Em X. Liu’s The Death I Gave Him is an interesting beast. Mostly, it’s an exceedingly clever and faithful retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Put simply, if you’re at all familiar with Hamlet, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on here. Liu takes the guts of that familiar story and works into something that’s both original and familiar.
Transforming the story into a sci-fi locked-room mystery of sorts adds an extra layer of tension, even if you immediately know who did it. That lack of suspense doesn’t really matter as Liu adds enough other intrigue through all of the added sci-fi elements. The Death I Gave Him is less of a whodunnit and more of a whydunnit and what-is-going-to-be-done-about-it. There’s an overwhelming sense of inevitability to the story, too. One that comes from being familiar with the source material, to be sure. But one that also comes from this dark, overpowering sense of melancholy that permeates the entire story. Don’t come for the mystery, but do stick around for the character-driven revenge.
The Destroyer of Worlds feels like a “middle installment” in every sense of the phrase. On the one hand, it offers a very welcome return to the world of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. On display once again is this startlingly haunting marriage of Lovecraftian horror and Jim Crow-era racism. While not quite as scary as the first book, it still offers a fast-paced, thrilling ride through some classic, pulpy sci-fi tropes. And getting to spend more time with these characters is a delight, too, especially those characters that didn’t get quite as much focus in the first book (like Hippolyta and Ruby).
This is an absolutely gorgeous listen. There’s simply no other way to describe it. It’s the kind of story that’s so good it makes you wonder why they haven’t been doing stories like this the whole time. It’s like River was made for this story. A multi-generational mystery exploring the depths of love, loss, familial drama, and hope in the face of all of that. It’s funny, it’s adventurous, it’s touching, and it’s heartbreaking. One of the behind-the-scenes interviews suggests this story’s like “This is Us” with time travel, and that’s an incredibly accurate statement.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A dystopian future wrecked by climate change and other semi-apocalyptic events. An overreaching police force enforcing questionable laws. And an officer who quickly finds himself turning into the very thing he’s been hunting. If you immediately thought of a dozen different sci-fi books and movies, that’s completely understandable. Despite how fun a read Blake Crouch’s new novel, Upgrade, is, I wouldn’t call it very original. However, what it lacks in originality, it more than makes up for with intricately plotted twists and turns and plenty of thrilling action sequences. Upgrade reads like the literary equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie in the best way possible. It’s a compulsive read from start to finish and a perfect book for a summer vacation.
If you’re a fan of weird, creative, deeply original science fiction, then Paul Cornell’s new novella, Rosebud, is worth checking out. A quick, dense read, Rosebud is unlike anything I’ve read in ages. Featuring a group of immediately captivating characters and an absolutely mind-blowing plot, Rosebud isn’t always an easy read and it could benefit from being expanded into a full-length novel. But when it works, it works very well.
NOTE: I received a review copy of Rosebud from Macmillan/Tor and NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.
Rosebud Written by Paul Cornell When five sentient digital beings―condemned for over three hundred years to crew the small survey ship by the all-powerful Company―encounter a mysterious black sphere, their course of action is clear: obtain the object, inform the Company, earn lots of praise. But the ship malfunctions, and the crew has no choice but to approach the sphere and survey it themselves. They have no idea that this object―and the transcendent truth hidden within―will change the fate of all existence, the Company, and themselves.
I think it’s safe to say that nobody’s been watching the most recent Godzilla movies for their stunning human characters. No, we’re all just there for the cool world-building and the big Kaiju vs Kaiju action scenes. But imagine a book that combines cool world-building, bombastic action scenes, and compelling characters, and you might end up with something like John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. Featuring a breezy plot, well-rounded characters, and blockbuster-worthy thrills, The Kaiju Preservation Society is as good as the best Kaiju movies. A fun read from start to finish, The Kaiju Preservation Society might just be the pick-me-up we all need right now.
NOTE: I received a review copy of The Kaiju Preservation Society from Macmillan/Tor and NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.
If you’ve ever wanted a book that combines elements of time travel, murder mysteries, and ghost stories all into one, then Rob Hart’s The Paradox Hotel is the book for you. Genre-defying to a fault, The Paradox Hotel crams so much story into its 300-odd pages that it’s kind of a miracle everything works as well as it does. But overall, The Paradox Hotel is a genuinely impressive book. The mystery’s satisfying and well-plotted. The emotional stakes are clear and well-developed. And the book is just so much fun to read – a shining example of a compulsive page-turner.
(NOTE: I received a review copy of The Paradox Hotel from Random House Publishing Group/Ballantine Books and NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.)
