Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
(Note: I received this novel as an ARC from Angry Robot Books, through Netgalley.) Morningside Fall, by Jay Posey, is what you can call a good reading, no matter if you are (as I am) a hard SF lover and…
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The Skinner (2012) is one of the Neal Asher’s most famous books, and the first of the Spatterjay series. It narrates the history of three men in a nightmarish, alien waterworld populated by ferocious monsters. Deadly virus, cybernetic zombies, AIs…
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I have already spoken a few times here about the challenges of worldbulding in SF, both in terms of designing working planetary systems – around a single or binary star – and imagining celestial bodies where life is at least…
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a not just a book, but a multi-media phenomenon started by the British comedian Douglas Adams in 1978 as a radio show for BBC 4. One of the most amazing sci-fi fictional…
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Douglas Adams is the author of that SF masterpiece The Hitchhiker Guide of the Galaxy more people have seen in movies than actually read… (if you are one of them, shame on you. If there is a book non-SF lovers…
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Altered Carbon (2002) is a novel by Richard Morgan. Set in a future four hundred years from now, on a few exoplanets in a dystopian human-colonised universe, where rich people are able to get replacement bodies to make them almost…
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That old villas are spooky places is known to everybody. All of us remember creepy stories from our childhood, and there is an entire movie tradition built on this trope – a quick look at IMDB would easily prove it…
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Hyperion (1989) is a Hugo-Award winning novel by Dan Simmons. Otherwise known as “the Canterbury Tales of SF” for its narrative structure. You will follow the stories of seven pilgrims to the planet Hyperion, where a legendary and ferocious creature…
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It started with reading Sci-Fi Magazine’s quote on the book cover “The zombie novel Robert A. Heinlein might have written” – a suggestion I could not avoid checking out. It ended with me reading everything – and I repeat, everything…
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Prey (2002) is a novel by Michael Crichton, and, as others of the same author, presents unintended consequences of newly discovered technologies and scientific wonders. In this case, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and swarm intelligence get the spotlights. Fascinating and scary.