Children of Earth and Sky I should have known Guy Gavriel Kay wouldn’t let me down. Kay’s books are often classified as fantasy, but I think they’re firmly historical fiction. I don’t have anything against fantasy—I grew up on J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, and I still love it—I just don’t think Kay’s books fit the description. Kay’s characters believe in mysticism, but I think that’s more a reflection of how people used to see the world than an effort to inject magic into the proceedings.
Darknet Cover Like Douglas E. Richards’s Infinity Born, Darknet is a near-future science fiction thriller about the dangers of artificial intelligence. But Darknet is a much subtler, more carefully crafted, realistic, and enjoyable novel.
Darknet follows several major characters through settings as diverse as Manhattan, Hong Kong, and rural Canada as they struggle against an artificial intelligence, created by a hedge fund, that’s gone rogue and is attempting to take over the world’s financial and political systems.
Infinity Born Cover I didn’t like this book. It has some interesting and promising ideas, but none of them are well-executed. Ultimately it’s a book with boring characters about computer science and espionage that seems to be written by someone with little understanding of either computer science or espionage.
Infinity Born is a near-future thriller about artificial intelligence. The concepts involved are fascinating. Unfortunately, it’s just not very realistic. The author has a master’s degree in genetic engineering, so I have no doubt he’s capable of understanding the computer science involved, but for some reason it just doesn’t come off that way.
I loved this book. It’s a really fun, fast-paced novel about a guy in a seemingly utopian future with an uhappy family who accidentally destroys the future utopia by using his father’s time machine to derail the technological developments that made it possible. But in the much-less-utopian present, our present, he finds that he’s a lot happier, his family’s a lot happier, and he has a shot at a life with the woman he loves.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a science fiction novel by Becky Chambers. It borrows some tropes of the genre that’ll be familiar to fans of Firefly and The Expanse. However, Angry Planet is light on world-building and plot; it’s almost entirely character-driven. I liked the first half of the book, when getting to know the characters—many of whom are alien species—and, for the most part, the characterization is well done.
Ian McGuire’s novel The North Water is a story about whaling. That alone invites comparisons to Moby Dick, and, indeed, both are gritty, realistic tales about adventures on nineteenth century whalers. But the stories are very different. The North Water is told in the third person and the present tense (which, combined with the graphic descriptions of violence and gore, has prompted comparisons to Cormac McCarthy).
Our protagonist is the Irish doctor Patrick Sumner, who served as an army surgeon during the Indian Rebellion in 1857.