Alien first contact stories are a dime a dozen. They always focus on the immediate impact of extraterrestrial contact – how does humanity survive that first encounter? But what about the aftermath? What happens months later when the dust has settled and the shock dissipates? What are the long-term impacts of knowing humanity isn’t alone in the universe? This is the question at the heart of Lindsay Ellis’s Truth of the Divine. Picking up where the first book, Axiom’s End, left off, Truth of the Divine simultaneously expands the world introduced in that first book while delving even deeper into the psyches of its characters – human and alien alike. Truth of the Divine takes everything that worked in Axiom’s End and makes them even better. And it’s a thrilling, thought-provoking read that stays with you long after the first page. (4.5 out of 5 wands.)
(Note: I received an ARC of this novel from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own. Additionally, mild spoilers for both Axiom’s End and Truth of the Divine follow.)
Truth of the Divine Written by Lindsay Ellis The human race is at a crossroads; we know that we are not alone, but details about the alien presence on Earth are still being withheld from the public. As the political climate grows more unstable, the world is forced to consider the ramifications of granting human rights to nonhuman persons. How do you define “person” in the first place?
Have you ever read one of those books that immediately envelops your interest? One that just grabs your attention and holds it like a vice, daring you to put the book down? There’s nothing quite like reading a book like that. It’s a high that all readers chase as often as they can. Reading Dan Frey’s newest sci-fi techno-thriller, The Future is Yours, created just that experience for me. The Future is Yours is an epistolary novel and tells its story through writing found within the novel’s world (like emails, text messages, blog posts, transcripts of congressional hearings). As a result, it creates a reading experience unlike those found in prose-based novels. The Future is Yours is a face-paced, thrilling read that asks what might happen if humans could access information from the future and then thoroughly unpacks all the reasons why humans shouldn’t be allowed to do that. It’s a nuanced page-turner with fully-fleshed characters and a well-executed premise that’s well worth a read for all sci-fi fans. (4.5 out of 5 wands.)
NOTE: I received an ARC of this novel from NetGalley. All thoughts are my own. Additionally, this review is spoiler free.
For Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry, the answer is unequivocally yes. And they’re betting everything that you’ll say yes, too. Welcome to The Future: a computer that connects to the internet one year from now, so you can see who you’ll be dating, where you’ll be working, even whether or not you’ll be alive in the year to come. By forming a startup to deliver this revolutionary technology to the world, Ben and Adhi have made their wildest, most impossible dream a reality. Once Silicon Valley outsiders, they’re now its hottest commodity.
The device can predict everything perfectly—from stock market spikes and sports scores to political scandals and corporate takeovers—allowing them to chase down success and fame while staying one step ahead of the competition. But the future their device foretells is not the bright one they imagined. Ambition. Greed. Jealousy. And, perhaps, an apocalypse. The question is . . . can they stop it?
Told through emails, texts, transcripts, and blog posts, this bleeding-edge tech thriller chronicles the costs of innovation and asks how far you’d go to protect the ones you love—even from themselves.
Who doesn’t love a good fish out of water comedy? There’s just so much joy to be mined out of watching a character from one environment have to navigate the ins and the outs of a totally new and alien environment. This trope is especially successful in sci-fi settings, where either a human has to adapt to an alien culture or vice versa. It’s this trope that first attracted me to SyFy’s Resident Alien, a TV adaptation of the Dark Horse Comics series of the same name. Here, Alan Tudyk plays an alien who’s crash-landed in a small Colorado town and is forced to blend in with the local townsfolk as a quirky doctor, Harry Vanderspeigle, while searching for the remnants of his ship and the device he intends to use to destroy the world. It’s one of those premises that seems destined to become a classic sci-fi fish out of water story. Unfortunately, Resident Alien never quite manages to take off in its first seven episodes. It’s not a bad show, just a wildly uneven one. Its plot is unfocused, it struggles to balance its comedy with its drama, and many of the characters feel underdeveloped, at best, and paper thin and annoying, at worst. There’s plenty of potential here, but there’s a lot of work to be done before this show is as good as its premise is. (3 out of 5 wands.)
NOTE: This review is based off of the first seven episodes. It will be as spoiler free as possible.
Resident Alien (created by Chris Sheridan) Based on the Dark Horse comic, SYFY’s RESIDENT ALIEN follows Harry, an alien played by Alan Tudyk that crash lands on Earth and passes himself off as a small-town human doctor. Arriving with a secret mission to kill all humans, Harry starts off living a simple life… but things get a bit rocky when he’s roped into solving a local murder and realizes he needs to assimilate into his new world. As he does so, he begins to wrestle with the moral dilemma of his mission and asking the big life questions like: “Are human beings worth saving?” and “Why do they fold their pizza before eating it?”
Thoroughly Modern Reviewer 