Genre: Science Fiction

Masquerading under the guise of a cute and innocent story of sentient robots starting a take-out noodle restaurant, Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle is brilliant satirical novella that is full of creative and imaginative metaphors. Part start-up company business story and part reflection on human experiences and rights, Automatic Noodle is a smart scifi themed exploration of many prominent and hyper-relevant social, political, and cultural topics, its charming robots serving as potential proxies for a wide variety of disenfranchised groups in a post war torn San Francisco. A timely book appropriately written for the US, minus certain conservative readers who may take issue with the thematic messages, Automatic Noodle is a unique and quirky story best suited for those that like their scifi stories to have intellect and substance. Before I get into the book’s creative success, I think it’s important to address a common misconception I see with this book and quite a few past reviews of it. For those interested in reading this book, Automatic Noodle is NOT a cozy scifi story. While the story has an inherent cozy feel to it due to the lack of fast-paced action and an almost whimsical feel to it at times, there’s…

An incredibly meta and satirical novel, Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms is an ambitiously written story that defies conventional genre classifications. Featuring a collection of scifi-based short stories within a larger memoir-esque story, Metallic Realms recaps the highs and lows of the Orb4 writing collective group on their real and grounded struggles in creating cosmic literary art. Full of real-world metaphors, social commentary, and sharp jabs at the publishing and online communities, this book is an incredible experience written for hardcore SFF geeks and struggling millennials.   Note: For greater clarity for those who have not read this book, I will be referring to the author by his first name “Lincoln” instead of my usual review format where I would use his last name instead. When I drafted this review, I felt it might be confusing and too easy to misread the character Michael and Michel back-to-back.  Before I get into why I found this book so incredible, I feel the need to address some of the confusion about this book and offer some respectful advice for those potentially interested in it. First and foremost, Metallic Realms is a book full of satire, far-reaching scifi and fantasy references (and by that, I mean affectionately dragging fantasy), and general…

A sweeping love story across time, Alix Harrow’s the Everlasting is a wildly ambitious fantasy story about freedom of choice, the making of legends, and ever-changing nature and distortion of history by written records. Utilizing time-travel concepts applied to the high fantasy genre, the resulting book is a masterfully crafted reworking of how a knight’s origin story literally affects a nation’s future. Featuring a complex plot, nuanced themes, outstanding character work presented through an elegant prose, the Everlasting is an impressive story that is unlike any other fantasy romance book out there. While Lady knights are having a bit of a moment this year, this book is much more complex than its scholar x knight premise would suggest. Set thousands of years apart, the Everlasting tells the story of an anxious and dispirited historian Owen Mallory who is sent to chronicle the legend of the famed historical icon Sir Una Everlasting. The loyal beast of a knight to the first Queen, with her famed adventures and conquests in the name of the cross, it is her ultimate demise that cements her figure as the martyr and inspiration for all of Dominion. Or so how history has told it. Enraptured and…

This review is based on a complimentary Advanced Reader Copy provided by Atria Books via Netgalley. A romance story across time mixed with traces of speculative fiction and fantasy, Amy Tordoff’s debut novel All We Have Is Time is an accessible story filled with interesting historical fiction snapshots spread over the course of four hundred years. Time-travelers and immortal beings are two common elements separately, but this book’s unorthodox cross of the two gives it a unique spin and for its characters, different repercussions from its genre’s norm. Easy to follow and generally fast-paced in nature, All We Have Is Time is a safe pick for historical romance readers, though those looking for a strong speculative fiction storyline or deeper introspective character work may find this book underwhelming and bland. Marketed for fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, at first glance All We Have Is Time appears to fly too close to the sun with what is clearly one of its inspirations and at risk of being highly derivative. Both books feature a withdrawn female protagonist cursed by a fantasy being with immortality and walking through history a shadow of a person. Both books also feature a tragic…

A futuristic scifi, techno hacker speculative fiction, and queer retelling of the Great Gatsby is a concept I never would’ve considered and one that made me do a double take, but in Jay Gatsby’s own words per K.M. Fajardo’s author’s note, “why not”? Fajardo’s debut novel Local Heavens is a brilliantly crafted book that not only is wildly creative but is also a faithfully adapted love letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original story. Modernized for the 21st century with a crazy genre-shift, this interpretation smartly capitalizes on all the best aspects of a retelling without being hindered by the typical drawbacks through careful artistic choices. Featuring beautifully poignant writing, excellent characterizations, and original storylines that work seamlessly with the original framework of events, Local Heavens is an amazing and unique read for both fans of the original book and new ones alike. “Though in this disquiet summer, a summer that pushed us forward into hedonistic apathy, Gatsby was the singular exception, flying over the dust and toils of our world on fire. Beyond that famous, corrupted name, he clung to a vestige of that old cosmic hope I’d readily believed did not exist anymore, his indestructible sincerity blossoming like an…