Dust by Hugh Howey
[Read as an ebook from the public library] NANOBOTS. I’m going to be honest – I skipped a bunch of pages in this one. My affection for Wool had started wearing off by this time and not even Juliette’s return could pull me back into the narrative enough to get me fully invested. I still like the overall world here, but there’s just so many holes after Shift. A lot of the menace of the outside world is gone, the rituals of IT are no […]
Shift by Hugh Howey
[Read as an ebook from the public library] Note: This edition is the collection of three novellas. This is essentially the prequel to Wool, and serves to explain how and why the silos were built and what has happened to the outside world by the time of Wool. It takes place in two different timelines — one follows Donald Keene, a young Georgia congressman in 2049, tapped to help construct a new nuclear waste storage facility in the area outside Atlanta. The other follows Troy, a silo […]
Wool by Hugh Howey
[Read as an ebook from the public library.] Note: This is the omnibus version, which collects the original five novellas into one edition. I didn’t expect this book to hit me in quite the ways it did. This has clearly been the year of sci-fi for me and I’ve run the gamut from Becky Chambers loveliness to the quirkiness of Murderbot to this, the comparative grimdark of the Silo. I usually don’t go in for post-apocalyptic literature, because I don’t need to be more depressed, […]
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
[Read as an ebook from the public library.] I read The Martian in one sitting — couldn’t put the thing down. It was pretty much everything I love about science fiction and being a giant NASA dork. I got a few chapters into Weir’s next book, Artemis, but it was just too much heist and too little space for my tastes. Project Hail Mary is a welcome return to a lot of what I loved about his first book. It’s a love letter to science and […]
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
[Read as an audiobook from the public library] Well, we’re straight out of Murderbot and right into some of the most serious big person pants sci-fi I’ve read since I started reading Leviathan Wakes about a hundred years ago. Bite-sized fun time space western this is not. It was some work, and it took some time, but the rewards are definitely ample. Ancillary Justice is on its face a sprawling space opera spanning a thousand years, with weird names and strange planets and ridiculously nuanced cultural […]
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
[Read as an audiobook from the public library] I got this one a lot sooner than expected, hooray! This was, for me, a welcome return to form for the Murderbot series after the longer and (for me) more confusing and annoying Network Effect. I’ve found that I’m happiest with Murderbot’s grousing on a limited basis — say, four-hour increments or so. Also, if I learned anything from The Mandalorian it’s that I’m highly susceptible to the Monster of the Week format when done well, and I […]
