Just as history books often tell us more about historians than they do about history, genre fiction can reveal a great deal about its authors and the times during which they write. History books fall into disfavor as new information comes to light, making way for new interpretations of the facts. And science fiction and […]
Continue Reading...Three enormous starships depart Earth on a mission of galactic exploration in the twenty-fourth century. Each harbors a crew of two hundred highly trained specialists. None of them is armed. “The Serengeti had gone north, above the galactic plane in search of intelligent life in other galaxies, and the Savannah had been commissioned to explore […]
Continue Reading...Kurt Vonnegut didn’t write science fiction, or so he always insisted. So, why would Kilgore Trout keep showing up in his books? Trout is the author of more than 117 science fiction novels and 2,000 short stories, none of which received the approval of either the critics or the reading public. And why would that […]
Continue Reading...Four humans and a cleaning robot with a mind of its own are on their way in a stolen spaceship to a newly discovered planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. Amphitrite, the title of this book as well as the new planet’s name, is the entertaining story of why they’re on their way and what […]
Continue Reading...The premise is familiar. The remnants of the human race crowd aboard a spaceship en route for centuries to a new home amid the stars. Somehow, far behind them in space and time, the Earth’s billions have perished. Yet never before have I come across a rendering of this story that I can believe without […]
Continue Reading...Ever since the origins of the genre in the 1920s and 30s, American science fiction writers have imagined military conflict between humans and aliens. Amazon lists more than 60,000 books of military SF. To my mind, the best of the lot (at least among those I’ve read) is Joe Haldeman’s 1974 classic inspired by the […]
Continue Reading...Few writers have thought more deeply about how First Contact with extraterrestrial intelligence might unfold than the Australian science fiction author Peter Cawdron. To date, Cawdron has published fifteen novellas and novels on the theme (with three more due out in 2021). And in Xenophobia, the second book in the series, he demonstrates what might […]
Continue Reading...Climate change has claimed a sub-genre of its own within science fiction. Outstanding examples include Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. No doubt there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others. So, any less prominent author must offer up something truly innovative to get noticed […]
Continue Reading...If there’s a sub-genre that might be called wacky science fiction, then surely John Varley’s novel, Red Thunder, is a prime example. Oh, it’s not zany like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Doctor Who. But as the story’s protagonist and narrator notes, the technology at the center of the tale is “outrageous, goofy […]
Continue Reading...Martha Wells has been writing science fiction since 1995 and was nominated for major awards in the field on several occasions. But her breakthrough came in 2018 when she won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award for All Systems Red. That book kicked off what is to date a series […]
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