The Death of Grass by John Christopher
★★★★☆ | Science Fiction | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A short 1950s SciFi novel about a virus that kills grasses. Starvation and violence breaks out. Governments fall. Civilization crumbles.
…Science Fiction
Dune by Frank Herbert
★★★★★ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Rereading one of the first books I was enthralled with as an adult is a trip. I remembered parts of it vividly, but there were huge gaps.
Herbert must have used the Pacific Northwest as his guide for Caladan, but when did he visit the desert? I could not help but compare Vashon and Arizona as Caladan and Arrakis.
Dune is a classic Hero’s Journey, which must have still seemed fresh in 1965. So many parts of this book are still relevant.
…The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
★★★★☆ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A breezy space opera with interesting science (space flow systems that enable long distance FLT travel) and fun characters. Lady Kiva is the space version of Beth from Yellowstone. First of a series and I will probably read them all.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
★★★★☆ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This book won the Hugo award in 2020. Slow moving at first with a lot of world building jargon to pause over. The plot picked up in the middle and became almost a page turner by the end.
I liked the eerie description of the Sunlit, a human/AI police force (we never really find out what they are).
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
★★★☆☆ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A comfort read with some interesting themes:
- Human sustainability in a fragile ecosystem
- Finding purpose and meaning in a godless, accidental universe
- Finding joy in the face of mortality and eternal oblivion
I respect the neutral gender treatment in the novel, but it kept throwing me off during my reading.
…Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel
★★★★☆ | Science Fiction | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoyed the writing of this story more than I expected to. I guess I have a weakness for time travel and Universe as Simulation books.
A key theme of the book was the powerful but morally corrupt Time Institute — a secret government agency that developed and used time travel technology to preserve itself without regard for the moral good it could do. The main protagonist joins the agency and uses time travel to safe a life which gets him in huge trouble.
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The Peripheral by William Gibson
★★★☆☆ | Science Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I’m mixed about this book. The first few chapters were confusing in true Neuromancer style, but I soon caught on. It’s an interesting premise: In the future, technology is developed using some kind of quantum physics to communicate with the past. In this case, a seventy-year past — pre-Jackpot — whatever that means, that feels like maybe 15 years into the future for the reader. The act of communicating with the past changes its timeline, so they call these time-travel adventures “stubs” in the continua. They figured out a way to bring members of this past age into the present day through the archaic virtual reality technology that existed in the stub time period, and then later through a neural interface that allow the person to take over a “peripheral” — a living, breathing robot (?) to interact in this future world as if they were really there. So, we get to see the far distant future through the eyes of someone who’s not that far removed from us. Oh, and during one of these interactions, the time-traveler witnesses a murder and is thus being recruited to the future in this peripheral body to help solve it. It’s a little convoluted, but fun in a nerdy way.
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