Tag: science fiction

Review – The Cure

N.T. Kova

The Cure is the second book in the Unbounded series, after The Change. I liked The Change, it was fast paced, action romance with an SFF premise. It had its issues, like the romantic interest being the “brooding brute” trope, but overall, fun and worthy of a quick read. The Cure, is a different story. One problem is that it suffers from being a sequel. The start of the book is full of exposition dumps. Lots of them. I believe this is done for the people who never read the first one. However, for the people who did read the…

Continue Reading→

Review – The Change

N.T. Kova

I really enjoyed this book. It was such a fun read. High paced, action filled, and with a touch of romance. It had all the right ingredients to make me want to keep reading. The story starts with Erin, who suffers a terrible car crush and is burnt over most of her body. Although she should have died, she soon wakes up without a trace of the accident on her body. That’s how she discovers she is Unbounded, a nearly immortal being with fantastical abilities. Unfortunately for her, that means she has to abandon her old life and join a…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

Review – Transmission

N.T. Kova

Transmission is a young adult novel with a 13 year old boy as a protagonist and I actually enjoyed this book. I’m not big on young adult novels as the problems teenagers face seemed irrelevant to me even when I was a teenager, but this book was well written and avoided many of the tropes of young adult sci-fi. Perhaps it is because the protagonist finds out at the very beginning of the book that he is dying and, so normal teenage problems are not really part of his life anymore. There were a few moments that made me cringe…

Continue Reading→

Review – The Forever War

N.T. Kova

What can I say? Read it! I mean, drop everything you’re doing and read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman . I can go on about the fantastic short writing style, the visceral subject matter, or the fact that I actually cried reading it, but all of those would be superficially inadequate reasons. This book is now my #1 by such a high margin that it’s sitting on top of mount Everest, while the other books in my list haven’t even gotten to base camp. Even if you don’t like sci-fi, even if you don’t like “war” books, even if…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

↑

We use cookies to offer you a better browsing experience, analyze site traffic, and serve targeted advertisements. Read about how we use cookies in our policy page. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies.