Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

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Synopsis:
A 6-year-old wunderkind enters Battle School to train to defeat the aggressive, invading Buggers.

Review:
This was actually my first foray into audiobooks on the iPod. I am a huge fan of podcasts, but had yet to tackle a book during the time I spend pushing my stroller and nursing Superfast Toddler to sleep. I figured Ender’s Game was a good entrée, since I have read it before and it wasn’t terribly long, only 11 hours. Since it only took me 2 or 3 hours to actually read the thing, the inefficiency sort of bothered me at first, but I got into it really quickly.

What amazes me about Ender’s Game is how skillfully Card pulls off such an absurd premise. Ender and his cohorts are children who are capable of tremendous feats of military strategy and intellect. It’s impossible to picture–yet it totally works. Even more remarkable is how he maintains sympathy for Ender, who could’ve been totally insufferable in his excellence and achievement. Ender never fails, but you don’t hate him, because Card gets into his alienation and fears so deeply. All told, it’s a fine book for newcomers to science fiction, and definitely held up to a second read.

The Dark Planet (Atherton, Book 3) by Patrick Carman

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Synopsis:
Edgar must leave Atherton, the only home he’s ever known, to finish his creator Dr. Harding’s work on the poisoned Dark Planet.

Review:
The Dark Planet, a stirring conclusion to the Atherton trilogy of science fiction adventures for middle grade readers, finds Edgar heading off his home planet towards the Dark Planet, where children like him are worked as slaves tilling a despoiled earth. It’s his own journey into Mordor–except the plot of the Atherton trilogy owes more to “Lost” than Tolkien.

The world of Atherton was created by a mad scientist, and is populated by wondrous creatures and machines powered by fire and light. Dr. Max Harding, the creator of Atherton, was but a boy when he dreamed up the refuge from the increasingly toxic Dark Planet, and wrought as many mistakes as he did miracles. Nevertheless, he’s left a map of sorts for Edgar, hoping that his only son will find his way to finishing Dr. Harding’s grand master plan.

Treasure map stories can be frustrating, when predestination overpowers causality. Patrick Carman strikes a marvelous balance, with a story that depends as much on Edgar & Co.’s ingenuity as it does on Dr. Harding’s plan.

I had a great time with this whole trilogy and think they will stand the test of time as classics. While the books are not as weighty as Lois Lowry’s The Giver or as edgy as Neal Shusterman’s Unwind, they have just enough complexity to intrigue younger YA readers. The books raise good questions about ecological resonsibility, and the nature of heroism. I also think that they would inspire budding writers and artists, because Carman’s imagination is so potent and compelling. And I think that they’d make fantastic movies, so here’s hoping!

Rivers of Fire (Atherton, Book 2) by Patrick Carman

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Synopsis:
With Atherton inverting, a young boy with a penchant for climbing and his friends go on a journey of a lifetime through the hidden corridors of the only world they’ve ever known.

Review:
Rivers of Fire, being the middle book in a trilogy, concerns itself with questions of war and evolution. Everything on Atherton is in flux, from society to the ecosystem to geology itself. I don’t want to give too many spoilers for book 1; suffice it to say that our heroes remain in jeopardy as they struggle to save the people of their world from the menacing Cleaners and the wicked Lord Phineus. Like with Book 1, I was hooked from page 1 and blasted through it during a blessedly long nap by Superfast Toddler. Can’t wait to read book 3!

The House of Power (Atherton, Book 1) by Patrick Carman

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Synopsis:
Atherton is a world with three levels, which have always remained apart; however, when the top level begins to sink the entire society is threatened and a young boy may be the only one with the key to survival.

Review:
I was glad that I knew very little about The House of Power before reading. The dust jacket is deliberately, thankfully obscure, and the story doesn’t yield its treasures readily. I love the pacing of the exposition, which kept me in suspense but not overly frustrated by how little I knew.

Orphan Edgar loves to climb, and ends up scaling the cliffs that separate the Highlands from Tabletop. In the process, he discovers that there’s more to his world of Atherton than he imagined. I really don’t want to say much more. If you’re curious, the book’s website has some of the sketches that illustrate the book. They’ll pique your interest about the plot and help you visualize Atherton.

