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Tag: science fiction

Review: The Vela, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and SL Huang

OOF. Tear my heart into tiny pieces, why don’t you, The Vela writing team? If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course,…

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Review: Zero Sum Game, S. L. Huang

What purer pleasure in the month of December than finding a new book that you can’t stop reading? I love S. L. Huang’s short fiction, and was thrilled that her formerly self-published Zero Sum Game got a reissue with Tor this year. It absolutely lived up to my internally generated hype. Cas Russell is a math genius such that she can calculate the bolt depth and wall strength of bars on windows in an instant, and apply leverage in exactly the right spot to pry them off. She’s a math genius such that she can dodge bullets by predicting their…

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Review: Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee

The third Nicefox Gambit book is out — the series is actually called Machineries of Empire, but I like Nicefox Gambit too much to resist using it. So before I get into this book, Revenant Gun, here’s a quick, spoilery recap of the story in Nicefox and Raven Stratagem. A rebellious foot soldier has the ghost of a dead traitor general installed in her head. The hexarchate — the ruling powers — intend for the general, Jedao, and the soldier, Cheris, to win a particularly challenging battle for them — they’ve used Jedao’s ghost in the past this way, to…

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Review: An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon

Don’t you love a debut novel? Admittedly in this trashfire world I am prone to getting sentimental about things it is insane to get sentimental about, like tiny foods and sitcom episodes where people discover emotional truths about themselves; but I do feel sentimental about debut novels and the hope they represent. There’s something quite magical about an editor believing in a brand new author, and there’s something even magical-er about an author setting their first-ever book into the world like a message in a bottle, searching for their exactly-right community of readers. Which is why I’m mightily grateful to…

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Review: The Prey of Gods, Nicky Drayden

“Whatcha reading?” said someone to me as I was waiting in line at the post office the other day. I flipped up the cover of The Prey of Gods (which is a p. cool cover, as you will see below.) “What’s it about?” they said. And I was like, “My friend, that is a GOOD FUCKIN QUESTION.” The Prey of Gods was described to me by two separate people as being the craziest SF book they’d read in a while, and they were not mistaken. What’s it about? Gods and robots, sometimes working together, sometimes really not at all. Viruses.…

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Review: Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty

What a genuinely great, fun book. Six Wakes was one of my most anticipated books for spring, and with good reason! In this future, humans have perfected cloning: with regular backups (called mindmaps) and a fresh computer, a clone can die as many times as it likes and wake up again in a brand new body. If you haven’t backed up your mind lately with a new mindmap, and you die, your clone will be missing some time. Space janitor and chef Maria Elena wakes up in a new clone body to find that her last body is dead. The…

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Review: Version Control, Dexter Palmer

What a weird, weird book. It reminded me a little of Nick Harkaway with the quills retracted (does that metaphor work? do porcupines retract their quills ever?). Version Control is a time travel novel with very little time travel, a story about humanity and loss from whose human characters I felt distant, a novel of ideas that sometimes made me think brand new thoughts and sometimes made me feel very tired of humanity (although not in the way the author maybe intended). Philip Wright has not built a time machine. It’s a causality violation device, and so far it has…

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The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

It has taken me some time to put my finger on the problem I had with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but let me say before I start on that, I liked The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. It’s hard not to like a book that wears its heart on its sleeve the way this one does, dripping earnestness and longing to do the right thing from every page. Ashby Santoso is the captain of the Wayfarer, which bores holes in space to permit rapid travel between far-distant planets. In this world, humans are a…

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Review: Nexus, Ramez Naam

A while ago I accidentally checked out Crux, the second book in a series about a drug called Nexus that expands the human brain’s capacity and permits brains to connect directly to each other. Despite its turning out to be a sequel whose original I hadn’t read, I really liked it. Nexus is the book I meant to check out, so I went back and got that one the next time I was at the library. The beginning: A government agent called Samantha Cataranes has been sent to gather information about a science computer genius guy named Kaden Lane, who…

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Crux, Ramez Naam

tl;dr: Crux (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is some really, really excellent science fiction. You should be aware that it is the second in a series. The beginning: Isn’t this a veritable cornucopia of characters for me to remember all at once. Damn. The gist of all this appears to be that there is a mental enhancement program called Nexus with some serious implications for human evolution. Its ?creators? ?adapters? are on the run from the law (in fact, on the run from the law + a whole bunch of bounty hunters). They are also trying frantically to stop…

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