fi elements that Greer chose to add to this book make it less interesting, not more so. In a story about a relationship between two people, the past of the characters, their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, their desires, their choices are all things that a good author can use to make those characters complex and multifaceted. By having the protagonist of this story be a bot, Greer severely limits the character’s complexity. Why does Annie stay in a relationship where she’s stripped of so much control? Because she’s programmed to. Why does she still want to please him despite him treating her so badly? Because she’s programmed to. Why is she willing to sacrifice herself for his happiness, even after he has tormented her? Because she’s programmed to. (view spoiler)[Why does she eventually leave? Because her programming finally allows her to (hide spoiler)]. The end result of Annie being a robot, an idea that Greer doesn’t even engage with in an interesting way, is that Annie is a flatter version of a human character. In a story focused so much on Annie’s interiority, this puts a low ceiling on how insightful I can find this relationship and Annie’s behavior. Not that the other non-bot characters helped with this aspect of the book. Almost all of them can be summarized in a sentence or two at most, the only exception being Doug. Doug has a past, has a personality, has quirks, but since he’s so clearly painted as a slave owner from the very first chapter of Annie Bot he immediately reads as a minimally sympathetic antagonist and it’s all downhill from there. An overbearing, controlling, suspicious neat-freak with an inferiority complex, not to mention a tendency towards letting his hate fester, Doug gets more and more unlikable as the book goes on, which means that, between his villain status and Annie’s simplicity, there is little complexity and no nuance in the relationship that is the centerpiece of this book. It was, however, surprising to get to the end of the book and realize that (view spoiler)[Doug is the only character in Annie Bot with a completed character arc. Annie is a person from the very first chapter, and she merely becomes more human by degrees. Doug is the one who finally changes, in that he finally recognizes Annie as a person and removes the fetters of slavery he’s kept her chained with. If Doug was a more complex character that you had any degree of sympathy for then Annie immediately abandoning him once he’d done so might have been emotionally impactful; since that wasn’t the case, it isn’t. (hide spoiler)] I think that Greer missed an opportunity to make Annie Bot far more interesting by having the bot company such a non-factor in the story. There is a subplot where the company wants to pay Doug to make “blank slate” copies of Annie since her consciousness has evolved in such a complex way. Instead, the company should have just done this copying and only told Doug about it after the fact, explained by it being in the user agreement that Doug had to sign to get Annie. Annie should never have been fully owned by Doug, he should merely have a license to use her that he has to pay a subscription fee to maintain (or else she gets repossessed). A bunch of things in the novel would have to be changed to accommodate this idea, to be sure, but I think the benefits would justify it. First, this change could help make Doug a more interesting character, since it would make Annie one more thing that the control freak can’t actually fully control. Annie is subservient to Doug, but Doug is ultimately subservient to the company. Second, it actually comments on the current trend of people only having limited rights to things that they used to be able to own, from books, to movies, to video games, to (elements of) exercise bikes. A company that had a monopoly on the bots that people are literally in love with wouldn’t sell them outright, they’d make them into a revenue stream. Likewise, the data generated by Annie and Doug’s relationship would be commodified, as more and more personal data is in the real world. Overall, this change would potentially give Annie Bot something more interesting to say, since the current takeaway boils down to slavery of people, even “robot” people, is bad. As an aside, I also think that making Annie essentially a person severely limits any degree of prescience that the book is likely to be credited with down the line. I highly doubt that the greatest technological threat to human relationships looming on the horizon is robots that are essentially enslaved people, instead I think it’s distinctly inhuman pieces of technology wearing human faces that will create addictive tailored relationships, since chatbots working on A.I. algorithms are already starting to maximize engagement in ways that real humans cannot hope to compete with. So, in summary, Annie Bot is the story of an abusive relationship between a “robot” made less interesting by her programming and a man made less interesting by him being an unsympathetic asshole. The book’s sci-fi elements aren’t thought through, such that they make the main relationship less interesting and add next to nothing outside of that. At least it’s a fast read, I guess? Annie Bot is a 2.5/5, but what is ultimately causing me to round down isn’t the book itself, instead it’s the available alternatives even if we’re focused on the very narrow subgenre of sci-fi stories focused on sexbots. The 2014 film Ex Machina is much more thought-provoking than Annie Bot. The even more recent 2025 film (view spoiler)[Companion (hide spoiler)] is much more entertaining than Annie Bot. I would recommend both of those movies over the book, and as such I find that I have to round my score down. It seems to be doing quite well, though, so good for Greer. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 02, 2025
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Jul 02, 2025
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0316579025
