The movie Ad Astra is a strange mix. In many ways, it's a visually stunning film with excellent production values. And it has first class name stars, most notably Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones. But the plot has serious issues. On balance, I enjoyed it, but this is a case where your mileage may … Continue reading Ad Astra: Apocalypse Now in space
Category: Science Fiction
Recommendation: Silver (Inverted Frontier Book 2)
I just finished reading Linda Nagata's new book, Silver, which is the second book of her new Inverted Frontier series. It's a sequel to the first book, Edges, which I recommended earlier this year, and Memory, which I described and recommended a few weeks ago. Characters from both books feature heavily in the new story. … Continue reading Recommendation: Silver (Inverted Frontier Book 2)
Recommendation: Memory
I've noted before that I think science fiction author Linda Nagata is an underrated talent. She crafts mind bendingly imaginative tales. I've recommend several of her books, all in The Nanotech Succession series, which she has recently started adding to again with her latest book: Edges. (Technically the newer books are part of a new … Continue reading Recommendation: Memory
Recommendation: Altered Carbon: Download Blues
I posted a while back on the Netflix series, Altered Carbon, based on the books by Richard K. Morgan. The series presents a universe where everyone has a device implanted in their brainstem shortly after birth that records their personality, so that if they die, the device can be moved to either another human body, … Continue reading Recommendation: Altered Carbon: Download Blues
Recommendation: The Warship
Back in January, I recommended Neal Asher's The Soldier, the first book of a series called The Rise of the Jain. The series takes place in Asher's Polity universe, a future interstellar civilization run by AIs (artificial intelligence) and featuring androids, various degrees of posthuman citizens, and lots of aliens, both in AI and organic … Continue reading Recommendation: The Warship
Recommendation: Children of Ruin
Last year I recommended Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, a novel about the far future involving a struggle between an interstellar ark of refugees from a dying Earth and an accidental civilization of uplifted spiders over the one terraformed world known to be available. Children of Ruin is a sequel, although a substantial portion of … Continue reading Recommendation: Children of Ruin
Reflections on Game of Thrones
(Warning: Here be spoilers!) Last week was the series finale for Game of Thrones, a series I'd been watching from the very beginning. Indeed, I first discovered George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books way back in 2002. I still remember seeing the first book in the store, with the cover … Continue reading Reflections on Game of Thrones
Recommendation: The Nanotech Succession
Okay, having already recommended two of Linda Nagata's books, Vast and Edges, I finally got around to reading the first and second book of her Nanotech Succession series. (I haven't read the "zeroeth" book so this recommendation doesn't include it.) The first book, The Bohr Maker, takes place a few centuries in the future on … Continue reading Recommendation: The Nanotech Succession
Avengers: Endgame
I saw it this weekend. I will say that it's an enjoyable and entertaining movie. But it's something of a logical mess. I'm not spoiling much by saying that time travel features in the story. Early in the movie, there's discussion about how lame movie treatments of time travel typically are. (Back to the Future … Continue reading Avengers: Endgame
Recommendation: Edges (Inverted Frontier Book 1)
A few weeks ago I recommended Linda Nagata's novel, Vast, the final book of her Nanotech Succession series. Edges is both a sequel to that book, and the first episode in a new series, Inverted Frontier. As in Vast, this is a future where mind uploading and copying is possible, where multiple copies of someone's … Continue reading Recommendation: Edges (Inverted Frontier Book 1)
