I love this series! This one wasn’t my favorite, but it does a great job finishing off the arc started way back in The Last Colony and escalated in The Human Division. Whenever Scalzi comes back to this series, he’ll have a brand new universe to play around in. Also, it’s chock full of Scalzi’s smart, irreverent voice. So this is the sixth book in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. The first three books are a trilogy, #4 is a weird re-telling of #3, and then Human […]
All Aboard the Noah!…and then Someone Dies
Holy babjeebus of holy smokes this book was wild. Intense, mysterious, sci-fi-y and inventive. Welcome to the sci-fi murder-mystery. We dive right in as Hana Dempsey is getting released from breeding duty. She lives on a ship, the Noah, that’s on its way from Earth to a new planet thousands of years away. Breeding duty is exactly what it sounds like; it involves sleeping for 9-ish months while you gestate and birth a child, then get administered a bunch of drugs and back to work. […]
This book is insultingly bad.
Ugh, this was bad. So, so, so, so bad. I can’t believe I never knew how bad this was when I read it fourteen years ago. The first one wasn’t this bad! What’s going on? I mean, this is just BAD WRITING 101. If I was teaching a How to Write Fiction class, I would use this book as the perfect example of what NOT to do. This is going to be a bit different than my normal reviewing style; I’m going to do one with […]
A checklist of 80’s trivia in book form
Okay. I’ve been sitting on this review for about two weeks, getting my head around how I felt about Armada for a bit longer, and 3.5 stars it is. It’s not a bad book — all things considered, it’s very entertaining — but even without comparing it directly to Ernest Cline’s first (and still best) book Ready Player One, it is precocious and simple in ways that aren’t completely flattering. There will be some spoilers below, and I’ll mark them. In this paragraph, I will […]