Ted Chiang is one of the greats! Every story in this collection is fantastic. Chiang builds incredible, well-connected worlds and populates them with real people. That excellent writing is the rocket fuel behind his ideas.

If you take a mostly-discarded idea — like Kabbalah golems, a tower to heaven, God’s omnipotence, etc — extrapolate it into the present, weave its implications into politics, geography, culture, put some interesting characters into that world, make them navigate the consequences of the original idea, and draw the thing to a satisfying conclusion — then that’s a Ted Chiang story. It’s not half thought experiment, half story. It’s 100% thought experiment, 100% story. The thought experiment is fully dissolved into the story. This is a very hard thing to do, and it represents the apotheosis of the science fiction writer’s craft.

That may have been a bit hyperbolic. These are good stories. They make you think. And, unlike many sci fi stories, they make you think about real things.

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Blake Crouch’s science fiction novels are existential in an interesting way. It’s not that they expound existentialist philosophy, or that they represent it symbolically. Rather, they compel the reader to consider their own life without from an existentialist point of view.

Kierkegaard talked about the man who hurries in and out of the scenes of his own life so fast you only ever see the flapping of his coattails as he rushes out the door. The person so engrossed in the past or the future that they never actually live: they lived once, and they’re planning on living again soon, but right now they’re too busy.

In Dark Matter, the protagonist finds out in the worst possible way that his particular life is so valuable that a version of himself from another timeline would commit a terrible crime to steal it from him. It raises every question about identity you can raise. It makes you think seriously about your day-to-day choices.

In writing a novel that grips the reader this way and turns them toward their own life, he’s done a more existential thing that if he had written a book of existential philosophy. Of course, the more existential thing would be for him to really actually live his own life.

And for me to live mine. Instead of writing a review of a novel that might remind somebody to live their life. So, leaving the novel aside…

Hi reader. Your life, your real life, right now, is of great value. If you were able, by some science fictional means, to see it as it really is, you’d walk through fire for it.

Now, the next thing that you’re supposed to be doing? Go and do it.

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I would give this 0/5 if I could.

I do not like this book. I’m going to be charitable here but also fair: don’t read it. Leave it alone. I wish the author all the best, but I won’t be reading any more of their books. Review over.

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I know Delany can do better. This is still Delany, so it’s still awesome sci-fi, I would never say not to read it. It’s just not up to his usual standards.

There are just a lot of things in the novel that don’t have anything to do with the story. The drugs, for instance. Why? What, in the end, did this invented drug (‘Bliss’) have to do with anything? Why the tarot? Does it affect any part of the plot? Does anybody change their mind because of a tarot reading in this? No, so why is it in there? What is it taking up pages for? Why was there a random novelist on the crew of this spaceship? What does his hobby have to do with anything?

This is a Robert Lewis Stevenson treasure hunt in space. Except he ruined the pacing with all this extraneous nonsense. Oh, and several extensive flashbacks, too.

His characters are motivated by strong cultural and economic incentives that are very important to the central conflict of the book. But does he spend pages exploring those economies and cultures? A little. Yes, Draco people talk differently from Pleiades people, but how else are they different? Anything?

Still, the book is a pleasure to read, as is all of Delany’s work. And it’s interesting to see hippie culture through his eyes. There’s a certain energy there, that makes you feel as though you’re meeting new people in college.

It’s wonderful to read a book where computers A) intelligently search galaxy-wide news reports for mentions of a particular person, B) cyborg-link with humans and C) spit out data on spools of paper.

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What can I say, Starship Troopers is an absolute classic.

I’ve been reading military sci fi since I was a kid, and I never really understood what a lieutenant was until now.

Strict discipline is something that’s frequently the target of literature. The protagonist’s journey is away from discipline, toward freedom. It’s seldom that a novel defends discipline. Of course, the best defense of a thing depicts its trade-offs as well; its ugly side. And Starship Troopers does that with military life as well. That frankness lends the argument strength.

A great book opens up some aspect of human life in an authentic way. This book does that for military life. If it wasn’t set in the future, that feature might shine through better. But on the other hand, the extra science tech gives it an interest that pulls you through. It wouldn’t have that if it was set in Vietnam.

The war-saving heroic ending feels tacked-on. The novel was never about the conflict itself. It was about the protagonist’s military career. The conflict was only a setting.

Ultimately, it’s place as an American sci fi classic is well-deserved.

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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is one of the best presentations of difference in character and difference in language of any book I know of. It’s not for nothing that it won all those awards. It provides a lot of those delicious moments when you’ve been inside the protagonist’s head and language for a while and you’re used to it, and then another character appears and reacts to them, and you can suddenly see them from the outside, and know them for a minute as they don’t even know themselves.

