Tag: book

Review – This is How You Lose the Time War

N.T. Kova

This book is magnificent. It is a tale of an unlikely connection through time and space between mortal enemies. The beautiful prose and the vague, drip by drip introduction to the world and its characters is what make this book work so well. Truly, I don’t want to say much more about the book because everything seems like either a spoiler or a gross mischaracterization. The language is what makes you get lost in this one. However, it is the way the world building is done that keeps you interested. A slow trickle, through hints and turn of phrases. No…

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Review – Octavia Gone

N.T. Kova

I never understood how people read “before bed”: an hour of reading in bed, then just put the book down, turn off the lights, and put your head on a pillow. If I were to do that, I’d be lying wide awake thinking about everything I just read and imagining what might happen next. Well, that was until I read Octavia Gone. Reading this book is the most relaxed I’ve ever felt reading a book.  It was quite tranquil to read about the slow paced, measured investigation done by a practically uninterested party. The pace picks up a bit towards…

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Review – The Watchmaker’s Daughter

N.T. Kova

The good: it takes place in the late 1800’s in London and our protagonist is a (like the title suggests) Watchmaker’s Daughter. Unfortunately for her, her dad just died and her fiancé broke off the engagement after receiving her dad’s store in the will. So, our protagonist is screwed. No work, no money, no one to turn to. The book gets points for an interesting start for our protagonist and for making us care about her quite fast.  Then, she meets a mysterious man from America… ahhh!, I realized, this is a romance! People label your books properly, so i…

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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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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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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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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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