Sci-fi reviews mostly

First story I wrote for a writing prompt:  [WP] When you die you can stay as long as you want as a ghost. The year is 2028 and the crew of the first human mission to mars has no idea that the ship is filled with the ghosts of hundreds of scientists, explorers and intellectuals. "Entry 1" : Some say there is a god in the machine. If I were a superstitious man I could swear that I find things moved, small things that in zero gravity could have floated away on their own. When I am alone at my shift in the silence I hear sometimes faint whispers. I can almost make out what they say, though they always remain unrecognisable. Sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye, I can even feel a hand on my shoulder. There's nothing there though, there never is. We're on our 110th day of our voyage and we have all sacrificed so much to be here! My daughter knows me mostly from our online sessions and I see the sad look in my wife's eyes. It

Second story done for another writing prompt: Turns out humanity was alone in the universe because they were way too early to the party. Now, billions of years later aliens find a strange planet, Earth, and begin to unveil the secrets of the first intelligent species. Life is a game of inches: Our path was a hard and arduous one. We fought tooth and nail just so we could get past our atmosphere. We are not built for space travel. We cannot think well in spatial terms. We are not creative and everything we've created was done while we failed again and again and again. With each iteration we got one minuscule step closer - continuous improvement is our mantra, our shield, our first and last rule of efficiency. But the truth is we would never have thought to reach space if we had not received the signal. It was so incredibly alien, so strange, so alluring! Against our instincts we have striven forward and upward! We changed our genetic make-up so we could

This is something I wrote for this subject. First original post on this blog: "You noticed as a child that every night you can’t sleep, a disaster occurs somewhere in the world. You’ve been having chronic insomnia for weeks now. Something big is coming." I am a human measuring tool for loss of life. Instead of degrees like a thermometer, I measure in time of no sleep. Until now longest I've gone is 2 days without sleep. It's been two weeks now and I feel like I'm dying. I find myself rather excited at the thought. During the first week I was really afraid. One day of no sleep usually means 1000 people dead. That's an average of course, but the growth is not geometrical, it's exponential! When you have insomnia you are never asleep, but you are never really awake either. There's this quote from fight club : "With insomnia nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.". I th

Persepolis Rising - 7th Expanse book review     “I’ve always rejected the great-man idea. The belief that human history was formed by singular individuals instead of broad social forces? Romantic, but …” He waved a hand vaguely, like he was stirring fog. “Demographic trends. Economic cycles. Technological progress. All much more powerful predictors than any one person. And yet here I am.” So what happened between books 2 and 7? A lot of things, but due to lack of time they didn't get turned into reviews. If you have not got to the 7th book, please do not read futher! Some spoilers await.

“It seems very straightforward when I say “I.” At the time, “I” meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from “me” than my hand is while it’s engaged in a task that doesn’t require my full attention. Nearly twenty years later “I” would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I–Justice of Toren and I–One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which “I” was one and after which “I” was “we.” It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable? On one level the answer is simple—it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets?

”You've mistaken the stars reflected on the surface of the lake at night for the heavens.” Isn't that just the coolest quote? The first novel in the Witcher series, Blood of Elves is written by Andrzej Sapkowski - try to pronounce that English speakers! - and was popularized further by the Witcher games that drew quite a following. It starts sort of confusing - you don't get much of an introduction to the universe so I really wasn't sure if this is the first novel of the series or not. It feels like a really well developed universe and I like that the author isn't afraid to include a lot of different creatures and monsters - including elves, dwarves but also vampires and all sorts of other things that bite or have humans in their meal preferences. The magical system is pretty basic but well made and it plays an important part in the story. The book is a sequel to a bunch of short stories set in the same universe - Sword of Destiny and The Last Wish