Wow, this book. There are a few technical elements that initially justified me wanting to leave off the fifth star, but the sheer audacity of the story and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about it a month later make Seveneves one of my favorite books of the year, and certainly the most thought-provoking. Effortlessly checking off a list of “stuff I want in a sci-fi novel,” Seveneves is technical and speculative, extrapolating from cutting-edge current science to detail seemingly inevitable future technology. Equally […]
Writing Science Fiction #LikeAGirl
During the past few days, a couple of interesting stories crossed my screen and they are so perfectly related to my current review that they simply must be referenced. First came the #LikeAGirl campaign from Always, encouraging us to turn that pejorative expression into a compliment. Then came this story from NPR about women writers in science fiction: Women are Destroying Science Fiction and That’s OK — They Created It. As I have just finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed, I must say […]
A book easy enough for your dog to understand, but maybe not you.
I’m a bit of a closet physics fan. It’s hard to admit, seeing as the classes I struggled with most in college were my physics courses. But if you don’t force me to work out equations for things like how a ball bounces, and just talk to me about all the weird stuff that physics predicts, I’m an enthusiastic student. While there are a lot of mysteries to be understood in this world, there is one thing that really bothers me. I don’t get relativity. […]
A visit to M.C. Escher Park: The Relativity of Dogs, Cats, and Bunnies
Radical Daffodils Review “… Orzel takes a conversational tone both with the reader and in his asides with Emmy, and if his teaching style is anything like his writing style I’d love to take one of his classes one day.”