Ben

One of the best collections of SF stories from the 20th century. Wells, Vonnegut, Silverberg... it's a great representation of the genre.
I recently found this anthology in a second-hand bookstore and I remembered just how much it had gripped me when I was a child.

It kicks off with Harrison Bergeron, which is probably the most familiar of Vonnegut's shorts, and
Rachel Pollack's “Is Your Child Using Drugs?” was frankly terrifying when I was younger and hasn't lost much of its power now that I'm old enough to understand what it's all about. The same goes for “Descending”, and “The Engine at Heartspring's Center”.

There's not a story here that I would hesitate to recommend on its own merits.

A great idea, not particularly well written. This story is one of those rare cases where the film was better.

I'm not quite sure why so many people seem to dislike this book, going by the reviews I've seen here. Perhaps it was mis-marketed as some people seem to have expected it to be a gothic horror story. Perhaps people have very short attention spans or expected something with a little more action in it.

I picked it up second hand with no preconceptions and enjoyed it for the most part. There are moments where I feel the decrepitude of the surroundings might be laid on a little thick. And I'm not sure I liked the ending - although it's correct for the story and it made me think back and reconsider my interpretation of earlier scenes, it was a little bit quick. It made me think a little of Julian Barnes' Sense Of An Ending actually.

A decent science fiction collection from 1975.
It wasn't particularly inspiring compared to other books in this series. The editor seemed to rate the more boring stories as his favourites; The Day They Cut off the Power by Vera Johnson (the only female author represented here) and Zone by Peter Linnett were both lifeless expressions of dissatisfaction with the system that could have come from any schoolchild's English essay.

The stories by Keith Wells and Graham Charnock I just plain didn't like. They weren't bad, as such, but there didn't seem to be any point in them existing. Long Time Ago, Not Forgotten by Bob Van Laerhoven, about life in an alien circus is better, but still only barely worth reading, with a dull and unsatisfying payoff. And Heal Thyself by John Rackoff which covers electronic empathy and mind-connections is ok. Yes, just ok. The same ground gets crossed by Kapp's finale so much better that this story is eclipsed.

Brian Aldiss appears for a typically Aldissian series of non-sequiturs in Year by Year the Evil Gains, which is part of a longer series by him that doesn't sit all that well in a science fiction collection. It's nicely-written, though, and thought-provoking.

There were three stand-out pieces for me:

Bartholomew & Son (and the Fish-Girl) by Michael G. Coney gives us a funny world, where sea life has been adapted to land and art quite literally conveys emotion. It's well-written and with only a couple of turns of phrase changed I could imagine it appearing in a “new writings” from this century instead.

Heatwave is just as perfect a piece of science fiction satire as I've ever read, even if one or two of the acronyms he uses could have done without the repetition drawing attention to them. The world is heating up, but it's all just a distraction as bureaucrats and scientists rush to solve the mystery of an intercepted coded message: The Sun Is Going Nova.

Cassius and the Mind-Jaunt by Colin Kapp explored, in 1975, so many of the questions we demanded of shows like Star Trek when the star actors had their bodies swapped, or infiltrated someone's dreams. The questions that got answered decades later in films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Inception could probably all be shown to have been answered here first. It's witty and engaging, and it's a little bit of escapist adventure to end the book with.

I'm rating this as four stars because of these highlights. Overall, it's a disappointing package.

I'm rating this three stars because it has a couple of great stories in it. The trouble is, they're the stories which crop up in every other compilation, and the remainder are a bit flat.

Perilous Planets supposedly has a theme, but it's tenuous at best. The most you could say is “people are on an alien world, and perhaps one of them gets in a spot of bother”.

Damon Knight's Four In One is one of the most captivating stories I've ever read - but I've read it in a thousand other compilations.

How Are They On Deneb IV? by C.C. Shackelton is an interesting piece of metafiction, but too clever for its own good. I'd recommend it to someone for curiosity, rather than actual reading pleasure.

The only other story I hadn't read before that I thought was particularly good was William Morrison's The Sack.

Overall, hit-and-miss.

Since reading Mission of Gravity, I've gone through everything of Hal Clement's that I can find.
A year later, I can say that Mission of Gravity is definitely his best.

It has a few scientific problems in the harsh light of the 21st century, but overall it's fabulously well-thought-out hard science fiction.
Mission of Gravity features a limited cast of characters, a slow but steady progression of trials and setbacks and a satisfyingly optimistic conclusion.

Surprisingly good.

I picked it up with some old SFBC editions without knowing what it was about, and it's frankly ludicrous: miniaturised people are delivered to a tree in an area experiencing some kind of pine-tree devastation to try to find what's causing it.

They fight insects. They scale sheer woodfaces. They live in a matchbox for heaven's sake.