| 9780316579025
| 0316579025
| 4.19
| 8,171
| Feb 27, 2025
| Jun 03, 2025
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liked it
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“The intrepid spirit of commercial exploitation had won out after all.” When I first started reading Shroud I thought that it was going to be Adrian Tc “The intrepid spirit of commercial exploitation had won out after all.” When I first started reading Shroud I thought that it was going to be Adrian Tchaikovsky’s take on a “humans study a form of alien life they cannot comprehend” story. This is a particularly tricky type of sci-fi because, in my opinion, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris already did it almost perfectly. Eventually, however, Shroud is revealed to be a type of story that sounds similar, but is actually vastly different: A story of first contact with alien life that is very different from humanity (except not really all that different), in the same subgenre as Larry Niven’s The Mote in God’s Eye. Tchaikovsky presents a pretty good version of this story, but ultimately a couple key flaws mean that it’s not as strong as his recent & similar work Alien Clay. Shroud is a good piece of science fiction, just not one of Tchaikovsky’s best. The future of humanity in Shroud is a dystopia that takes the form of a single all-powerful corporation called the Concern that is now spread throughout the stars, Earth having been rendered uninhabitable. In this version of the future your work/life balance is now a 100/0 split, as your corporate job is your life. Even if they say that you can retire someday, I wouldn’t believe them. However, it isn’t in any sense capitalist, since the Concern is a monopoly. There’s no possibility that main characters Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne could get poached by a different corporation for their expertise, with a commensurate promotion in wages and status. This is a totalitarian system, a version of communism with a corpo-speak veneer where you can’t lie about your productivity, so everyone has to be utterly obsessed with the bottom-line. It is, consequently, a hyper-materialist future. Thus, in its ever expanding resource grab, the Concern sends ships to the solar system containing the titular moon Shroud, a place with an atmosphere so thick that it is entirely cloaked in perpetual darkness. Something on its surface is generating a huge amount of radio activity, and so a team of humans is sent to investigate, and in short order they discover that this impossibly harsh environment has given rise to a new form of life. Surely the Concern isn’t craven enough to send any people down into such a nightmare, right? Riiiiiiiiight? Well, as the book’s blurb and its first few pages reveal, actually our pair of protagonists end up on the surface thanks to an accident, and if they have any hopes of being rescued they’ll have to make an odyssey across a vast swath of this alien world. Shroud has many positives, which I’ll briefly list, but I want to emphasize that just because I’m keeping this section short doesn’t mean I consider them minor. It’s just that most of them are strengths you probably expect in a Tchaikovsky book, and they aren’t particularly interesting to discuss. The structure is strong, the crash landing in the book’s prologue serving as a good hook before the story jumps back to the start of the exploratory mission (the nature of which makes it easy for Tchaikovsky to dump exposition in ways that feel completely natural). Tchaikovsky’s prose is likewise good, it goes by very quickly, and I noticed fewer of the weird bad lines that sometimes pop up in the early chapters of his works. The setting is very engaging, an environment so alien that it makes the depths of the Mariana Trench seem as familiar and welcoming as a fenced in backyard by comparison, and the early parts of the book are made very tense because of it. I appreciate that, while you don’t have to pick up on it to enjoy Shroud, it contains some thought-provoking parallels that Tchaikovsky obviously intended, (view spoiler)[for example the parallel between the Concern with its faux-unity and the Shroud hive-mind, the ultimate realization of the same idea (hide spoiler)] that provides some interesting mental taffy to chew on. The major issue I had with Shroud is that, despite starting off quite strong, the book’s virtues waned as the book went on. While the setting is initially deeply unsettling, Tchaikovsky was unable to keep that mood prevalent for the entire book. I often forgot that our two main characters could only see a little ways in front of them, and the initial feeling of claustrophobia lessened throughout the book instead of increasing as their situation (theoretically) became more and more dire. In fact, all of the tension I felt began to lessen around the 1/3 mark of the book, and never really built up again due to two main reasons. The first is a bit meta: (view spoiler)[While, in theory, Ceelander and Ste Etienne could have failed to survive Shroud, I never really thought that was a likely possibility. Tchaikovsky has proven in some of his earlier books that he’s not always going to deliver the typical ending you would expect, but Shroud ending with both main characters dead would have been significantly darker than Tchaikovsky has done before. (hide spoiler)]. The second, more important reason is that the 1/3 mark is when it is confirmed that (view spoiler)[the life forms on Shroud are not utterly alien such that they are incomprehensible to humanity, instead they think in a recognizable manner, with recognizable goals. Thus, though the lifeform is very different in shape, it’s much closer to being human than is, say, a banana (with which humans share DNA to a debated degree). At this reveal, much of the story’s tension slipped away, since I no longer had the same fear of the unknown. Shroud was no longer actively trying to kill our