Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 126 by Neil Clarke My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Two Ways of Living” – A world in which humans can essentially hibernate by eating a ton of calories and then a chemical cocktail to go unconcious. Additionally, the person does not age. The short story essentially serves as a meditation on…

Drive by James S.A. Corey My rating: 4 of 5 stars Prequels can be a tough thing to get right. The reader/audience already knows where things are going. Can you have any real tension? Well, if you’re JSAC, you know a great way to do it – by having it involve none of the characters…

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I think the best way to describe this book is to reference the last chapter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s catchphrase on his podcast – the Cosmic Perspective. Even though I already knew a bunch of the info in the…

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 125 by Neil Clarke My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Assassins” – At it’s most basic level, this is a story about people forming emotional attachments with virtual characters. What I think makes this short story so compelling is that this is already the case with much less fidelity than a Star…

A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games by Dylan Holmes My rating: 4 of 5 stars It was nice to take a break from fiction to read this analysis of the evolution of video game narratives through time. Chronologically, the game goes from text adventure games through point and click adventure…

One Night in Sixes by Arianne “Tex” Thompson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I added this book to my To Read list back in 2014 after hearing Ms. Thompson interviewed on Sword and Laser. I had a slightly different impression of what the plot would be – I think the interview focused on the…

Terris: Wrought of Copper by Alex Flagg My rating: 3 of 5 stars If you are really into The Cosmere you tend to REALLY be into the Cosmere (just take a stroll through r/Cosmere on Reddit). So it would be a shame to miss out on all this background information about the Terrismen in this…

Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan My rating: 4 of 5 stars As I work through my To-read list, we come to another book I added around 2014. This one was after Mr. McClellan had been interviewed by Sword and Laser (and 4 years before I’d ever heard of Brandon Sanderson). His idea of powder…

The Mongoliad: Book Two by Neal Stephenson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a very hard book to properly review. Unlike a typical book in a trilogy (or however many books it ends up being – at the time this book was published it was a trilogy), this book does not contain a…

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is some old-ass science fiction. It’s interesting that on my recent trip I ended up reading 3 SF stories from my to-read list that were all from the 1950s. It’s definitely got a lot of that Zeerust where we’re incredibly far into…

The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick My rating: 4 of 5 stars This story is so short, the Gutenberg license at the end takes up the majority of the pages, but it’s still a fun story. Or, well it is to me and I imageine my boss would also love it. But we’re…

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie My rating: 5 of 5 stars Only my third 5-star review for 2019, but boy does Ms. Leckie deserve it here. It’s everything I love about SF including a gigantic, fully realized world with a culture that makes sense as a consequence of the world she’s created. It really reminded…

Sirena by Donna Jo Napoli My rating: 5 of 5 stars Another book that was on my To-Read list since 2014. I *think* I heard about it on Boing-Boing, but I wasn’t making good use of my GR shelves that way back then to keep track of such things. Wherever I heard about it, I…

Dead Man’s Deal by Jocelynn Drake My rating: 4 of 5 stars Wow, Ms. jocelynn Drake did something pretty rare among the trilogies I’ve been reading for the past half decade – she made a second book in the trilogy that doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. My memories of books I read when I was…

Kingdom Hearts II by Alexa Ray Corriea My rating: 4 of 5 stars As with the best books in this series, Ms. Corriea has a deep passion for the game she’s writing about and it had a profound impact in her life. Over a number of chapters, she makes a great case for why this…