rec by sci fri Probably his weakest book to date, but surprisingly feminist for a book about prehistoric humans.
Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. Th...
‘Green Mars’ is a novel which kept challenging my expectations, and then surpassing them. If you’d told me that I’d find a long section of a science fiction novel – dealing with a conference arguing what form a new Martian government would take – truly gripping, I would never have believed you. I...
Ha pasado casi una generacion desde la llegada de los Primeros Cien. Tras la violenta y fracasada revolucion de 2061, Marte Rojo ha desaparecido. Meteoritos de hielo bombardean la atmosfera para hacerla mas humeda; en el desierto se siembran plantas transgeneticas, los crateres se transforman en ...
I've been interested in Kim Stanley Robinson for a while, since I muttered something to my sister about wanting books that dealt with limited resource management and she mentioned his Years of Rice and Salt. Then on a much later ecological sci-fi (which I feel a pull to write myself) hunt, I disc...
Great stuff. This continues on from where 40 Signs of Rain left off and I really, really enjoyed it. Frank lives in a tree house! How could you *not* like that? Let me get my thoughts straight on this first before I write something more... Okay, have went through my thoughts. Or rather ignored th...
Red Mars deserves a place in the American literary canon, and not as an exemplar of "hard SF," scifi's most pocket-protected sub-genre, but as a compelling, substantive text that has something distinctive to say about life in the present and, perhaps, about being American. Let me fail to explain:...
I have to say, Antartica is me coming back to Kim Stanley Robinson after I gave up on him midway through his Washington Trilogy (at the end of Fifty Degrees Below for those of you keeping score at home). Like the Mars trilogy and the Washington trilogy, Antartica has themes of ecology, scienti...
A trip report of Gardner's travel to Intersection, the Glasgow Worldcon, plus many of his otherwise unavailable science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. Individual story introductions by Stephen Baxter, Michael Bishop, Pat Cadigan, Susan Casper, Jack Dann, Andy Duncan, Eliot Fintushel, Joe H...
This one goes too far at times, which is why I'm on the fence. I loved parts of it- but at other times the situations crossed from ridiculously funny to just plain ridiculous. If you are in the mood for a yarn about a Bigfoot wearing a Dodgers cap being snuck through a hotel lobby under the noses...
'It stands at Pluto’s North Pole – a mesmerising icehenge. Slabs of ice frozen harder than stone, towering two hundred feet above the crater-pocked surface. The central slab bears an inscription in Sanskrit.A message from an alien race? Or the mark of a human-powered voyage that might have passed...
I tend to go on binges when I discover a writer I really like, taking down as many of their works as I possibly can voraciously for the first few months of my acquaintanceship with their works. Hell, I read really fast, so it's not like I don't have time. So I'm kind of in that stage with Kim S...
This review of Blue Mars is in fact a review of the entire trilogy, since it's one continuous story -- one that altogether weighs in at something around 2,300 pages. I've been living on Mars for the last 3 months and wish that, if it were possible, I could actually live there, at least the Mars p...
They sailed out of Lisbon harbor with the flags snapping and the brass culverins gleaming under a high white sun, priests proclaiming in sonorous Latin the blessing of the Pope, soldiers in armor jammed on the castles fore and aft, and sailors spiderlike in the rigging, waving at the citizens of ...
Kiran was pleased to see Swan joining him on the ferry ride down. She wanted to talk to a friend; she would introduce Kiran to him, then be on her way. There were no space elevators on Venus, because the planet rotated too slowly for such a system to work. So their ferry sprouted wings, and as th...
It is not to be mistaken for a vacuum. There are hydrogen atoms, some helium atoms, a faint smoke of metals drifting away from exploded stars. Hot in a sense that does not register to humans, because it is so diffuse. A liter of the air in our biomes would have to be cast across hundreds of light...
Chief Justice, and may it please the court: Thank you, it’s good to be here. A special hearing convened by you is very special. I’m happy to answer your questions. Well, yes, the subpoena. But I’m happy too. No, I did not represent them in those years. And now I’m only serving as their spokespers...
—MARCEL PROUST, Les Plaisirs et les Jours No ONE UNDERSTOOD WHY the maestro was so anxious and melancholy after that night when Cardinal Barberini came through. It was true he had eaten and drunk too much at the banquet, and had then slept badly and eventually fallen into one of his syncopes, and...
The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the gods is excited and rushes on every side into forms.” —Emerson Wake up Sunday morning. In the van, outside a fregan potluck house, down in Foggy Bottom. Put on clothes one would wear to give a talk: “scientist nice,” m...
Was that true for you? What was your first literature? I didn’t know science fiction existed until I was eighteen; then I fell in pretty deeply. The first book I remember reading was Huckleberry Finn, and I still have that copy of the book with me, it has a gorgeous cover depicting Huck and Jim p...