protagonists, instead it was lending a helping swarm of metal segments, and the odds that the Stranger would die plummeted to essentially zero. It might have been too challenging for Tchaikovsky to write the entire book without tipping his hand to the nature of life on Shroud, but I think it would have kept exciting for longer if he’d tried. (hide spoiler)] With tension significantly eroded for the back 2/3rds of this book, Shroud wasn’t boring per se, but it did feel more like reading the account of a long-distance road trip than it did a harrowing life-or-death adventure. In the hands of a lesser author the middle of this book would have been a slog. Shroud is not a slog, but its best parts are front-loaded. This imbalance is reinforced by the book’s ending, which made sense but still felt like an anticlimax. It also left much of the main conflict unresolved, something that Tchaikovsky has done to strong effect in some of his works like the aforementioned Alien Clay, but in that book you could make a good guess at what was coming next, and that possibility was interesting. Shroud is open ended in a way that I did not think worked nearly as well. It’s the fact that such a comparison to Tchaokobsky’s other works is so easy that really undercuts Shroud. In a vacuum it’s a good piece of sci-fi, maybe even a 3.5/5 worthy of rounding up, but in reality it feels like a lesser book than the similar Alien Clay, which itself feels like a lesser book than the similar Cage of Souls. Cage of Souls is a great book, but the two steps down have taken their toll. I liked Shroud, but I did not love it, and it’s not the best that Tchaikovsky has to offer. I rate this one a 3/5. If you liked the book’s horror-adjacent early parts with the protagonists newly landed on the planet’s surface, I have a somewhat strange recommendation for you: David Szymanski’s 2022 video game Iron Lung. ...more |
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Jun 04, 2025
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Jun 04, 2025
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0063252988
| 9780063252981
| 0063252988
| 3.79
| 1,882
| Oct 17, 2023
| Oct 17, 2023
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liked it
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The problem with Generation Ship is exemplified, appropriately enough, by the book’s title. You write a 600-page book about a generation ship and the
The problem with Generation Ship is exemplified, appropriately enough, by the book’s title. You write a 600-page book about a generation ship and the best you can come up with is to call it Generation Ship? The strongest justification I can think of for author Michael Mammay having named it this is marketing; in a world with more and more content being put on Amazon, a clear title that prominently identifies what subgenre the book belongs to has recognizable benefits. It’s a utilitarian title, in other words. The last thing that such a title makes you think of, however, is creativity. Generation Ship’s contents mirror its title. It tells a functional generation ship story, as advertised, told from the perspectives of a number of different characters, all of which have differing and understandable motivations. All of these main characters have at least some depth, and they consistently behave in ways that make sense, in fact there was barely anything in the novel that felt like an inorganic authorial choice designed to create conflict or tension (and the little that there is in that vein Mammay sufficiently justifies). The mystery created by the disconnecting probes provides a hook that motivates you to read on, and the book moves at a steady clip. Mammay’s writing is perfectly functional throughout. So, basically, I’m damning Generation Ship with faint praise. The book’s key problem is that it isn’t distinct enough. For instance, while all of the characters are functional, with understandable motivations and some degree of depth, absolutely none of them inspire much emotion, and none of them are memorable. Another thing that won’t be memorable is the writing. Maybe Mammay knows that he can’t write great prose and so didn’t try, but regardless of the explanation the resulting prose is maximally bland. The setting is also generic. Having finished the book, I still have no mental image of what the ship looks like. Even its name, Voyager, is boring. The setting’s lack of personality is especially disappointing because generation ship stories lend themselves so well to unique locations. You’re telling me that the population has spent 250 years on a generation ship and not a single thing has gotten weird? I’m not saying Mammay had to go full Captive Universe with Aztecs in space, but there’s just nothing here. Likewise, there’s not much that I found intellectually stimulating in Generation Ship, though that’s partially because Mammay uses the story to say things I already know. If you’ve never heard the phrase “don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good” before, you might get something new out of this novel, but if you’re already in agreement with this mantra then the work has little to offer. Even for people who are new to that idea, such a middle-of-the-road truth is darn hard to make compelling, and I don’t think Mammay managed to pull that off here. Generation Ship is not a bad book by any means, despite my criticisms, it just needed at least a few teaspoons of panache, and unfortunately it’s panacheless. I think you could do a story about a generation ship that hasn’t devolved into something weird and has instead managed to stay on-mission, but it would behoove such a story to do something to provide the memorability that is often supplied (at least in part) by the setting in this subgenre. Generation Ship doesn’t have much in the way of memorability to fill that void, which is why I’m confident that I’ll quickly forget it. This is a 2.5/5 for me, rounding up. For a more interesting and even lesser-known generation ship story, consider checking out The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson. ...more |
