This story is a cautionary tale to all Sci-Fi writers, especially of the Steampunk variety. Don’t fall in love with your setting, especially the politics. You want your readers to become immersed in your newly created environment, and to do so they need to know all sorts of things. Readers don’t know this. They signed…
Tag: Sci-Fi
REVIEW
“Attack on Boredom” by L. B. Spillers.
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These short stories are more tightly interwoven than in most works of this genre. They are thematically linked, being multiple well-considered examples of the possibilities involved in having our lives taken over by Artificial Intelligence, alien overseers, gods or the plain old economic elite we’ve always had. Likewise, the general tone of the book is…
REVIEW
“The Triangle Age” by David Aumelas
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This is a very original Science Fiction novel, styled in a surrealistic setting based on Inuit legends. It is characterized by a minimalistic dearth of setting details, with only the immediate vicinity of the character even mentioned, and never the overall setting, which seems to be inside some sort of space station. In a strange…
REVIEW
“Private I” by Ashlei E. Watson, Jill Fain Lehman and Paul Pangaro
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This novel is very much a Sci-Fi “almost present day” look at a possible future for humanity. It is notable for its attention to the details of everyday life in that society, with settings and societal elements given appropriate descriptions, names, and acronyms. And thereby hangs a problem. Excessive acronyms are accurate, even in our…
REVIEW
“The Callista Alignment” by Steve Gay
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This is a serious Science Fiction story about social change, dealt with at all levels of society. The cast of characters includes members from the lowest feral human to the highest ruling alien, and we see fragments of the story from the points of view of all of them. This presents a problem in the…
REVIEW
“Miss Universe” by David M. Jones
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Okay, don’t be fooled by the title; this is true Science Fiction. Don’t think, “Miss Congeniality.” Think “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” filled with thousands of alien races and myriads of inconceivable scientific and technical wonders. But, rich in technological and social setting though the story may be, it is the characters that drive the…
REVIEW
“Wind in Trees” by Arthur M. Doweyko
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This is Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi, but the tale starts further than usual down the road to the post-humanity era of self-awareness. It deals with the problem we have trying to predict this progress. There’s no point in present-day humans worrying too much about it, because by the time AI starts taking over, the people of that…
REVIEW
“Strike the Lilac Scent” by H. C. Turk
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This strange novel has a fascinating story line, but it seems the author tried a little too hard to be creative, and thus did not succeed in communicating clearly with readers. Granted, the heroine is a teenager, but the other characters are adults, and yet the conversation is peppered with “golly,” and “ohso” and juvenile…
REVIEW
“Robot Detective” by Shawn Goodman
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This novel is dressed up as Science Fiction, but its roots are in the good old-fashioned detective tale. Except for his lack of skin, Schneider is the epitome of underdog detectives, looked down upon by his workmates, reviled by the public, watched with suspicion by his superiors and viewed with frustration by those who try…
REVIEW
“After the Fall” by Gerry Gainford
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This novel is a Post-Apocalyptic story stripped to its basics. The world has fallen apart, and it has really crashed. There are no enclaves of rescued tech and remembered ethical behaviour. Technology has been pushed back to the 1950s, politics and morality into the early Dark Ages. Feudalism would be a definite improvement. As stories…