Category: Book Reviews

 

Review – I Still Dream

N.T. Kova

Read it! This is an interesting novel utilizing multiple time jumps and character views to explore the birth of an artificial intelligence. It starts in the early days of personal computing when most people didn’t own a computer and continues into the decades where basically everything is a computer. In each chapter, with each time jump, the novel deals with a new problem, a new life challenge; and as you see the problem play out, you also see the rise of AI and its ubiquity. It is easy to imagine nowadays how easy it would be for a program to…

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Review – Play to Live

N.T. Kova

Play to Live is the first book in a series called AlterWorld and I’d recommend you read it! It is a fun adventure full of high stakes and riveting challenges. The series is seven books long and a page turner throughout. I listened to these books in audio format and was entertained for multiple weeks of commutes and household chores. Not going to lie, I’ve even started to do more chores in order to continue listening to this book.  The combination of the writing style, the humour, and the exciting world keeps you engaged and engrossed. Again, Read it! The…

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Review – Frankenstein

N.T. Kova

First thing I want to say about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that the actual book is very different than what’s in the pop culture ethos. Yes, there are the little things like, Frankenstein isn’t the monster, he is the guy who created the monster and no, he wasn’t a doctor. But the differences are actually a lot more interesting and make the book a worthy read. Despite all of the adaptations in pop culture of this book, the original story is often lost. The story is written from the perspective of a character that is nowhere to be found in…

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Roadside Picnic – Review

N.T. Kova

Right away – Read it! This is a sci-fi classic. Sure, it is Russian sci-fi classic, but I’d say it’s on the level of Arthur C. Clarke and others. Disclaimer, I read this in Russian, but the tidbits of translations I’ve seen seem to be good. There might be a few cultural references that will be hard to understand, but the book is still fantastic without them. The title of the book, Roadside Picnic, is a fantastic analogue for an alien visit that is almost nonexistent in sci-fi: aliens either want to kill us or to make friends. I don’t…

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The Hound – Review

N.T. Kova

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound is a short story written as a last confession and suicide note, a common form for Lovecraft’s writings. I actually never read Lovecraft before this and was truly impressed with the language. I am someone who tends to remember the story or the characters and pay little attention to the style or word choice, but Lovecraft is a notable exception. The language is part of the story as much as the characters or the events. It sets the mood and tells us about the author of the confession. The word choice also underlines the other-worldliness of…

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Brother Book Review

N.T. Kova

So this one is a weird one. It is not sci-fi, it is good old, regular, normal fiction.  I read it for a writing course I took. Personally, I thought it was meh. The story is about an immigrant family in Toronto and their grief. I think part of the reason I didn’t like it is that it isn’t in my genre and I prefer to read about odd situations and imaging what I would do in them.  As an immigrant myself, I can imagine myself well in the situation described in Brother and there is nothing overly exciting about…

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Our Lady of the Ice – Review

N.T. Kova

Our Lady of the Ice is an interesting piece of sci-fi. It takes place in the domed Antarctic city, what feels like the 1950’s . Our main protagonist is a young PI hoping to earn enough money for a visa to the mainland. However, everything gets a lot more complicated when she takes a case for a rich aristocrat. I’d say, read it! It has a good pace, interesting mysteries to uncover, and a good sense of tension. The story telling takes place through multiple characters and it is used to explore the world and the mysteries. The book also…

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Childhood’s End – Book Review

N.T. Kova

What can I say? This is a classic – read it! Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke is a fantastic tale of alien contact with earth. It explores the consequences of such contact with a mindful and engaging narrative. There are three sections to the book, each with its own mystery and its own characters. This approach allows the author to explore the impacts of an alien contact through a wide lens and keeps the reader engrossed in the world. One benefit of Clarke’s work is that it is 237 pages. It doesn’t waste the reader’s time with exposition or…

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The Big Book of Science Fiction Review

N.T. Kova

The Big Book of Science Fiction is an anthology of a century’s worth of sci-fi short stories. It is a large collection with 1216 pages! Before each short story, there is a short biography of the author, which sometimes helps frame the story you’re about to read. Considering that some of the stories were written in the early 1900’s, the framing helps explain why there are two moons on mars, for example. However, sometimes the biography is not very interesting. Too often there is a long list of the author’s publications, which doesn’t add much to the story ahead. So,…

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Fallen World Book Review

N.T. Kova

Ugh… This one is a little difficult to review. The author, Simon Emery, reached out to me through an Indie Database, which contains useful contacts for indie authors (self-published, or published by small indie publishers). He gave me his eBook for free for a review (to be fair the book is like US$2.5). When I started reading the book, Fallen World, I got frustrated. The book needs a line editor! Grammatical issues, word repetitions, pronoun confusion, all of those things made it hard to read and took me right out of the story. I’d often have to track back and…

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