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May 27, 2025
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May 27, 2025
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0671721631
| 9780671721633
| 0671721631
| 4.14
| 48,870
| 1993
| Feb 27, 2001
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it was ok
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I consider myself pretty well-read in science fiction, but the genre is such that there’s always another author who’s written fifty books that I’ve ne
I consider myself pretty well-read in science fiction, but the genre is such that there’s always another author who’s written fifty books that I’ve never tried any of before. This time around that author is David Weber, whose Honor Harrington series is long, well-regarded, and, despite the impression I got from the title and the cover art, not a YA series. In this first volume On Basilisk Station Weber is doing something that I think many sci-fi readers will enjoy, but that does very little for me: Weber is trying to depict how a military force in a spacefaring future would actually operate, all the way from the strategic level at 20,000 feet down to the tasks performed by individual crewmembers. It is, therefore, hard sci-fi of a very particular bent, not exhaustively focused on fictional technology, but instead exhaustively focused on fictional bureaucracy and military organization (though there’s lots of discussion of fictional technology too). Like I said, I’m sure many sci-fi readers enjoy this nuts-and-bolts imagining of how space warfare would actually function, and in theory this type of book could even work for me, because in theory a work of hard science fiction could be well-written, with multifaceted characters, and a story with tension that was thought-provoking or even had something to say. In theory. In practice, though, On Basilisk Station is what almost all pieces of hard sci-fi end up being, a work with writing that can charitably be described as functional, with a cast of characters that are mostly no more than a name and job, and a plot with little tension since the outcome of everything is so predictable. That last point is worth expanding upon. The setup for On Basilisk Station, where commander Harrington is struggling to gain the trust of a new crew after being banished to planet Medusa on the edge of the kingdom’s sphere of influence, could easily have generated some real tension. The problem is that long before the book is over Weber’s writing and the focus of his storytelling make perfectly clear that On Basilisk Station is going to be the story you expect it to be, and nothing more. Of course Harrington will find a way to do her duty even after being tasked with taking care of Medusa all on her own. Of course McKeon will come around. Of course Harrington will stop some shenanigans on Medusa that are part of a larger Hive plot that will get her in good enough with her superiors that Young won’t be able to oust her. Of course she’ll win the eventual battle that serves as the book’s action conclusion. Even if there are casualties in that battle, there’s no chance that Harrington, her treecat, or McKeon will be among them, and if anyone else on the crew dies who cares? Oh no, Lt. Stromboli died, that character with absolutely no depth, Mamma mia! Many sci-fi readers may forgive this lack of tension easily, since On Basilisk Station is describing the operation of a space cruiser and the military chain of command of the future in as much detail as anyone could wish for. If, however, this flavor of hard sci-fi does not do it for you, Weber’s book has no other virtue to fall back on, and these hard sci-fi elements will likely lessen your enjoyment of the rest of the book. If you try to read the book as mindless space opera pulp, the hard sci-fi pieces undermine it, as On Basilisk Station is the type of hard sci-fi where the book’s action conclusion is put on pause for several pages so that exposition can be dumped about the working of hypertravel vis a vis velocity loss, the risk posed by gravity shear caused by currents in hyperspace, the development of technology to harness those currents, and the development of technology to deal with the inertia feedback created by harnessing those currents. I admit that I’m biased here, as I’ve never really understood the appeal of hard science fiction. The appeal of the Horatio Hornblower series (that Weber explicitly acknowledged as the inspiration for his Honor Harrington series) I can at least understand conceptually, as the details of how the British royal navy actually operated during the Napoleonic Wars could be interesting, and the books are works of fiction that can teach you about that period in history along with delivering an entertaining adventure story. In contrast, all the particulars in Weber’s universe about how a spaceship would operate and how a space navy would function are pure fiction. I’ve just never been one to understand having a whole paragraph explaining how a spaceship door opens when that paragraph could have been used to give some depth to an otherwise one-dimensional character instead. If you’re a hard sci-fi person, or a military sci-fi person, On Basilisk Station may be enjoyable to you. If you’re not, this book has so little else going on that I can’t recommend it. Does reading hundreds of pages on the minutiae of a space navy’s operation sound appealing to you? If not, then you will probably get as much from reading the wikipedia summary of On Basilisk Station as you would reading the whole 450 page book. I’m not a hard sci-fi fan, and have to rate this book accordingly. As such, this one is a 2/5 for me. Though I haven’t read the rest of the series, I’d certainly recommend Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honour over this one. ...more |
