Tag: sci-fi

Review – Fritz Leiber Short Stories

N.T. Kova

I listened to three short stories by Fritz Leiber, a prolific speculative fiction writer in the mid to late 20th century. The stories themselves are alright. Perhaps, I didn’t like them as much because they are dated, perhaps because of the narrator that I found so annoying (he was actually doing a robot voice), I’m not really sure. This was another case that I’m sure I would have enjoyed the stories more if I had read them rather than listened. I did get the recordings for free from Librivox, who record public domain works. I do want to say something…

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Review – Vorkosigan Saga

N.T. Kova

I’ve read the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold over 12 years ago and have recommended it to all my friends, some of whom took me up on it and loved it as well. This series is actually what got me back into reading after a long dry spell, where I would maybe read a book a year for school, maybe. What’s even more remarkable is that I read them in Russian. My reading speed in Russian was abhorrent, in the start of the series I think I read about 15 pages an hour, but the books were interesting enough…

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Discovery

N.T. Kova

Emily swiped her card. The little red light turned to green and she walked into the warm embrace of the hallway. She shook her umbrella and let it drip as she made her way into the break room.  The building was quiet and the rare light coming in from the break room was inviting. As usual, Emily made her way in, hung her coat, placed down her umbrella, and powered up the expresso machine. The noise from the water pump broke the silence and then the whirling blades overwhelmed the pump. The smell of fresh ground coffee filled the room…

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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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Priestess

N.T. Kova

She stepped into the temple’s inner circle, where a seven sided star laid in the marble floor. In her hands, she carried a great bowl filled with five large gems. Tonight was the night between the Sun’s day and the Moon’s day, and this was an offering to the goddess honouring her role and sacrifice in creating this world. First, the priestess placed a red gem into a bowl at one of the short sides of the seven sided star. As soon as she placed the gem, the moonlight, coming in through the glass roof, hit it and fantastical images…

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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.

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