Tag: scifi

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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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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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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The Steppe

N.T. Kova

The wind was in his face, flaying is long dark hair. He saw a speck on the horizon, shining brightly against the raising hot air, and gave a glottal grunt. The horse picked up the pace. As he approached the strange hut, he slowed down to a light trot. Its broken contours and unnatural glow in the Sun made it look like the ancient ruins. He’d seen them himself when he was a child. When he first found it, he followed a falling star so bright it lit the night sky.  He was so close to it when it first…

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Time Shards Book Recommendation

N.T. Kova

Time Shards by Dana Fredsti and David Fitzgerald is a good sci-fi novel. We follow multiple characters as they navigate through a time broken world and encounter horrors both natural and man-made. The main protagonist, a young woman, is portrayed well and doesn’t suffer from the usual sci-fi tropes. The story is interesting and pulls off misdirection well. There are a few bumps. The beginning is a bit long and I would’ve definitely cut at least one scene. It felt cliché and uninspired (et tu, Brute). Toward the end there is at least one moment of colossal luck, which irritated…

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