There are some solid sci-fi ideas at play here, as well as a good adventure, all tied up like a mystery. It’s a real page-turner and I’m so excited to be able to dive into book two immediately. I’m also thrilled to add this to Superfast Toddler’s library–it’s definitely a series I want to pass on to her when she’s old enough.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

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Synopsis:
Katniss Everdeen takes her sister’s place in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death between teenagers, televised for the whole world.

Review:
I asked my YA librarian friend if The Hunger Games was any good, and her report was that it wasn’t the best book she’d ever read but she couldn’t keep it on the shelves and the kids in her school were passing it around like crazy. Being a fan of YA literature and of Rollerball-type stories, I had to check it out.

I devoured The Hunger Games, even staying up late to finish it–trust me, when you have a toddler, this is not a wise choice. But I couldn’t help myself, because I had to know how Collins would resolve Katniss’s story. It’s pretty obvious she’ll win, because this is only the first book in a series, so this book could’ve been quite tedious. Collins manages to build suspense into the “how” keeping me riveted–yes, Katniss will live, but there’s a lot more to survival than just making it out alive.

Collins does everything right here, reminding me of no less than Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, one of my favorites in this genre. The Hunger Games is its equal. I’m so thrilled to be a part of the litblogging world because otherwise I may not have even heard of this book, let alone find a new favorite.

House of Stairs by William Sleator

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Synopsis:
Five orphan teens find themselves trapped in a room filled with nothing but stairs, which quickly turns into an experiment that may have no end.

Review:
House of Stairs is a book I read about a zillion times when I was a kid. The scenario enthralled me–a seemingly endless room with stairs as far as the eye can see, and a machine dispensing pellets of food as long as the kids performed a bizarrely elaborate dance. Things get darker when the machine changes its requirements, forcing the kids to tap into their inner torturers and terrorists.

Because House of Stairs is YA, it doesn’t delve the depths of horror achieved by Jose Saramago’s Blindness, for example, but it does get pretty dark. I’m surprised I wasn’t scarred for life reading about the ways that people can be evil to one another in this book and in The Chocolate War, but as a teen (and now) I was a very trusting person who is always surprised when people treat me badly. The 5-point Calvinist I am should know better, but I always give people the benefit of the doubt. I would’ve been eaten alive in the House of Stairs!

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

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Synopsis:
An account of the years between child admiral Ender Wiggins’ defeat of the formics and his career as Speaker for the Dead.

Review:
I have only read Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind–and honestly only the first two stuck with me–so I was largely unfamiliar with the backstory featuring Bean and Petra Arkanian that figures largely in Ender in Exile. Still, it was a welcome pleasure to re-immerse myself in the world of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who was unwittingly used to destroy an entire alien race of giant, telepathic bugs when he was just a child of six. Now a highly decorated admiral in his early teens, he must navigate the politics of a newly configured universe, while attempting to understand the “buggers” he annihilated.

As usual, Orson Scott Card’s characterizations are a little flat, and some of the dialogue exchanges are expository and downright irritating. He seems to have it in for mothers in this book, or perhaps he always has and I’m only just noticing it now that I have a kid of my own. However, I really enjoyed Card’s explication of the political machinations between the characters as they grapple for power over the newly created world of Shakespeare (known as Colony I in previous books). Ender faces off with his opponents in surprising and suspenseful ways, with an acumen worthy of the man he will become.

The book lacks the intriguing ethical and moral dilemmas that made Speaker for the Dead so compelling, and more than anything whet my appetite to re-read that as well as Ender’s Game. I ought to check out the Shadow books but for some reason I’m less interested in that storyline, even after learning some of it in Ender in Exile.

A bonus is Card’s afterword, where he openly admits to the challenges of adding a new installment to a series containing several thousand pages. He relied on help from his fans for fact checking, and will be republishing Ender’s Game with a new final chapter to make it compatible with the later books. I’m a bit of a purist so I hope that the new edition remains a companion piece, and does not supplant the original version.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

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Synopsis:
After spending time incarcerated in a secret prison after a terrorist attack, a computer-savvy teen decides to fight back in the name of the Constitution.

