Science Fiction

Understated, quietly moving, but absolutely brilliant nonetheless, upon finishing Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel The Other Valley, it immediately shot to the top of my favorite reads of the year. This had everything I love in ambitiously written novels, including my love for time jump/continuity based speculative fiction elements. But what set apart The Other Valley from other similar books for me was its reserved and meticulous character work with its poignant tone and reflections on the choices one makes in their lives and morals behind it. It’s also a coming of age story that’s equally successful at portraying Odile’s life as a teenager as well as an adult in her late 30’s (coming of adult age) that felt so relevant despite the science fiction premise. I have nothing bad to say about The Other Valley which was a home run for me but as per the norm, I will attempt to write a detailed review that’s far too long to describe why I found it amazing. First and foremost, there are two important things that need to be discussed upfront which are potential deal breakers in this book. The first is Howard’s deliberate choice to forgo the use of…

The fifth book in Pierce Brown’s Sci-fi epic, this review assumes you have read the previous four books in the series. Spoilers specific to Dark Age will be hidden with spoiler tags, but any content covered in the previous books will not be hidden. Besides, why in the world would you be reading a review for a book in the middle of a long-running series, go read Red Rising first, it’s really good. Now on to the actual review- The 2nd book in what’s considered the 2nd phase of Pierce Brown’s series, Dark Age needed to be solid to maintain the series’ momentum. Despite being an overall great book, I found the previous entry Iron Gold to easily be the weakest and most inconsistent book thus far. I acknowledge that a good portion of its length was required to both bridge the big time jump from Morning Star and to introduce what was perceived to be the new set of main characters. While Iron Gold accomplished what it needed to do, the reading experience for me felt disjointed with its jumping between three different plot threads and the overall direction felt lacking. Picking up after a short time jump, Dark…

There’s honestly a lot of great ideas going on in Peng Shepherd’s All This & More including science fiction time and reality bending, second chance life choices and romance, an underlying mystery revolving around the unreleased tv show season, and the unsettling appearance of Chrysalis. This is all done on top of a “Choose your own adventure” branching storyline book setup. Yet despite how ambitious and creative Peng’s concepts are on paper, it was amazing how uninteresting and tedious this was for me to read. I don’t know what it was exactly, but this book felt heavily catered towards suburban mother book club members in their late 30’s to 40’s based on Marsh’s characterization and the tone. I thought the Choose your own adventure concept and branching choices were decently executed but the pacing, unusual choices in focal points, and Marsh’s character were all not to my taste and squandered the excellent premise. Also to properly review and critique the book in its full entirety, I went back and read through every potential choice including any parallel sections and each short ending. An unrelated nice touch though was the “System Error, you shouldn’t be here” due to cheating and not…

Bury Your Gays’ title alone is one way to get someone’s attention followed by an earnest bit of social commentary on media culture wrapped up in a comedically ridiculous premise. Sub 300 pages complimented by a casual and functional prose, Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays is a light campy horror novel that is easy to like and has a lot of things going on. With bits of body violence/gore, homophobia, and child neglect, it’s not always a rosy read, but it’s still quick and generally light-hearted. Despite appreciating its aspirations and blend of different elements, I personally found it to be a bit dry to read and disjointed in content. It’s certainly ambitious with its themes and plot, but it feels like it was trying to do too much without excelling at any one area. An established screenwriter known for campy horror movies/tv-shows with underlying queer elements, the narrative switches back and forth between the present day in LA vs Misha’s memories of his upbringing. Without giving away too many spoilers, these flashbacks are told out of chronological order and are meant to give the reader insight into how Misha’s interest in storytelling was shaped by a tumultuous childhood where…

Don’t let the page count and novella length fool you, Martha Wells is a literary wizard for packing so much action and content into All Systems Red’s 150 pages. I kept seeing The Murderbot Diaries popping up in book lists and booktuber recommendations, and winning a Hugo Award certainly helps give it some critical street cred. Despite its short length, I thoroughly enjoyed this and breezed right through in one day. This is a pretty short read so I’ll try and keep this review appropriate short. While many sci-fi works get bogged down with heavy exposition and detailed world-building, All Systems Red doesn’t have the luxury of length and immediately takes off running from the get-go. This novella is pure plot, though surprisingly a bit light in terms of fighting/gunfire action. Despite being called Murderbot, Murderbot isn’t a killing machine (at least on paper) and acts as a defensive security unit for hire. And they’re a weaponized tool that could care less about what happens to their human clients, at least initially. The premise of an indifferent narrator is clever in concept, allowing the book to get away with skirting heavy world-building with an effective mechanism of “I never bothered…