Also worthy of mention is the extraordinary crisis at the center of the political events of the novel, which I won’t spoil — but it’s fantastic, and it’s exactly the thing I love about sci-fi, the way this technology we don’t have yet and haven’t thought through yet can have problems that are just as totally outlandish and impossible as the technology itself; and yet they’re the same human problems we’ve always had. It’s, at the same time, a meditation on impossible, bizarre things and on those things that are closest to our own humanity.

I almost feel like this is a retelling of some era of Roman history. It feels very, very Roman, right down to the inclusion of a strange, newly-popular monotheistic cult, the sharp divide between slaves and citizens and the mysterious barbarians who somehow can destroy you even though you know you’re better, you just know it.



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I wish I could live in Lois McMaster Bujold’s worlds all the time. I wish she would write War and Peace in one of her worlds! If In Search of Lost Time had been in Barrayar, I would be very excited about its length.

So, the main problem with Penric’s Demon is that it’s too short. I wish she had developed it into a full-length novel.

I love the five gods world. Too frequently, fantasy world gods are pretty mundane. They don’t seem much more powerful or ineffable than wizards. (To be fair, some of the Norse gods seem about that powerful too.) That isn’t a problem for this world. There’s a strong sense of foreignness with these gods. These are gods that control you; not gods you can control. They’re dangerous, and you’re not always going to like what they do.

I guess the main point of the plot is to establish what I suppose is going to be a big dynamic in Penric’s life story. That his demon is both a blessing and a curse; that other people want it, but also fear it.

Great book. Lots of fun. Bujold will never let you down.

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I know. I know in my heart. With all my soul. That Terry Pratchett can do better than this. I don’t know Stephen Baxter, I can’t speak for him.

Lobsang hides and reveals information not when an actual person would, or when a robot would. Over and over again we ask, “Why wouldn’t Lobsang have told Joshua this earlier?” And the answer is, “No good reason.” Lobsang is also the most reliable vehicle of artificial exposition.

And it doesn’t seem to have an ending? I mean, they journey and then they journey back. But the central question of the story was never whether they could make the journey. The first thing we know about the protagonist is that he’s the best at making this journey. So there’s not that much suspense there. The other major question is, “What is the Long Earth?” and only Lobsang ever does anything toward answering it, and none of that research is visible to us. Only the resulting exposition at convenient times.

They tacked the character conflict on because there’s supposed to be conflict. The arguments come from nowhere and have no consequences. Not believable.

There’s a terrorism sub-plot tacked on, too, for no reason I can tell. It doesn’t affect the journey. It doesn’t tell us about the Long Earth.

The Douglas Adams references don’t make up for all these problems. All they do is make me wish I was reading a Douglas Adams book.

I’m sorry. It just suffers from poor construction. If you’re bored reading this, that’s why. Every Discworld book is better.

(A quick note on the audiobook. The British guy who narrates it has to fake an American accent for most of the character voices. It’s not convincing.)

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Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I very, very much appreciate the faithfulness to physics. Any sci-fi world has got to have some technology in it that’s not real (yet!) but it’s really very thrilling to have space battles in a universe with as little of that tech as possible. From bone density to G-force to the basic physics of interplanetary spaceship momentum, Corey keeps it very close to realistic. He didn’t have to build a world where it takes just as much time and fuel to slow down a spaceship as it does to speed it up — but he did, and I love it.

Also, it takes a lot of guts to treat the military power differential caused by the Earth’s gravity well seriously. I think the only other novel I know of that does that is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I’m sure there are others. But if you’ve ever stopped caring about an episode of Star Trek because you thought, “You know, the Enterprise is in space. They could just drop rocks on this planet until the problem goes away. They don’t have to beam down or whatever.” — well, in Babylon’s Ashes, James Corey takes us right down that particular dark theoretical road, all the way to the end.

There’s also a wonderful side plot in which a character risks everything to help total strangers, and the deed goes entirely unnoticed: neither punished nor rewarded. But we, the readers, from our broad historical viewpoint, can see that he saved millions of lives, although he’ll never know it, and they’ll never know it either. The realism of the technology, military strategy and politics serve to drive the point home: do the difficult, good thing, even if you can’t see the end results.



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The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was pretty entertaining. There are some problems with it, though. The worst one is that it starts off like a mystery, by asking a question, and by the end of the book, that question isn’t answered. Other questions are answered, and the final questions are much grander than the first ones, but there’s something unsatisfying about solving the big cosmological mystery but not the little everyday mystery that led to it.

I did enjoy that different groups of supernaturally powerful mysterious beings have different cosmologies. Just because you can teleport doesn’t mean you know where the world came from and what it is.

All in all, this is trying to be a PKD short story. But it’s not quite good enough.



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