Tag: book recommendation

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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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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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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Revenger Book Recommendation

N.T. Kova

I’m not going to bury the lead – skip it! Right away, the book starts with lots of new words that have a different meaning in the Revenger’s world. And it would be ok, if it wasn’t ten new words per paragraph leaving me with the feeling that something happened, I’m just not sure what. To note, I consume a lot of science fiction, so the normal sci-fi concepts are not new to me.

Infinity’s End Book Recommendation

N.T. Kova

At the moment I am reading Infinity’s End edited by Jonathan Strahan. It is a collection of sci-fi short stories by 14 different authors and is the seventh and last part of the Infinity Project. The project collected sci-fi stories with particular themes in each volume. I did not know this when I picked the book, but since these are short stories it did not affect my read.

Book Recommendation Scale

N.T. Kova

Personally, I enjoy short book recommendations – should I read it? That’s it. Of course, I need to know if your tastes are similar to mine, but that’s it. This is why I’ve chosen to write short book recommendations, which answer two main questions: did I like it and what type of book it was. In that regard, I will be using the following scale: Read it! Meh… Skip it.

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