Wow. I was struck speechless by this book. Mark Watney is stuck on Mars. His crew thinks he is dead. He knows another mission should arrive in about four years. It’s an equation. X food + Y Oxygen – Z Carbon Dioxide + A Water = B Survival Solve for all variables. Inputs to the matrix include available tools and materials, constraints include limited living space, a longer mission time than anything you’re working with was ever designed to function, and a planetary environment that […]
If you loved the movie, you need to read this.
If you’ve read any reviews of this book, what I’m about to say is probably something you’ve heard before: This is one of the best film novelizations I’ve ever read, if not the best. Oy, that sounds really hyperbolic, and to be fair, it’s really not a high bar to clear. People aren’t going around screaming for the next great novelization. They just aren’t. Also, the novelization for The Force Awakens was quite terrible, so psychologically speaking, pretty much if this one had been halfway decent I […]
Humans still struggling to learn empathy in 25th century
This one was a friend recommendation as well as a start to my quest for more women-written science fiction, and it did not disappoint. Cat is a psion, a “freak” born of the socially forbidden union between a human and a Hydran, a race of telepathic aliens who have been exterminated by humans. His telepathic powers make him feared and hated, even though a past trauma has left him unable to access his psion abilities. He is recruited/coerced/blackmailed into taking a job as a glorified […]
Thought-provoking and … kind of freaky
I purchased Story of Your Life and Others after I saw Arrival in theaters, which rocked me to my core, and I wanted to see just how it translated from the page to the screen. The answer? Very differently. For one, Chiang is a lot more technical in his descriptions, and I really appreciate the sparse-ness of his language. He does not use wordy descriptions to manipulate emotions out of his readers; he simply lets the readers draw the parallels between the science-y concepts he talking about […]