Category Archives: Science Fiction

Book Reviews, Science Fiction, Short Stories

A Weekend with the Greats

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Mother Nature, sensing my need to feed my classic science fiction jones, provided me with perfect reading weather this weekend: ice and snow. After returning from the early morning showing of Shutter Island we shut ourselves in for the weekend as the weather turned quite nasty. I chose to embrace the situation by reading Robert A. Heinlein’s classic, Farmer in the Sky on Saturday, followed up by a Sunday reading of the Cordwainer Smith short story collection, You Will Never Be the Same.

Listen carefully…can you hear that? That, my dear friends, is the sound of a deep sigh of satisfaction birthed from a weekend immersed in great stories. Let me tell you about them…

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Book Reviews, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Cyberabad Days ~Ian McDonald

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Cyberabad Days ~Ian McDonald

–published 2009
–Pyr Books
–268 pages
–“The Djinn’s Wife”, winner of 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novelette
–4.25/5 stars

Cyberabad Days is a return to the world of Ian McDonald’s BSFA-winning novel River of Gods. Like an exotic dish, this collection of seven stories (6 previously published, 1 new), is flavored with spices from the old world and the new. I savored hints of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick amidst what I might have initially thought was an incongruous mixture: a Britain born son of Irish and Scottish parents writing stories set in a future India, steeped in that nation’s rich cultural heritage.

Cyberabad Days was a new and exciting literary experience, blending familiar science fiction ideas of future tech and artificial intelligence with a language and heritage that is far removed from my everyday experience.

Ian McDonald brings the history of the Indian people, albeit a “history” viewed from a time three plus decades in the future, in a way that sparks an interest in this diverse and storied nation.

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Book Reviews, Science Fiction

Diving into the Wreck ~Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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Diving into the Wreck ~Kristine Kathryn Rusch

–published 2009
–Pyr Books
–268 pages
–4.25/5 stars

Boss, the protagonist of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s latest novel, is a middle-aged wreck diver. She owns her ship, craves solitude, and alternates between taking tourists out for recreational dives and putting together crack teams to investigate the wrecks of ships she discovers in her travels. On a return trip she noticed a brief signal that her instincts prompt her to investigate. Doing so reveals something to her trained eye that simply cannot be: the derelict hulk of a 5,000 year old Earth ship that could not possibly exist this far out in space. Not willing to believe her eyes, she conducts some research and returns to the wreck with a hand-picked crew, searching for answers. Answers that will forever alter the lives of Boss and her crew and will put her face to face with a past that she would just as soon forget.

Diving into the Wreck is an intense, introspective, character-driven adventure that has moved to the top of my list of books to recommend to those who either have never tried science fiction, or are of the belief that science fiction isn’t for them.

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Book Reviews, Science Fiction

Gateway ~Frederik Pohl

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Gateway ~Frederik Pohl

–published 1977
–Del Rey Books
–278 pages
–1977 Nebula Award Winner, 1978 Hugo, Locus and John W. Campbell Award Winner
–3.25/5 stars

Frederik Pohl’s much-lauded novel is my latest foray into the books that have won speculative fiction’s biggest awards, in this case, the Hugo and the Nebula (and the Locus and the Campbell!). Pohl was up against some big names that year, George R.R. Martin (Dying of the Light), Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Forbidden Tower), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (Lucifer’s Hammer) and Gordon R. Dickson (Time Storm) and while I can not legitimately have an opinion about whether it was the best of that group, having not ready any of these other novels, I can see, upon reading it, why it captured the imagination of the voters.

It captured my imagination as well, and there was much about it during the reading, and in retrospect, that I enjoyed. There were other parts of the story that bothered me, and I will attempt in this review to touch briefly on both.

While I make an effort in this review to not point out major plot spoilers, I do end up talking around various parts of the plot in ways that are not typical for one of my book reviews. I thought it fair to warn you ahead of time.

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Book Reviews, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Asimov’s March 2010

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Asimov’s Science Fiction March 2010

–published by Dell Magazine
–112 pages
–4.25/5 stars

When I saw that the cover of the latest Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine was by the contemporary artist with classical talent, Donato Giancola, it became a must buy. I was also excited by the opportunity to read a story by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch, whose latest book, Diving Into the Wreck, has been getting positive buzz on the net. While I certainly hoped that a cover-to-cover read through this magazine would deliver more thrills than chills, I did not expect it to be quite the intensely pleasurable experience it turned out to be.

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