Review:
I am so not cool enough for Little Brother. I’ve never hacked, coded, partitioned or flashmobbed. I don’t understand crypto and I’ve never touched an Xbox. I did learn BASIC programming when I was in elementary school, and one time I spent half a day typing in commands that I got from Mad Magazine, promising to render a picture of Alfred E. Newman right there on my Apple II+. When I hit RUN, imagine how disillusioned my 9-year-old self was to see my screen fill up with green, save for one blank dot right in the middle. Oh, Mad. You so crazy. I decided to stick with reading and counted cross stitch.

Little Brother follows a technologically adept teenager who builds an underground computer network in order to get around the Department of Homeland Security’s stranglehold on civil rights. Marcus is way smart, yet he keeps on underestimating the power that he has to sway the masses. Time and again, he sees that his flash mobs are no better than the terrorists that DHS purports to fight. Yet he keeps persevering, trying to find his righteousness, continually returning to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to remind him what the fight is all about.

There’s a love story, too, and a coming of age story featuring parents who just don’t understand. And just as Moby-Dick interspersed Captain Ahab’s metaphysical quest with the minutiae of whaling (whale-penis costume, anyone?), Little Brother digresses into discourses on the history of the internet, the logistics of cryptography, and the addictive power of writing code. Somehow author Cory Doctorow manages to keep it all from feeling pedantic, mainly because he obviously shares Marcus’s passion and exuberance.

The book suffers a bit from too much speechifying, and there’s not much depth in the character development. However, it’s a fun, breezy read with a worthwhile lesson about civil liberties and the importance of freedom.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

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Synopsis:
In which a journeyman in the guild of torturers becomes ruler of the world.

Review:
I should have reviewed this book in two parts, because it’s published that way, as Shadow and Claw and Sword and Citadel. Perhaps I would be less intimidated by the prospect of discussing what ended up being an immense, sprawling, daunting work if I took smaller bites. Too late now.

The Book of the New Sun is an epic fantasy with science fiction elements, or perhaps it is the other way around. I’m not really sure how to classify it. One of the blurbs on the back of the book summons Swift, Dickens, Spenser and Wagner, and I saw all of the above influences within the book. More than anything, however, I was reminded of The Brothers Karamazov. As in Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, The Book of the New Sun is guided less by narrative agency and more by outsized moments of grotesquerie, beauty, philosophy and mystery. There is no guiding hand behind Severian’s elevation; unlike in Karamazov, God is not a force with which to be reckoned.

Superfast Toddler is stirring from her nap, and I’m far more interested in hearing what others have to say than in my own thoughts on this book. If you’ve read it, please leave a comment and tell me what you thought!

In the Face by Lorelei Armstrong

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Synopsis:
When a famous movie star appears to have dumped a body on his plastic surgeon’s balcony, a simulation-obsessed detective delves into a seamy world where there are no limits to what people will do for fame.

Review:
Babies getting plastic surgery–that’s all I needed to hear to get interested in Lorelei Armstrong’s debut, In the Face. Melding a hard-boiled style in the tradition of James M. Cain and Andrew Vachss with a cyberpunk sensibility, Armstrong delivers a fast-moving, intellectually stimulating thriller with a strong story at its center.

In the Face is set in a vaguely futuristic world, where “shapers” work on young babies in the hopes of achieving physical perfection. Evo Selig is the biggest shaping success, and has become a huge movie star. There are countless bootleg “simulations” that show Evo doing just about everything a person could want him to do, and so when a sim appears that shows Evo dumping a body, it’s fairly easy to prove that it wasn’t Evo. Except Evo keeps pretending like it was him, and Detective MacEvoy finds he has a PR nightmare to contend with in addition to a messy murder investigation.

I loved the ideas that Armstrong created for In the Face, and she does an outstanding job of not letting them overwhelm the narrative. The book is a perfect blend of LA Confidential and Neuromancer, a quick and dirty read that has me hoping Armstrong is hard at work on her next book.