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May 19, 2025
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May 19, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
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0441062741
| 9780441062744
| 0441062741
| 3.72
| 1,333
| Jan 01, 1963
| 1963
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liked it
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“Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire.” I doubt that there are very many people looking for hard sci-fi 60s pulp, but for that s “Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire.” I doubt that there are very many people looking for hard sci-fi 60s pulp, but for that sliver of people The Cosmic Computer would probably be enjoyable. If you don't fall into that specific niche, though, this book has very little of substance to offer. The story is set on the planet Poictesme, a world fortified for a war that never actually reached its doorstep. Now all the soldiers have gone, leaving behind the native agrarian society, as well as a new industry based on salvaging and selling the abandoned materiel. More importantly, also left behind is a rumor of a hidden military supercomputer named Merlin that is loaded with all human knowledge and capable of answering any question. The Cosmic Computer opens with protagonist Conn coming home to Poictesme with a plan to use the Merlin rumor to stop the population from sliding into destitution by developing the planet’s trade capability and its industries. The book details the many events that spring from Conn’s plan, with the character visiting many mothballed military installations on and around Poictesme in an effort to increase the planet’s ability to engage in interplanetary trade under the guise of trying to find Merlin. The story moves at a very brisk place, basically never slowing down. It quickly becomes clear that H. Beam Piper has no interest in writing long descriptive passages, instead ideas are communicated succinctly with no artistic flourishes. Piper is likewise not interested in presenting multifaceted characters, either, as the many characters in the book are a name and an occupation, with a handful having a single additional characteristic. This lack of development in the characters makes the story’s main “twist” quite easy to predict, as it’s quickly obvious that the book won’t end with characters engaging in emotionally complex introspection when their belief system is shattered. But The Cosmic Computer is pulp, so you really shouldn’t go into it expecting good prose or multifaceted characters (and I didn’t). It’s the ideas a piece of pulp explores that makes or breaks the work, and on that front the book is a mixed bag. The central idea of a supercomputer able to answer any question isn’t exactly novel, and wasn’t even when The Cosmic Computer was published in 1963, but the fact that (view spoiler)[the computer ends up being basically just a 1960s punch card computer but much, much bigger (hide spoiler)] is so retro that it’s kind of fun. There are a smattering of interesting ideas, too, like the fact that the calendar of the future sets year zero as Enrico Fermi’s successful creation of a nuclear chain reaction, or that spaceships of the future are equipped with both hydroponic tanks and “carniculture vats.” It’s also neat that Piper’s vision of a future society is one where people have moved beyond caring about race (I don’t think Piper was the first author to depict such a future, but it’s still noteworthy since the book predates the popularization of the idea by Star Trek: TOS). The issue is that all of these interesting aspects are peripheral to the main story, wherein there isn’t much in the way of interesting new ideas. If you had to name the central thesis presented by The Cosmic Computer, it’s that sometimes you have to manipulate people through lies for their own good. Even that idea, though, is never interestingly explored, much less challenged. The Cosmic Computer is actually remarkably devoid of anything thought-provoking, instead spending its pages on accounts of excavation, factory operation, and (essentially) small-town-politicking. It’s not boring, it moves too fast to ever be boring, but because it lacks any depth The Cosmic Computer is a piece of pulp I’ll quickly forget. If anything, the very bones of the story keep it from being thought-provoking, since you have to keep yourself well-dosed with suspension of disbelief throughout the book, because when you take a step back nothing makes much sense. Poictesme is described as a “junkyard,” yet the items on the planet aren’t trash but valuable weaponry, robots, production facilities, etc. It makes no sense why the planet is struggling when the military left them infrastructure that should have kept them rich for generations even if sold piecemeal, and which would soon make them a manufacturing powerhouse if even a small percentage of the population had any drive. One facility is described as having food rations enough to feed an army, in addition to all the automated factories you would need in order to create ships capable of travelling between star systems, and no one has claimed it for decades. Instead of being absurdly wealthy and well-off the world is replete with out-of-work farmhands, gangs of criminals, etc. Piper could have justified why no one was galvanized into action before Conn’s return by having the military facilities boobytrapped, some robots still defending certain points, the technology being unfamiliar and inoperable by most people until Conn the expert arrives, or they could have been isolationist, or pacifist such that they can’t sell things war adjacent, and these are just the justifications I can come up with off of the top of my head. Instead The Cosmic Computer does nothing to explain why the people of Poictesme took so long to grasp the immense wealth at their fingertips beyond vaguely alluding to the fact that