Tag: Science fiction

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 →

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 →

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) →

Recommendation: Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse Book 8)

Tiamat's Wrath is the eighth book of The Expanse series.  This is definitely a series you want to read in order, so if you're just starting, I'd recommend beginning with the first book, Leviathan Wakes. This is the penultimate book of the series, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that things are seriously heating up.  We … Continue reading Recommendation: Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse Book 8) →

Recommendation: Prador Moon

I've recommended Neal Asher's books before.  This one is pretty much cut from the same pattern: superhuman AIs, fearsome aliens, exotic future technologies, and epic space battles covered in detail.  In terms of the chronology of his Polity future universe, Prador Moon is the earliest story, although it was written after several other books and … Continue reading Recommendation: Prador Moon →

Why faster than light travel is inevitably also time travel

I've always loved space opera, but when I was growing up, as I learned more about science, I discovered that a lot of the tropes in space opera are problematic.  Space operas, to tell adventure stories among the stars, often have to make compromises.  One of the earliest and most pervasive is FTL (faster than … Continue reading Why faster than light travel is inevitably also time travel →