Tag: scifi

Review – Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat

N.T. Kova

A few months ago I listened to “Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat” by Adam-Troy Castro published in LightSpeed Magazine and I have to say, I hated it. The premise of this short story is… confusing. Basically, it is a conversation between a victim of an in-progress Kharbat attack and an expert on Kharbats. Is this conversation happening because the victim has implants which let him converse with anyone at any point? The allusion to candles as a primary light source later in the story would suggest otherwise. So, how is this conversation happening? Not clear. But…

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Review – Exhalation

N.T. Kova

Lately, I’ve been loving short stories and anthologies. Basically, every short story that I’ve read I either loved outright, or it was good enough to be worthy of a read. Well, the stories in Exhalation are definitely challenging this. Not that they’re all bad, it’s just that they are such a mixed bag, that they kind of sour the whole anthology. It starts off strong with The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. A time travel story in the style of 1,001 Arabian nights, a tale within a tale, which lends itself well to the paradoxes of time travel. Then, Exhalation…

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Review – The Atonement Path

N.T. Kova

This one was… disturbing. Certainly interesting and definitely captivating. A thought provoking piece that I do recommend you read (or listen to). I found it in the Lightspeed Magazine online. A magazine that has plenty of free short stories to read and listen to. This story, I found by clicking on the author’s name, Alex Irvine, and perusing through his works published in the magazine. The style was engaging – we only get one side of the conversation, never actually hearing the questions asked, only the answers to them. It’s part of what makes this story engaging: you want to…

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Review – Orbs

N.T. Kova

The premise of Orbs by Nicholas S. Smith is relatively interesting, but there are several things that, honestly, just ruined the book for me. One problem is the constant jump in viewpoints, sometimes several times within the same scene! It makes it a quite jarring and confusing. Also, half the time I’m left wondering why the jump happened. Can’t the main character notice the tension in her ex-lover and thus relate to the reader his state of mind? Do we have to jump to his view point for a single paragraph just to find it out? And then, jump back…

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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…

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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…

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Review – Ambassador 1: Seeing Red

N.T. Kova

While reading Ambassador 1:Seeing Red, I’ve been guilty of putting it down and not thinking about it for a few days (or even weeks) before I would pick it up again. And honestly, the reason why I would continue reading it is for this review. So, yea, you guessed it, I’d Skip it, if I were you. But the question in my mind was why did I find it so un-engaging?  The book started with a bang (literally – a bomb blew up) with ramifications for our protagonist and the wider world. It’s true that I didn’t know much about…

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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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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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