Recent Book Reviews
SciFi and Beyond: A Librarian's Log
A bold adventure into realms unknown
Youth in Revolt: Beowulf’s Children (The Dragons of Heorot) – 1995 and Wild in The Streets – 1968
Beowulf’s Children (The Dragons of Heorot) – Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes – 1995 I decided to read this novel because I found a mention of it in an unrelated book as one of the best novels about first contact and colonization of another planet. However the reference actually was for the […]
Genre: 1960s Films, Alien Contact, Satire, Science Fiction
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An Etiquette Guide for the End Times by Maia Sepp
Toronto, 2028. Climate change has started to devastate the world as we know it. Summer temperatures are higher, the food supply is disrupted, and government infrastructure is breaking down. While the elite can still enjoy a lifestyle that we would recognize as normal, the vast majority of people are living with food shortages, power cuts, […]
Genre: Dystopia, Science Fiction
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Expiration Day by William Campbell Powell
In 2049 the human race is on the brink of extinction. The fertility rate has plummeted and one of the ways that humanity has held off chaos is by creating perfect android children that are used as substitutes to raising real children. They are raised and loved but at age eighteen they are returned to […]
Genre: Science Fiction
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The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith
Amber Bierce and her sister are on a colony ship of 50,000 people when it veers off course and crash lands on a strange planet. Meoraq is a warrior-priest, one of the lizardlike inhabitants of the planet, on pilgrimage to a holy shrine. When he runs across the few survivors he sees it as his […]
Genre: Erotica, Romance, Science Fiction
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The Martian by Andy Weir
Mark Watney is on a mission to Mars, but something has gone horribly wrong. A few days into the expedition, the crew has to evacuate the planet, but Mark is injured, assumed dead and left behind. Now he’s alone on Mars with only enough resources for a few weeks and no way to communicate with […]
Genre: Science Fiction
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Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Book 1 of the Southern Reach Trilogy FSG 200 pages. The idea of différance posits that the differences between language and phenomena are not fixed and binary, but rather mutable, shifting, and entangled…an idea that insists upon the principle of difficulty and provision. While this idea resides most often in post-structuralist philosophy and linguistics, it does […]
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Existence by David Brin
David Brin attempts to tackle the question, “What would humanity do when they encounter a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence?” A former astronaut that is reduced to nudging space junk into reentering Earth’s atmosphere discovers a message capsule sent from the depths of space. This is the Singularity moment that triggers all mankind to reexamine […]
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