Tag Archives: sci-fi

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

Book Review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach – by Kelly Robson

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I borrowed a paperback copy of Kelly Robson‘s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach from the local library.

Description from Goodreads:

Discover a shifting history of adventure as humanity clashes over whether to repair their ruined planet or luxuriate in a less tainted pass.

In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity’s ancestral habitat. She’s spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology. 

Review:

Not bad, and I liked it a lot more by the end than I did the beginning. I thought the way the two narratives were interspersed and eventually intersected was really clever and I liked the world with it’s generational differences and integrated tech. (And I love that the main character is an 83-year-old woman.) But honestly I was bored for a lot of the time while reading this. So, my overall experience was middle of the road.

Book Review of HALO: Smoke and Shadow, by Kelly Gay

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I won a paperback copy of Kelly Gay‘s contribution to the Halo universe, Smoke and Shadow.

Description from Goodreads:

Find. Claim. Profit. In a post-war galaxy littered with scrap, it’s the salvager’s motto. And with a fast ship and a lust for adventure, Rion Forge has certainly made her mark on the trade. When the discovery of a wrecked UNSC cruiser brings Rion’s past back to haunt her, stirring fresh hope into a decades-old wound, she’s hell-bent on finding answers: What really happened to her father and his ship, the Spirit of Fire?

Review:

As I said, I won this book through a giveaway and, having not read any of the previous 18 books or ever played the game, I was really going in blind with reading it. But I was able to follow it without problem and it was engaging enough. I felt it would have been better suited for a full-length novel than the novella it is. It could have done with the room to flesh it out. And there is a bit of predictable tragedy I’d have preferred to do without. But all in all, I’d be willing to read the next book in Gay’s arc of the Halo franchise. (However, having just read a review of HALO: Renegades with some pretty major spoilers in it, I guess I don’t need to. To be fair the reviewer was pointing out the events of other books in the universe that functioned as spoilers to Renegades, but having not read those other books it was their review that was the spoiler.)

Book Review of Normal, by Warren Ellis

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I borrowed a copy of Warren Ellis‘ Normal from the local library.

Description from Goodreads:

Some people call it “abyss gaze.” Gaze into the abyss all day and the abyss will gaze into you.

There are two types of people who think professionally about the future: Foresight strategists are civil futurists who think about geoengineering and smart cities and ways to evade Our Coming Doom; strategic forecasters are spook futurists, who think about geopolitical upheaval and drone warfare and ways to prepare clients for Our Coming Doom. The former are paid by nonprofits and charities, the latter by global security groups and corporate think tanks.

For both types, if you’re good at it, and you spend your days and nights doing it, then it’s something you can’t do for long. Depression sets in. Mental illness festers. And if the abyss gaze takes hold there’s only one place to recover: Normal Head, in the wilds of Oregon, within the secure perimeter of an experimental forest.

When Adam Dearden, a foresight strategist, arrives at Normal Head, he is desperate to unplug and be immersed in sylvan silence. But then a patient goes missing from his locked bedroom, leaving nothing but a pile of insects in his wake. A staff investigation ensues; surveillance becomes total. As the mystery of the disappeared man unravels in Warren Ellis’s Normal, Adam uncovers a conspiracy that calls into question the core principles of how and why we think about the future–and the past, and the now.

Review:

I read this in one sitting and really enjoyed it. I liked the way you could feel how fragile Adam is and how aware of their own brokenness the other inmate/patients are. The book also manages to pack quite a lot of commentary on the current-future state of earth and society into a small number of pages, largely without ever overtly speaking to any individual topic.