Genre: Science Fiction

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…

Easily one of the most creative and whimsical novels I’ve read in many years. Simon Stephenson’s Set My Heart to Five is a thoughtful (and occasionally edgy) commentary on human behavior and societal culture wrapped up in a seemingly light-hearted, meandering AI bot adventure. Despite being compared to Vonnegut’s ideologies and writing, the book’s content reminded me a lot of Daniel Keye’s Flowers for Algernon (which is one of my all-time favorite novels) in which both stories feature an innocuous narrator who does not understand the complexities of human behavior and terrible people around them. Set My Heart to Five’s premise of an AI bot developing feelings admittedly isn’t new territory, but the style of delivery and humorously dry character voice puts it in an entirely new area. First and foremost, Set My Heart to Five is not going to be for everyone, nor does Stephenson make an attempt to be mass-appealing. Jared’s character voice is somehow both frank and dry, yet also entirely comical in a witty, dark humor kind of way; you know that one friend who always talks about the unspoken elephant in the room that’s not socially acceptable, yeah that’s Jared. Full of fun wordplays and…

The Last Murder at the End of the World feels like it should’ve been something directly catered to my taste which is a murder mystery investigation wrapped up in a post-apocalyptic, science fiction (borderline dystopian) dressing. This one is hard to talk without giving away crucial spoilers that would heavily affect the reading experience. The novel had all the right elements and pieces to work with and Stuart Turton had a lot of creative and intriguing concepts included. In an alternate universe with some tweaking, this could’ve been a knockout hit. Unfortunately for me, the novel’s science fiction flavor gets a bit out of hand and is frankly a mess. Numerous unexplained apocalyptic elements weaken what should’ve been a well-done murder investigation story. Set on a protected island where the last survivors of an apocalyptic fog inhabit, the setup for the plot was good. There’s a clear timeline of events dictated by a countdown to extinction that separates each section of the book. The first 40% of the story focused on introducing various villagers on the island, their relationship with three revered scientists, and the dynamics of the island. The book has a long-running metaphor of equating the villagers to…