Sci-fi reviews mostly

Another writing prompt: "The king has ruled for 1000 years, secretly using black magic to take over the bodies of his heirs. This is only known to a select few in a dark, secretive Order. You are the next heir, and have discovered the truth. Now you're on the run, and the dying king has sent his agents after you." "There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic." The small dark room smells like rotten food and piss. I take a drink from my flask and try to keep the door closed. I boarded the entrance with the remnants of a bed, but it will at most buy me minutes. I need more time! They would have killed me by now and taken the next one in line, but the old man really wants me. It's an ego thing, he wants to prove that he beat me in every way possible. That no one can escape his will. Well fuck him! We'll see about that. The door erupts in a shower of splinters and the masked men rush in. My fathe...

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 ...

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.” I have to review the book side by side with the movie in this case. Only the first film though as the others answer the question - can you make a good film with bad acting, crap cgi and terrible dialogue. The answer is no. The classic sci-fi novel from Heinlein is kind of crap. Harsh statement, but it's militaristic, boring sci-fi at it's best - there are dozens of pages dedicated to showing off gear and how to clean it. I mean if you have a fetish about cleaning gear and drilling this is definitely the book for you! Also a tonne of training and quite a bit of propaganda about how only people who serve in the army are fit to lead. Now if you've watched the movie you'll say that it's tongue-in-cheek but actually no, that's only the...

 “We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole.” A novel written by John Scalzi, Redshirts is very different from any novel you've probably read in the last year or so. It won the Hugo for best sci-fi novel in 2016 and I can definitely see why. It has popular appeal and it resonates with anyone that's watched Star Trek before. You don't even have to be a sci-fi fan to enjoy the book and since the Hugo nominations are voted on by fans it makes sense that the book's large popular appeal would be an asset. The audio book is narrated by Wil Wheaton(lt Crusher from Star Trek) so that's a plus for listening instead of reading. You can also check out Geek and Sundry where Will Wheaton plays table top games with celebrity guests or just friends. “You’ll notice that the Intrepid’s inertial dampeners don’t work as well in crisis situations, Dahl remembered Jenkins telling them. The ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and yo...

“We gotta talk” The second book of the Expanse series, which by the way has been adapted into a well made tv sci-fi show(The Expanse) is pretty different from the first. Originally meant to be a mmorpg game developed by a chinese video game producer, it never got the greenlight so the authors decided to publish what they had written as books. Originally the game was meant to have three factions which you can guess if you’ve read the first book. It was an overly ambitious game that could not be made in 2004. Ty Frank is the video game geek, while Daniel Abraham is the more traditional writer. Thus the Universe encompassing Earth, Mars and the belt got it’s unlikely start. Read more only if you've read the first book.

The sequel to “The Three Body Problem”, “The Dark Forest” is the second book of the trilogy written by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. You thought the first book was weird? Well get ready for another big slice of weird pie. More

The first novel by Ernest Cline it is described as dystopian sci-fi. I’m not sure it fits that description but more about this later. An interesting bit of trivia is that the audiobook version is narrated by Will Wheaton who actually makes a cameo in the book. I did not have expectations from this book. I have seen the movie “Battleship” and I heard they were making one based on “Tic Tac Toe” so my faith in entertainment(and humanity) is already low. I believed this to be an attempt at a book in that spirit. I was surprised as I saw some friends which I knew read a lot of sci-fi give good grades to the book on Goodreads so I eventually grabbed a copy for my kindle and decided to try it. I was pleasantly surprised. The book is very well researched, either that or the author is incredibly passionate about 80’s pop culture. Way too passionate, like creepy stalking waiting all night outside your apartment levels of passionate. The world is gripped by an energy crisis made worse by glob...

By the way, that’s a shitty cover. I mean the book deserves better, this makes it look like a soap opera. I mean look at that shitty sword, no way the badass sword(Nightblood) you'll read about looks like that polished piece of crap in the cover. A fantasy book written by Brandon Sanderson “Warbreaker” it is the first of a series. Well kind of, there is no sequel yet but the author has repeatedly mentioned that he wants to write one. “It was strange, how easily and quickly protection could cause destruction. Sometimes, Vasher wondered if the two weren't really the same thing. Protect a flower, destroy pests who wanted to feed on it. Protect a building, destroy the plants that could have grown in the soil. Protect a man. Live with the destruction he creates.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker I read the ebook version and the author had an incredibly original idea. He added at the end of each chapter an explanation of what he was trying to achieve and of how he views the cha...

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.” ― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest What do you get when you combine hard sci-fi written by someone as smart as Asimov with the cultural revolution and the chinese culture? Yes, you guessed it correctly it’s this book. At places this reminded me of Asimov, but a more pes...

“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture ...

“Most people who have failed miserably in life itself have one last resort left available to them. They become politicians.” It took a while but I finished it. I really liked about 85% of the book. It’s smart, the sci-fi and the way the species have evolved make sense. And I’m probably an asshole but I really did not appreciate the ending. Don’t get me wrong, it all ties down really well, the plot points and characters are finally converging but that’s it. It’s like going to a restaurant that looks really good, the food you ordered has a very nice presentation and the waiter is nice only to realise that it tastes the same as some fast food diner around the corner that sells it 5 times cheaper. Also the plot twists felt kind of expected. Makathran is a good exception as is the statue of the Lady. Again back to the ending that I could not get over. I will not go into details but I was underwhelmed.Ilanthe is a shitty ass villain. The Cat is good, but Ilanthe seems really lame by com...

“Stars are better off without us.” Leviathan Wakes is a 2011 science fiction novel by James S. A. Corey (pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). This science fiction mistery is a part of the Expanse series of books written by James S.A. Corey. The following books have been published: The Butcher of Anderson Station, Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate ,Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes that appeared as soon as December 6, 2016. 3 more books have been announced so this is a pretty big series. The Butcher of Anderson Station was written after the first 2 books so you can read it first or you can read Leviathan Wakes directly. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of it, this is not your ordinary sf book, as it mixes space opera ,noir and horror elements. I'll admit I was attracted by the space opera, but I found myself enjoying the detective story most! “I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs;...

“This is the breaking point in a human life, right here. This is waking up on an operating table to find aliens peering down at you, this is hearing the audible voice of God telling you the date the world will end. This is seeing a family of bigfoots in the forest and being without a camera. Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a website soon.“ John Dies at the End is not a sci-fi classic, it's not even sci-fi it is actually a combination of horror and dick jokes.But mostly dick jokes. If the Culture Universe is a well matured wine, kept at the proper temperature for 20 years to be enjoyed while having a veal steak enjoying great conversation with your educated friends - great taste and all the excitement of a root canal, John Dies at the End is the cocktail that mixes half the alcohol the bartender finds that you order after doing 3 shots - all the excitement in the world, followed by a splitting headache the day after when you might not even know where you wake u...