Synopsis: Aya’s city runs on fame, and she’s desperate to find a story to send out over her personal feed in order to crack the top 1,000 and get all her heart desires. Review: Extras is a follow up to Scott Westerfeld’s acclaimed trilogy: Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, which follow Tally Youngblood through a series of escalating body and mind modifications that basically turn her into a superhero.
Synopsis: The sole survivor of humankind’s first trip to space is a ruined, broken Jesuit priest, for whom the encounter with alien life brought him both divinely inspired rapture and despair. Review: When humanity finally hears a voice from space, it’s music, and thanks to a bold young scientist the first mission to the source of the transmission is financed by the Jesuits, completely under the radar of the rest of the world. However, something has gone horribly wrong, and no one has survived the…
Synopsis: A young man with severe amnesia comes to realize that he is being stalked by a conceptual shark (which is much, much scarier than you might think). Review: What surprised me most about The Raw Shark Texts was how fast it moved. For all its high-minded metaphysical aims and experimental underpinnings, the book has the pacing of an airport thriller or Stephen King horror book. There were some sequences in this book, such as protagonist Second Eric’s Sanderson encounter with Nobody, that were are…
In the comments thread for Will the Series be Unbroken, Brad & Imani‘s insights made me realize that I was thinking of series in a very limited way. I was only considering a series as having the following criteria: Set in the same world Recurring characters A forward-moving story that aims for cohesiveness across multiple books There is a discrete end in sight, whether or not the author ever reaches it (coughrobertjordan) In other words, the common model in the fantasy/sci fi world.
Synopsis: A military hero struggles with his identity as a clone when he’s caught between in a war between humans and the Brotherhood who created him. Review: Science fiction is not really my thing, but I do like to give it a try every now and again when I’m given an author or book recommendation.
Synopsis: When an author stubs her toe on a piece of metal buried on her property, she uncovers a force which begins to change her from within–and this force might be guided by a malevolent consciousness. Review: I have begun The Brothers Karamazov, but it’s not exactly a “before-bed” book. Enter The Tommyknockers, a lesser work by Stephen King that deals with a pretty big whatif: “What if there was a spaceship buried in my backyard?” Bobbi Anderson stubs her toe on some metal, and…
This post is going up in commemoration of the book I read for work last night and this morning. Check out the On Reading tag for more of the same. The book I read for work, while I won’t reveal the title or author because it hasn’t been published yet, had a really involved, contrived setup that forecasted everything that was going to happen in the plot, to the point where I was like, “Get on with it already, since I already know how this…
Synopsis: In a world of Sameness, a young man who can see colors is chosen to be the Receiver and bear all emotion and memory for his community. As he trains, he begins to see the monstrousness of a world without feeling.