Estimated reading time: 4 minutes When COVID first struck with lethal fury a few years ago, the pessimists among us conjured up visions of a landscape devoid of human life. Bodies in the streets and on the roads. Cities everywhere depopulated. Farmlands lying fallow for lack of attention....
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes All too often dystopian fiction paints the future all in black and gray. But Alice Sabo’s inventive Changed World series is full of life and color. After a killer pandemic late in what seems to be the twenty-first century, one community—presumably among...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Whiz-bang technology leaps from the page in Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. It’s a suspenseful novel crammed with action. But its main attraction is the artificial life form whose name appears as the novel’s title. LOVs—tiny, genetically engineered...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Here you’ll find my candidates for the nine best among the more than three dozen techno-thrillers I’ve read and reviewed. Of course, you might ask what qualifies a novel to be called a techno-thriller. Definitions seem to vary. But mine is that it’s a story in...
Read More
When we read science fiction set in the near future, we expect three things above all. A reasonably advanced version of current technology. A plausible extrapolation of today’s political and economic trends. And a credible picture of the world after climate change has worked its way. Of...
Read More
You probably don’t need another terrifying book about the climate crisis to convince you that global “warming” is real. Chances are, you’ve known that for years. Or, at the very least, it became clear to you from the recurring floods, killer storms, and deadly heat waves...
Read More
Pick up any one of those sci-fi epics with a lurid cover that promises a story of combat in space. What do you see? Probably, humans battling evil aliens resembling lizards or spiders—or something undefinable. You can be sure there’ll be lots of battles, with heroic space jockeys stressed to...
Read More
A review of Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson. @@@@ (4 out of 5). This is a science fiction novel, to be sure, and as the title suggests it depicts an apocalyptic future, but it’s a future with a difference. This is a treatment of robots and automation from an entirely different perspective. It’s engaging. And it’s very, very scary.
Read More
For some reason I can’t fathom, one of the most vivid fantasies of my childhood was the story of Rip Van Winkle. The celebrated American author Washington Irving published a short story of that title in 1819. His hero is an indolent Dutch-American man in pre-Revolutionary New York who...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Most genre fiction is formulaic. Mysteries may be detective stories, police procedurals, cozy mysteries, and so forth. Romance novels fall into categories of their own. And science fiction encompasses space travel, dystopia, First Contact, military science...
Read More
When Berkeley-based science fiction author Annalee Newitz set out to write a novel about a hopeful future, The Terraformers was the result. And I am here to report that they succeeded brilliantly. It’s set at a far-distant time when the human race has spread among thousands of worlds...
Read More
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced he will split the company in two. This will leave Facebook itself to throw off a gusher of cash dividends every year while he funds Meta Platforms out of the disproportionate share he receives. Meta Platforms, of course, is...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes The city-state of Philadelphia. Late twenty-second century, more than a hundred years after the Conflict. The federal government has little clout now, and the United States of America is no more. The city’s poor crowd the Combs, an overpopulated slum in the...
Read More
Author William Gibson famously made the point that any science fiction story, no matter how far in the future it’s set, is really about the present. After all, no author can fail to reflect the prevailing values and preoccupations of their time and place. And that truth becomes abundantly...
Read More
Visions of future warfare abound with horror stories about robot soldiers. Ranks of Star Wars stormtroopers march through our eyes as we think the unthinkable of war conducted by proxy, with human operators located at great distance from the front lines like the men and women who pilot Reaper and...
Read More
Dystopian novels range across a spectrum from realism to absurdity. No one could regard the most famous of the lot as realistic depictions of any recognizable future. Brave New World, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale are works of literature, taking poetic license to drive home the...
Read More
Everybody in the world of technology talks about the Metaverse. But no two people among them seem to agree on what it is, how it will be built, who if anyone will control it, and when it will become a reality. Tech investor Matthew Ball sets out to address this problem in The Metaverse: And How It...
Read More
Take a walk with Gary Shteyngart in the USA 10 or 15 years down the road. The dollar is pegged to the yuan, and a tyrannical right-wing government is in power. The divide between High Net Worth Individuals and Low is a chasm that cannot be spanned. The country is bogged down in a losing war in...
Read More
Something happened on April 17, 2120. Something so big that now, a century later, it’s still referred to as 4-17. Whatever it was, it’s somehow connected to the brain implants that have been universally required for decades. But what exactly happened, and why, isn’t at all clear....
Read More
We can’t look back at our time from the perspective of the 22nd century. But if we were able to do so, it seems likely that one of the dominant phenomena we would observe in our era is the emergence of artificial intelligence. Few developments in science and technology have caused both more...
Read More
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.