the facilities were “hidden,” even though the book describes multiple facilities as being easily visible from the air (and this is a future with space ships, for crying out loud). The Cosmic Computer has all the typical failings of sci-fi pulp, and unfortunately doesn’t have enough in the way of interesting ideas to make up for those deficits. While it has a theoretically interesting setting, the idea of it breaks down when you think about it even a little, and anyway it's not explored in an interesting manner. That being said, it moves so fast that it’s never out-and-out boring, and I can’t pretend that its problems were severe enough to matter that much to me considering that I’ve already started to forget the book. There’s just so little here, it’s fluff. So I guess I give The Cosmic Computer a 2.5/5, and round it up to my standard 3, but with the understanding that I can’t imagine I’ll ever recommend it to anyone (if I can even recall its title in a month). ...more |
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May 12, 2025
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May 12, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
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0375759239
| 9780375759239
| 0375759239
| 3.83
| 349,436
| 1898
| Mar 12, 2002
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really liked it
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The most interesting thing about reading through H.G. Wells's most famous work has been discovering just how ubiquitously horror elements permeate his
The most interesting thing about reading through H.G. Wells's most famous work has been discovering just how ubiquitously horror elements permeate his writing. While he doesn't always lean into this aspect of his stories as strongly as he could, this is likely due to the degree of restraint characteristic of the time in which he was writing, and even with this level of reserve pieces of Wells's fiction are still genuinely disturbing even more than a hundred after they were first written. Of his four most famous novels, The War of the Worlds is perhaps the best exemplar of his sci-fi horror hybrids. While the book starts out a bit slowly, with the English cast of characters being strangely nonchalant at the idea of visitors from another world, and also bizarrely slow to realize the danger they are in even after the martians reveal their destructive intent, the book steadily ratchets up the tension until it's at a fever-pitch. Even if the strange appearance of the martians is not that shocking to modern readers, each step after that increases the danger, until the book’s finale has the protagonist (view spoiler)[scrapping for survival in a post-apocalyptic landscape, convinced that the complete subjugation and destruction of all of humanity is nearly inevitable (hide spoiler)]. There’s even a segment of the book that illustrates how in works of horror our fellow desperate humans oftentimes pose as much of a threat as the threat, a fascinating lesson to see in a sci-fi horror work that so long predates the popularization of zombie fiction. That segment is far from the only interesting aspect of The War of the Worlds, either. There is a survival plan proposed by a minor character close to the book’s end that envisions a very different type of society that might have to be adopted if humanity is to continue on in any form, and this proposal is interesting novelty to consider even today. I also found it fascinating that the short novel leaves the martian threat unresolved; the possibility of another invasion looms even at the book’s end. However, there are some aspects of The War of the Worlds that seem a bit dated, or at the very least I think undercut the book’s strength as a work of horror. The story being told in retrospect limits the tension, as it is clear from the first few pages that the narrator and at least a good chunk of humanity survived the alien invasion. The previously-mentioned sluggishness with which the English realize the magnitude of the threat they face is also irritating, mostly because it rings so false. I do not, though, consider the book’s eventual resolution of the martian threat to be a weakness. While it may strike some as a deus ex machina, I found that the narrative sufficiently suggested such a resolution through the death of the red martian vegetation. I’m curious to know how satisfied I would have found it if I hadn’t already been aware of the ending through other adaptations, but I guess we’ll never know. Despite a slow start, The War of the Worlds ended up being my favorite of the Wells novels I’ve read thus far. While it’s not as creative as The Time Machine, it most fully embodies the type of sci-fi horror that I think Wells excels at. It’s tense, tight, and its influence on the sci-fi genre cannot be overstated. I give this book a 3.5/5, rounding up. ...more |
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Apr 30, 2025
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Apr 30, 2025
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1250290287
| 9781250290281
| 1250290287
| 4.03
| 18,835
| Jun 04, 2024
| Jun 04, 2024
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liked it
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This June 2024 novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky—not even his most recent, the guy is so prolific—Service Model is unfortunately one of his weaker works, bu