But there's something about the writing style that's great. Dated, yes. Oddly-specific, yes. Engaging? Yes.

I had no idea what this book was about before I started it. I picked it up because it had a monochrome cover and was one of those old “science fiction book club” editions, which were sometimes unexpected gems.

This is not a gem. I had to push myself to finish it.

In the distant future of 1998, women control the world, and men are relagated to “home engineering” duties. This is generally seen as a good thing, because women are obviously driven by love and are good at organising things, but it does have its downsides, such as the US president having to run off to cry during meetings.

Every man in this book looks down on every woman. Every woman looks down on every man. The author clearly thinks they're being clever, and showing up a bunch of sexist stereotypes, but the result is exposing how pervasive they were. There is literally no paragraph I could pluck from anywhere in its pages that I could use to pretend this was acceptable satire.

Give it a miss. I wish I had.

Rogue Moon has some fairly critical reviews. People complain that it's boring, that it has one-dimensional characters, a weak ending and pointless digressions. They're not entirely wrong.

The characters all have a similar voice - presumably Budrys' voice - and spend most of their time in monologue. They each have a single, powerful motivation. Their interactions are there to allow them to explore these motivations rather than to forward the plot.

It was written in 1960 and the way that shows through is mostly in the characters roles and the author's intruding sexism. You remember the long scene in Day of the Triffids where the protagonist talks about how women have guided human evolution to the point where men do everything for them? That kind of thing. It's very much of its time, and reads a little like an Edmund Cooper novel. I'm positive it was meant to be progressive.

From the cover, you might assume this was all a big space adventure, but that's misleading. It's a story about men being men, and learning the measure of a man, and all that.

The measure of a book is in how it leaves you - do you think about it for days and weeks to come? Do you see its characteristics in other works? Does it have a lasting emotional impact?

Rogue Moon doesn't quite tick any of these boxes, but am I pleased that I read it? Yes, yes I am.

The viewpoint cycles chapter-by-chapter through the sisters, punctuated by reflections from the mother. There are a couple of really interesting characters, especially Adah, the hemiplegic girl and her twin.
I could pick a few grumbles, but not enough to tip it off five stars - exceptionally readable, probably the best book I've read all year.

The title and cover are a bit misleading. This is a book more about Fisher's relationship with her parents than anything else. It's also pretty short. But it's good fun nonetheless.

Terribly disappointing after having read Emergence. This book is a one-trick pony, and that trick gets old after about page 30.

I'm revising my rating of this. For some reason when I first added it I was using particularly rosy eyewear.

I like Heinlein. I do. I just think I like his ideas better than his writing - the only Heinlein I've enjoyed all the way through were his more young-adult books, like Podkayne or Have Spacesuit Will Travel.

Glory Road is a frustrating read. All his characters are perfect, or perfectly bad. You can guarantee that if someone walks onto the page and they're not perfect, then within five minutes you'll discover that they are, actually, perfect. It was just hidden by your prejudice about them being, say, a beautiful woman, who must be ditzy. But no! Turns out she's a superhuman genius too. This is fine given the time in which a lot of his books were written, but he doesn't half harp on about it. The same scenario plays out dozens of times. We get it. We don't need it.

The story is wish-fulfilment fantasy, barely disguised as SF, with wasted chapters on issues irrelevant to the plot which might have served as character development if the characters had anything to develop.

This book fits in well with things like Stranger in a Strange Land and Number of the Beast as being far too long, and far too boring. This time round, I didn't make it all the way through.

This book brought back to me everything I ever thought was good about Discworld.

I like 1950s SF, for the most part. This book was a disappointment.
It's a little uncomfortable with what it's supposed to be. It can't decide whether to be a space adventure perhaps aimed at younger readers or a moral lecture aimed at their parents.
Where it falls down is in its rambling. For the first hundred pages we follow the unlikeable protagonist as he roams the ship and there begins to be a bit of a problem with viewpoint. The character is uncertain about how large the ship is and so is the story - at some points travel between decks is something achieved by dropping through a trapdoor and at others times it takes a day's journey with packs of provisions.
Then, out of nowhere, the semi-realistic setting is shattered when a bunch of intelligent rats stroll into a scene towing a caged, telepathic rabbit they are using to extract information from prisoners. And this has no bearing on any of the rest plot, before or after, but is the first of many more WTF moments.
At one point the characters find an ancient swimming pool and, thinking back to books they've read, they decide that it must be the sea. I'm fine with that. As a reader, I like knowing more than the characters. But why make it one throw-away line? Take these sort of comedy mistakes and use them to pad out the otherwise fairly boring trudge through corridor after corridor. Otherwise they're pointless.
And they've never mentioned reading books like that before. In fact, I'm pretty sure only the priest could read earlier in the book. And later some of these characters are revealed to be from off the ship in the first place, with all of Earth's knowledge available to them.
The inconsistency and wasted opportunity becomes infuriating after a while.

