Written by Suzanne Palmer, Finder is a perfectly fine sci-fi novel that offers an overfamiliar, but, for the most part, well-told story about a cocky smuggler caught in a war when trying to steal a spaceship.
The protagonist, Fergus Ferguson, is actually not called a smuggler, but a finder: a person whose job is to locate certain objects and retrieve them for whoever is paying him. He’s a hulky red-haired man and the type of person who is usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, when Ferguson travels to a space colony to steal a ship from a warlord named Gilger, he inadvertently gets inside a cable car with an old woman called Mattie Vahn, who just happens to be on [...]
*This review contains spoilers*
Written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965, Dune is a complex sci-fi novel that is full of interesting characters and challenging discussion. Its narrative excels when it comes to building a stifling, oppressive atmosphere, immersing the reader into the main characters’ paranoia, but it occasionally falters when dealing with the delivery of exposition regarding its carefully built world.
Dune’s story is structured around the feud between two noble families – the Atreides and the Harkonnens –, who fight to control the production of an important spice on the planet of Arrakis, also known as Dune. This eventually leads to the rise of a [...]
Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel written by Ernest Cline, uses the vastness of the geek universe to compose the base of its narrative. The book, however, is marked by one-dimensional characters and a shallow, boring story that fails to deliver anything more than glorified references.
The story takes place in a decrepit society dominated by mega-corporations, where hunger, war, disease, and the terrible consequences of climate change have become common afflictions in the lives of the common people. That is, it’s basically nowadays, but a bit worse. In this scenario, people’s only means of escapism is digital: the so-called “Oasis” is a gigantic MMO in VR, a [...]
The Luminous Dead is a horror story about two women having to both confront and help each other under terrible circumstances. The novel excels at building tension and maintaining a suffocating atmosphere, immersing the reader in the protagonist’s paranoia while establishing a very troubled relationship between its two main characters.
The protagonist, a young caver called Gyre Price, is tasked to explore a dangerous cave system deep underground in an alien planet, but things eventually go awry, and her only means of escape is through her handler, the inscrutable Em, who is far from a forthcoming individual.
The novel’s first sentence is already an ominous warning that [...]
The debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky, blends fantasy with sci-fi, putting witches, magical trees, talking birds, mad scientists, time machines, and doomsday devices all inside the same story, but with mixed results: the fantastical elements can impress us with their creativity, leaving us with a feeling of wonder, but they also end up drawing too much attention to themselves, sometimes hiding the touching love story that should have been the focus of the narrative.
The novel has two main characters, Patricia and Laurence, and starts to follow their point of view when they are just kids meeting each other at school, right after having life-altering [...]
Some stories are more interested in developing ideas than creating a convoluted plot full of twists and turns. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a science fiction novel written by Becky Chambers, falls into this category, with a narrative committed to raising discussions based on the particular dilemmas of its characters.
The protagonist is called Rosemary, a young woman who is fleeing from her past and seeking employment on a spaceship. She is hired by the eccentric crew of the Wayfarer, which includes a reptilian pilot, a doctor with six limbs who can naturally change their biological sex, and a navigator who considers a virus that is infecting him an entity worthy of [...]