science fiction author
This is a collection of short stories. Some of them really stuck with me, some of them dragged on far too long and I wouldn’t have kept listening had I not been on an airplane. I enjoyed the author commentary after each story. Two stories really stuck with me. The first, Exhalation, is about some robots who begin to learn who exactly they are and how their universe was created, due to the fact that…
I listened to this relatively short novella on a long plane flight. I have liked previous books by Chambers and had seen this one around so I thought I would give it a try. This is the first in a series of ‘Monk and Robot’ stories. In a far future, humans live on a distant planet, and have reverted to simpler lives after their robots gained sentience and the two races parted ways. Our main…
I found out about this author last month from a promotional post on Bluesky for her latest book (Presumably The Misheard World, though I can’t find the post) and now I’ve read two of her books. I am not generally a horror fan, but I think it is more gore and graphic violence, and this book, while not without violence and gore, didn’t read as horror to me. I guess I need to keep expanding…
I started this book about a month ago, and just couldn’t get into it. After a few weeks, and starting and finishing my previous book, I decided to try again. This time, for whatever reason, I was able to get into the characters and the world and I finished it in about 5 days. I read “A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” several years ago and I knew that this book was set…
I am still trying to process this read. Due to some personal things, I have not been able to read or write in about 2 months. I tried to read and listen to several books, and just couldn’t get anywhere. I saw a post about this author on Bluesky, and her writing was described as literary, surreal, and unexpected, but also this novel was fairly short, so I decided to give it a try. Apparently…
I really wanted to like this trilogy, but it took me months to listen to the first book (had to renew my library book for The Fifth Season three times, and The Obelisk Gate twice) and I just couldn’t get through the second book. I know that not every book is for everyone, but all three books won the Hugo and I felt like I should read them. In the end, they are too much…
There isn’t a lot I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. I saw (did not meet) Joe Haldeman at the Nebula’s last year, but this book has been recommended to me so many times for so many years. I finally decided to give it a shot. It’s a war novel, and due to time dilation with relativistic travel, while only a few years pass in the experience of the protagonist, hundreds…
At this point in the theocracy/dictatorship/oligarchy that is brewing in the US, I figured it was well past time for me to read this book. It’s been on my TBR pile for a while and with a 4 day trip without internet, and with lots of down time, it was a good opportunity for me to finally make it happen. This is an important book and everyone should read it. I’m classifying it as hard…
I was glad to come back to this world. I enjoyed learning about Pax and Steveland and how the plant live on that planet worked. At the end of book two, Steveland sent seedlings to earth, as well as a Glassmaker, so I was looking forward to seeing that interaction. Instead, this book took a quite different turn, showing the aftermath of a global war (the Insurrection) that took place within the last few decades.…
This is a captivating and horrific story about love, life, and the search for meaning. It is hard to compare to anything else I have read. Calling it Kafkaesque makes sense, in its absurdity, but this book has no obvious answers, and yet it easily can speak to everyone. It has themes of meaningless and meaning, timelessness and time, love and loss, and what it means to be human, at the very core of that…