Wikipedia tells me this was Aldiss' first novel. I like some of his other stuff.

Since [a:Brian Aldiss 17119322 Brian Aldiss https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] wrote [b:Non-Stop 384579 Non-Stop Brian W. Aldiss https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1321611598s/384579.jpg 2268003], a.k.a. “The Ship” in the 1950s, we've had about seventy years of technological advancement. Our common knowledge of space has expanded. Our library of science-fiction has grown into something huge, yet instantly accessible through the Internet.The Bridge is what happens when someone thinks, “what would happen if we took all that progress, all that knowledge, our fond memories of that generation-ship plot, and really put our minds to it? Could we, in fact, make something much, much worse?”Yes, we could.

More interesting than captivating. Mostly interesting for the protagonist's expectations of the future (the year 2000) and how they clash with the “reality” he finds there. That sort of retro-futurism is always fun, especially when it's told slowly and methodically. It ends with a brief scene tying up a few loose ends but feels like more should have been explored.

Yes, on the face of it this is one of Heinlein's novels with multiple worlds, but in this case they're the same world, our world, re-experienced through a time loop. It's the grandfather to both Primer and Back to the Future.

The title is interesting. The “door into summer” metaphor is tacked onto the novel at the beginning and end. Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely image, but here Heinlein's writing is distinctly different. It's nicer. He stops looking at the world through a magnifying glass for a little while to relax and describe something in much more confortable terms. I found it a bit of a lurch, and would have preferred him to stick to one or the other style throughout.

Even reading it with Milligan's voice in my head, I didn't find it funny.

This was ok. But not great.

It needs an editor to fix some of the sloppy language. People simply speak in a way that's unbelievable in their circumstances. Or the author intrudes with a pop culture reference we didn't need.

We start by having the story fed to us as present-day interspersed with backstory. Then this style gets dropped.

There's a lot that happens in these pages, but nothing really grabbed my attention or made me care too much about the characters. Out of the 6 or 7 characters (see, I forget) only two are realised, the rest are wallpaper, which is a shame. And the author spends a lot of time making other people remind us of how brave and good the main character is (or was) without actually showing it in anything she does.

The middle section is a little muddled with action too. The ship is huge (aren't they all?) but aside from descriptions of rooms being a bit big I didn't really feel it. The fight scene feels a bit like it takes place in a cupboard, and I had a hard time following who was supposed to be in danger. I never felt any concern for the characters.

What lets it down most is the lack of originality. Everything here is something I've read before. Especially the final act.

I'm pretty sure there's going to be a sequel, and I'll probably pick it up, because I'm a big fan of the people-find-an-abandonned-spaceship genre, which is what lead me here to this book in the first place. But I won't expect it to blow me away: I'll expect it to help me pass a day by the pool.

I actually haven't read this one for years, and am going to pick up my copy at the weekend, so I might read it again and update my rating based on that.
It's notable in that it's probably the only second-person present tense novel I've read, certainly the only one I've read all the way through without getting annoyed. Excluding Fighting Fantasy etc, of course.
Mostly what this means is that it's one of those books that's hard to get into. It takes a few pages before it feels like a book and not just someone's experiment, and that means if you go have lunch and come back to it a few hours later, well, you just have to go through the few pages of everything feeling clumsy again.
It's very authoritative. An author might engage you by using a suggesive phrase like “Thrust your hands into your pockets to keep them warm”, but Roberts would write something more like, “You thrust your hands into your pockets. You need to keep them warm”. Molly has to undergo tests early on in the story. Or rather, you do. “You” make your choices like which button to press or which colour to choose, and you provide the reasoning behind it. You think it through, and you're told how Molly thinks it through, and wanting to make a different choice makes it a little uncomfortable sometimes.

I haven't touched on the plot. It's generic dystopian SF future with lots of running-away and hiding and things not being what they seem. It's less important than it seems; the main enjoyment I got out of this book was feeling like I got to know the character intimately, through a very unusual style.

Mary Sue: Battle Angel.

