Writing about writing and reading
If you go to this movie expecting to see laser fights and explosions and space battles, you will be disappointed. If you want creepy aliens and jump-scares you will also be disappointed. But if you're after a movie that puts a lot of thought into the story, the science and the characters, then you will …
Continue reading "Arrival: good drama, unconventional sci fi"
This is the 8th Culture novel, and the third that I've read, and so far I think it's the most memorable. The story focuses on virtual reality, and mainly the virtual realities different civilizations create for their afterlives. Some of them being hells. With the ability to record, copy and / or upload consciousness, comes …
Continue reading "Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks: A hell of a story"
I just finished this post apocalyptic sci fi classic, which takes the form of a few stories over the course of nearly two thousand years. Centuries after nuclear war, society rebuilds itself, regrowing from barbarism, and finding scraps of its ancient past. The story starts with a monk of the order of Leibowitz finding a …
Continue reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz: the forgetfulness of humanity"
The final book in the Three Body Trilogy, Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past)Â does not disappoint. Once again my mind is reeling from the barrage of amazing ideas and concepts that blasted me one after the other after the other as I listened to this book. I don't even know where to begin. If you've …
Continue reading "Death’s End, by Cixin Liu: Mindblowing scope"
Ursula K. Le Guin did, in The Dispossessed, which I just finished listening to. This book was described to me as the anti Atlas Shrugged, which made me instantly buy it without hearing anything else. It holds up to this description by being of reasonable length, by having realistic, likable characters, and by describing ideas …
Jonas David 