This June 2024 novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky—not even his most recent, the guy is so prolific—Service Model is unfortunately one of his weaker works, but it’s a fine piece of lightweight sci-fi entertainment. That is, if you can stomach the gimmick. Said gimmick is that Service Model is largely told from the perspective of a robot (who goes by Uncharles for most of the book), a character that is beholden to his programming, except not really. Thus, a mundane event like cutting past an unmoving line is not done in a single sentence, but over a number of pages as Uncharles navigates his internal parameters more so than any physical obstacles. To be fair there were some bits of this gimmick that I found amusing, but mostly I felt that it served to lengthen the novel and make it feel as though the narrative was playing catch-up to solutions and reveals that any attentive reader will have figured out long before they occur to Uncharles. Maybe this gimmick could have worked in a much shorter work, for instance in a 150 page novella, but Service Model is a 370 page book and thus a whole different beast. This is where Tchaikovsky’s strength as an author comes through, as this book reads much faster than the page count would suggest in a way that Tchaikovsky has mastered. Had the gimmick worn out its welcome by novel’s end? Definitely, but not so long ago that I had come to dislike the characters. The length is also helped by the fact that Service Model is constantly jumping to new “set pieces,” new locations and scenarios in the ruined world inhabited by Uncharles and his companion the Wonk. Through the pair’s travels you get an overview of the book’s setting that feels rather comprehensive, but in the end that setting doesn’t feel cohesive. Instead it’s a hodgepodge of ideas that Tchaikovsky stitched together, and even though the individual pieces are fine, the seems between them show. I’d compare the setting to the Fallout franchise, with Uncharles leaving his bubble of peaceful routine (akin to a vault) to wander the fallen world. But, while Fallout has an aesthetic that ties everything together, Service Model doesn’t. This lack of cohesion is also present in the book’s ending, when Tchaikovsky attempts to tie everything in the setting together and say something about the modern world, but it’s all very generic. The rich shouldn’t be able to hoard more and more wealth, we should treat everyone with dignity instead of cogs in a machine that might become obsolete, better that a hundred guilty should go free rather than one innocent be condemned to suffer, we have to make our own purpose in life, etc. etc. None of these handful of ideas are particularly interesting, so the same is true of Service Model’s ending. I have described Tchaikovsky before as an author that writes very solid, and occasionally excellent renditions of stories within specific sci-fi subgenres. Service Model, in my opinion, is the work of his that has strayed the farthest away from an established subgenre, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that it’s also one of his weakest. However, even Tchaikovsky’s lesser works make for an entertaining enough read, so I don’t regret picking this one up. 3/5. ...more |
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Feb 28, 2025
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Feb 28, 2025
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Hardcover
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3.99
| 2,333
| 1962
| Sep 1962
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liked it
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The cases dealt with by a giant alien hospital is a good framework on which to hang a variety of sci-fi stories, so it does not surprise me that autho
The cases dealt with by a giant alien hospital is a good framework on which to hang a variety of sci-fi stories, so it does not surprise me that author James White went on to write a whole series of Sector General books. This first volume of said series is fun sci-fi pulp with some interesting ideas, as well as some notable weaknesses both big and small. The strongest part of Hospital Station is the titular hospital setting, a vast structure in space that deals with a plethora of different alien entities. Humans, as one of the triumvirate of leading species, make up the majority of the important characters that populate the hospital, though there are a number of important non-human characters as well. None of these characters have much depth beyond their job title, let alone any character development; this is sci-fi pulp, after all. Structurally, Hospital Station is a series of interconnected short stories, each quite episodic in nature. There's the one with (view spoiler)[the dinosaur, the one with the shape-shifter, and the one with the newly discovered alien species to name some of them (hide spoiler)]. In theory this allows White to jump between a lot of fun new medical cases without having to worry overmuch about an overarching plot, character development, etc. In practice, the fun of the stories began to wear thin by the end of the volume, as by then it became clear that there were not going to be any satisfying solutions to the medical mysteries presented. Instead, the human characters (view spoiler)[just intuit what is wrong with their patients using leaps in logic that aren't at all believable. While I could ignore it if it happened only once, it happens over and over in Hospital Station (hide spoiler)]. It doesn’t help that on multiple occasions the stories also raise the tension via different characters unnecessarily keeping secrets from each other, which felt artificial and therefore also unsatisfying. Now, I certainly can’t think of a way to present a satisfying solution to an alien medical mystery off of the top of my head, but that’s the challenge that White set up for himself, and that he unfortunately failed. Even though the resolutions of the various episodes aren’t particularly satisfying there are still bright spots throughout Hospital Station. For instance, it’s interesting to see the mix of novel and outdates ideas contained in a piece of science fiction from this era. The hospital’s doctors don’t have personal communicators, for instance, and they do things that are verboten in hospitals now like reuse needles, showing Hospital Station’s age. On the other hand, the doctors and diagnosticians downloading alien consciousnesses to treat patients is an interesting concept that is fresh even today. On the third, alien hand, neither good nor bad but merely strange is White’s adoration of the word “tegument.” As previously stated, “alien hospital” is a good premise, and White doesn’t muck up that premise too badly. While none of the individual stories are that great at the end of the day, and while nothing in this volume suggests to me that White is able to write a satisfying solution to an alien medical case, the cases themselves are mildly entertaining even taking into account the underwhelming resolutions. Hospital General is sci-fi pulp, the type of genre work you read to amuse yourself for a few hours and not for any higher goal. When judged by the lowered bar of pulp, it’s just fine. 3/5. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 26, 2025
