Science fiction reviews: speculative narratives exploring technology, space, time, and the future of humanity.
Summary Five Pebble is an unremarkable planet. It has no particularly interesting geography, no great natural phenomena, nothing to draw visitors except its position at a junction of transit lanes that makes it a convenient waystation for travelers moving between more significant destinations. Ouloo, a Laru innkeeper, has built her life here with her child…
Summary The Power begins with a premise that sounds like wish-fulfillment and delivers something considerably more complex. Women and girls around the world discover they have developed a biological ability: they can conduct electricity through their bodies and release it at will, ranging from a mild shock to a lethal charge. The ability can be…
Summary In the world of Panga, robots became sentient centuries ago. They asked for their freedom politely. They got it, because the humans of Panga were reasonable people who recognized that a sentient being asking for freedom has made a sufficiently compelling argument. The robots walked into the wilderness that humans had left largely untouched,…
Summary Two agents are at war across time. Red serves the Agency, a technological utopia that controls the future through careful manipulation of historical threads. Blue serves the Garden, an organic, biological civilization with an equally determined vision of what the future should be. Their respective civilizations have been fighting across centuries and millennia, altering…
Summary In 2044, the real world has become difficult to bear. Energy shortages, economic collapse, and environmental degradation have made ordinary life grim enough that most of humanity spends its waking hours in the OASIS, a free-access virtual reality universe developed by the reclusive programmer James Halliday. The OASIS is immense, containing thousands of virtual…
Summary Mark Watney is stranded on Mars. This is a sentence that should be simple to write and is actually quite difficult, because the weight of what it means takes the entirety of Andy Weir’s novel to properly convey. Watney is not merely alone in a remote location; he is alone on a planet with…
Summary Jason Dessen is, by his own accounting, an ordinary man. He teaches physics at a small Chicago college, is happily married to Daniela, and loves his son Charlie. He sometimes wonders about the version of his life he might have had if he had pursued his research rather than choosing family, but he does…
Summary Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a future America that has perfected the art of avoiding discomfort. Books are illegal. Firemen don’t extinguish fires; they start them, burning any library they find. Guy Montag is a fireman who loves his work, or believes he does, until he meets Clarisse McClellan, his seventeen-year-old neighbor…
