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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112, September 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112, September 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Even though AI has been a constant subject in science fiction for nearly 100 years now, it’s interesting reading the two AI-related stories in the 2023, the year of ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT is still far away from general AI,…
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Review: Blood of Tyrants
Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars Oh, Temeriaire, you sweet summer child-dragon (to mix together 2 vastly different dragon-containing series). Yes, you’re learning, but you still are way too optimistic about people, dragons, and battles. This was one of the better Temeriare novels, although so far they’ve all been…
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My Reading Life in 2023
By the end of 2023 I had 3049 ebooks and magazines (a change of 256 – pretty even with last year). Of those, 2434 were unread. Some chunk of those – maybe as much as ¼ were giveaways like Raspberry Pi Magazine, HackSpace Magazine, and Tor.com book club freebies. I stopped getting the monthly free…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 111, August 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 111, August 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars This issue was one in which I enjoyed all of the stories very much. Science Fiction One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit (Dominica Phetteplace) – a dystopian story taking place “20 Minutes in the Future” that seems to me…
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Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars What is this book? It’s a love-letter to science fiction nerds. It shares narrative bits with Jurassic Park. It’s a reminder of how disruptive 2020 was in every day. I had a lot of fun with this story. I think the only…
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Review: Crucible of Gold
Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars When we last left Laurence and Temeriare, they were in Australia, contemplating retirement. This book has them dragged back in because Napoleon continues to scheme. Thanks to the deviation from our history in which Africa has been wrested from colonialism, Napoleon makes a…
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Review: I am not a Serial Killer
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’m not a horror person – I got this to listen to with my wife on a car trip. She calls the book Baby-Dexter. She’s not wrong. I think the book fits in a very interesting intersection. It’s (in my…
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Review: Long Past Dues
Long Past Dues by James J. Butcher My rating: 3 of 5 stars (a reminder that I use the star rating tooltips on the goodreads site. 3 stars = “I liked it”.) Butcher, the son, is back with another entry in The Unorthodox Chronicles. Book 1 was a buddy-cop plot. We’re back with the same…
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Review: Tongues of Serpents
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik My rating: 3 of 5 stars Just like the Africa book, this one is a lot of just passing the time without much happening. Then in the last few chapters we get a bunch of bombshells about how the world continues to differ from ours because of the the…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, April 2018
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2018 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars SCIENCE FICTION What is Eve? (Will McIntosh) – Will does a great job with the story. The reader can probably guess the general direction of the story, but it’s the details that make it shine. I think he also does a…
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Review: Victory of Eagles
Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars I found this book to be a nice change of pace from book 4. It was more exciting and moved the plot along quite a bit. We’ve had the dragon suffrage plot as a Chekov’s Gun since around the first book and we…
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Review: Empire of Ivory
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars I have come to the realization that what I enjoy in this series is similar to what I enjoy in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch series – I enjoy the formality of the systems that govern the main character’s lives. I wouldn’t want to…
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Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was not familiar with the original (The Island of Doctor Moreau Illustrated), but my wife tells me the plot is fairly similar (based on her recollection of the Marlon Brando movie). What we get out of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s retelling is…
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Review: American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza
American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza by Peter Reinhart My rating: 4 of 5 stars As a cookbook this one is fascinating. It will not be a huge surprise to those who have read Reinhart’s other bread books, but the first half of the book is entirely prose. Reinhart takes us on a…
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Review: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of ComputationReview:
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a good book that I want everyone to read so they understand why the tech is so broken right now. At the same time I think it’s hampered by the very forces it talks…