This book badly needs an edit. It's frustratingly difficult to read and stay immersed in the plot. Repetitions of words that stand out as repetitions are repeatedly repeated in some of the more repetitive paragraphs. We're treated to bracketed three-letter-acronyms (TLAs) even when they are never subsequently referred to that way. We're an audience of military science fiction fans and we have HUD explained to us. Oddly, when I was about 20 pages in, I had to check when this was written, because I had the impression it dated back to the 60s or early 70s. Some of the technology used made me check the copyright date and I was very surprised to find it was published so recently. I'm not saying this is a flaw, because I'm quite a fan of SF from that era, but it makes a modern book feel clunky. A couple of examples:* People are having to get used to new-fangled touch interfaces where they can swipe a finger to call up pertinent information. Come on, we've had iPads for a while now; this just seems weird.* The bridge crew, in their space attire, suddenly make a bet amongst themselves and whip out 10 dollar bills. From their uniforms? On an experimental mission to another star system? * The women are all nervous junior officers who get called by their first names.* Where others are described by their mannerisms, the second-in-command is introduced as being the big black man.It's all very Heinlein in as much as almost everyone is the best of the best, and only shows a flaw if it's about to be revealed as actually a situational benefit - but I'll leave the comparison there, since there's nothing particularly political about Into The Black, or much in the way of social commentary.The plot itself is derivative and predictable but that doesn't mean it's not fun. It's Heinlein, most obviously [b:Starship Troopers 17214 Starship Troopers Robert A. Heinlein https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1533117961l/17214.SY75.jpg 2534973], mixed with elements of Stargate and more than a few ideas lifted directly from the computer game Crysis. It basically consists of three battles, one in the first act and two parallel fights in the remainder of the book. There's not a lot of text that isn't about fighting.The characters are underdeveloped in favour of the technology. The author actually goes into a fair bit of detail about the weaponry, armour and so on used by the protagonists, and tries quite hard to make it scientifically solid (notwithstanding the obvious concessions of an FTL drive). I think this part comes across well. There are some places where I don't believe it, because my willingness to stretch disbelief starts to falter, but they're few enough that I can forgive them.The viewpoint changes are very clunky. We're a couple of chapters in before there's any indication it's not all going to be from the captain's perspective, and then suddenly the perspective starts changing all over the place. We see dogfights mostly from the pilots' point of view, but it snaps to the enemy in time to see them die in the explosion like it's an '80s B-movie put in print. There's a lot of time devoted to person A talking to person B and then us being told that person B pulled an expression hidden inside their blacked out helmet, for example, with the author explicitly reminding us that we shouldn't be able to know this. It would have been a much more comfortable ride if the story stuck to realistic viewpoints or just gave in and had an omniscient narrator.Despite this, I found myself enjoying the story, and would pick up the sequel if I found it lying around. The experience was like watching a SyFy Original TV movie.

Turns out I don't much like big-strong-man-vulnerable-girl romantic fiction, even if it's in a spaceship. Who'd have thought?

I'm almost certain that the word “grimaced” is used more frequently than the principle character's name. I'm not even joking. When they're not grimacing everywhere, they're scowling, glowering and snorting. Every conversation with a snort is defused when the more powerful participant chuckles. It's like a nursery book of simple emotions, left on the pile of magazines at a doctor's office and with most of the pages missing.It's so full of this language, I'm tempted to download an epub if I can find one free, simply so I can run a few scripts against it. grep -c “(grimac(e ed ing) scow(l led ling))”, you know. Oh yes, and I find it disconcerting when two people are talking and one refers to the other as his erstwhile friend. Did I miss some falling-out? Does that word's meaning change over the next couple of hundred years? Who dares to dream?The story (for all that happens, it's mostly maneuvering) is OK. It's not good. I don't care about any of the characters, even the ones who had more development in earlier books. The first couple of chapters gave me hope that this time there was a more interesting plot and that the book had maybe seen better attention from an editor.It's not boring, exactly. If you skip over all the duplication, anyway. Because every time someone says something or some new information appears, another character will find a way to paraphrase it immediately, just so we're sure we understand.I remember how in the first book the crew of this futuristic spaceship were getting used to using a touch interface, since this is clearly an alternate universe where iPods never happened. It's the same universe however, where people take mind-controlled space fighters for granted. That kind of disconnect is still here.I've read the first one and listened to the next one on audiobook. I'm not sure why. I didn't finish this one and won't be getting any more sequels. I hope Currie keeps writing and other people get some enjoyment from it, because the world could do with more epic military SF and I don't want the genre to die out. But I mostly hope that we get some better authors.Oh, and it's got a prologue. I have no idea why. It's chaptered and the prologue is just chapter 1 of the B-storyline. Now that's just weird.

I've read a bit of “military science fiction” as the genre's been, er... genred. Most of it really isn't very good. You could probably guess by the solid row of stars next to this text that I didn't feel that way about the Red trilogy.

It's good, it's really good. It's a set of questions about our increasingly connected future (the one where we're all paranoid that our waffle makers are secretly judging us) and it's played as an adventure.

There is quite a lot of fighting and blowing things up, though it's believable enough to a layperson such as me who has never even worn an exoskeleton for anything more than the daily commute.

Mostly, it's a relief to read something decent in terms of modern military SF.