Full disclosure: I’m already a fan of John Birmingham, and I talk to him occasionally on Twitter; so I read A Girl in Time with some preconceptions, and more than a little positive spin on my bias. Birmo is a big fan of manipulating both time and history in his recent fiction; his very excellent Axis of Time series (three full-length novels and three novellas) plays hard and fast with 21st Century military forces being inadvertently sent back to WWII and the massive fallout from […]
The Doomsday Book
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis This genre-bending story is a medical thriller, near-future time travel, and historical fiction novel all in one. Despite the subject matter, it’s a rather cozy novel; the kind you read while sipping tea on a rainy afternoon. While reading, I kept thinking that it had no right to be as good as it was because the overall story is rather thin: girl travels in time, professor tries to get her home. Well, maybe it’s a bit more complicated than that. […]
The Stars Are Out Tonight
Tor.com has a book club where you can download a free ebook every month and this book was one of their selections last year. Even though I grew up reading a lot of classic science fiction, I am sometimes wary of it because it isn’t necessarily that compelling. For instance, reading something like the Foundation books by Asimov, where it’s a lot of ideas hitting you left and right but no characters to really anchor the story. While Spin has its roots in that sort […]
A Giant Woman Should Be More Exciting
I picked up a free copy of this book at Worldcon last year. I find free copies tend to be hit and miss, usually it’s a book that a publisher really wants to promote. The last one I had read was Red Rising which was just awful, so I was a bit nervous about this one. But the cover was very appealing. I know they say you shouldn’t judge a book by the cover, but who hasn’t picked up a book thinking it was going to […]