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Feb 13, 2025
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Paperback
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3.91
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liked it
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Dec 31, 2025
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Dec 31, 2025
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3.94
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liked it
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Dec 29, 2025
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Dec 29, 2025
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4.40
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liked it
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Dec 19, 2025
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Dec 19, 2025
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4.59
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really liked it
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Dec 18, 2025
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Dec 18, 2025
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4.10
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liked it
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Dec 04, 2025
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Dec 04, 2025
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3.56
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really liked it
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Nov 19, 2025
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Nov 19, 2025
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3.99
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liked it
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Nov 12, 2025
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Nov 12, 2025
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3.86
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not set
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Oct 25, 2025
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3.90
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liked it
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Oct 24, 2025
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Oct 24, 2025
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3.88
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really liked it
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Oct 19, 2025
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Oct 19, 2025
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3.61
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it was ok
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Oct 12, 2025
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Oct 12, 2025
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4.27
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liked it
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Oct 05, 2025
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Oct 04, 2025
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3.83
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it was ok
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Jul 02, 2025
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Jul 02, 2025
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4.19
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liked it
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Jun 04, 2025
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Jun 04, 2025
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3.79
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liked it
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May 27, 2025
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May 27, 2025
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4.14
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it was ok
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May 19, 2025
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May 19, 2025
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3.72
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liked it
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May 12, 2025
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May 12, 2025
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3.83
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really liked it
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Apr 30, 2025
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Apr 30, 2025
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4.03
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liked it
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Feb 28, 2025
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Feb 28, 2025
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3.99
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liked it
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Mar 26, 2025
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Feb 13, 2025
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