Category Archives: Science Fiction

Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira

gunpowder moonGunpowder Moon’s title riffs off the unmistakable gunpowder smell that astronauts have reported on lunar landings. It’s journalist David Pedreira’s first novel, about the hazards of lunar mining, at least when someone is trying to sabotage your operation and kill you.

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Elysium Fire by Alistair Reynolds

elysium firePrefect Tom Dreyfus, his protégé Thalia Ng, Prefect Sparver (a hyperpig) and others who debuted in The Prefect (2007) return in Alistair Reynolds new book in his Revelation Space universe.  Following their adventures stopping an AI from taking control of the Glitter Band, a civilization of orbital habitats managing a pretty good democracy through neural implant consensus, Tom and his colleagues are faced with two new threats to the civilization they are sworn to protect. There’s an influential rabble rouser seeding dissent and urging habitats to secede on the one hand and a mysterious string of deaths spread across the worlds that defies analysis and seems to be increasing exponentially.  If the Glitter Band doesn’t dissolve in discontent, it might fail from mass pandemic unless Dreyfus and the agents of Panoply can find out who or what is behind the deaths and restore the public trust.

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Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

SeaofRustBrittle was a caregiver robot, back when there were humans. Now she’s a scavenger in the Sea of Rust, surviving in a Robotic Mad Max landscape full of failing robots and global AIs seeking to absorb all robot consciousnesses into a single group mind. Worse, the only other caregiver bot needs to scavenge Brittle’s parts to survive, and in a botched attempt to take her down, put Brittle on a path to shutdown. Even though the two robots are locked in a contest to the death for survival, they need to cooperate to escape the coming AI Overlord takeover.  Even for robots, the future sucks.

“It’d be great if the humans were still around, you know, if they hadn’t turned out to be such shits in the end.” Continue reading →

Semiosis by Sue Burke

Semiosis

Publisher:Tor Books (February 6, 2018)

SFRevu Link:  http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=17715

Semiosis Website: https://semiosispax.com/

Semiosis is Sue Burkes’ debut novel, and it’s quite good. The term refers to the whole communications process between living things, and though it usually refers to intraspecies communication, the author ups the ante here. In Semiosis, colonists from a climate change and war-ravaged Earth must learn to get along with plants with opinions.

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Into the Fire by Elizabeth Moon

Into the FIre(Originally posted on SFRevu.com 02.2018)

Following 5 books in the Vatt’as War sequence, Ky Vatta now has a second book of peace, even if peace isn’t all that peaceful. Long ago in book one, Trading in Danger, we met spunky Ky Vatta, the next generation of the Vatta transport and trading fortune. Ky had elected to not follow the family business, but to go to her planet’s military academy, and just before graduating with honors got thrown out because she tried to help the wrong person. From there she went on to a brief trading career, and a longer military conquest, leaving that service at the rank of Admiral and hero of a war. In the last book, Cold Welcome, Ky came back to her home world only to get captured by enemies of her family and held prisoner in a secret facility for months until she managed to escape. That should have been the end of it, and she should now be relaxing with a small fortune in back pay with her fiancée Rafe, and wondering what to do with the rest of her life.  Continue reading →