Posts in the Books category.
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July 11
Book: The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.
June 22
Book: Sea State
In her midthirties and newly free from a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley quit her job at a London magazine, packed her bags, and poured her savings into a six-month lease on an apartment in Aberdeen, Scotland. She decided to make good on a long-deferred idea for a book about oil rigs and the men who work on them. Why oil rigs? She wanted to see what men were like with no women around. [more inside]
June 19
Book: Service Model
(Publisher's description):
Meet Charles™, the latest in robot servant technology. Programmed to undertake the most menial household chores, Charles is loyal, efficient and logical to a fault. That is, until a rather large fault causes him to murder his owner.
Understandably perplexed, Charles finds himself without a master – therefore worthless in a society utterly reliant on artificial labour and services. Fleeing the household, he enters a wider world he never knew existed. Here an age-old human hierarchy is disintegrating into ruins, and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to its wellbeing is struggling to find a purpose.
Charles must face new challenges, illogical tasks and a cast of irrational characters. He’s about to discover that sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming. But can he help fix the world, or is it too badly broken? [more inside]
June 9
Book: The Marigold
Set in the near future of a climate change ravaged Toronto, The Marigold is pretty damned good eco-horror. [more inside]
May 22
Book: Some Desperate Glory
By Emily Tesh. World Fantasy Award winner Tesh (the Greenhollow duology of novellas) jumps from quiet fantasy to ambitious sci-fi in her raw and action-packed full-length debut..... [more inside]
May 19
Book: Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams
A 1992 young adult horror novel about a serial killer targeting high school students. He chooses his targets based on their zodiac sign and that day's horoscope. [more inside]
May 10
Book: My Boyfriend Is a Bear
The story of Nora who, after a succession of terrible boyfriends, finds a much happier relationship with a 500-pound American black bear. A 2018 graphic novel by Pamela Ribon and Cat Farris. [more inside]
May 2
Book: This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life
"Studies show that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women--women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, and unhappy. We've all seen how the media portrays divorcées: sad, lonely, drowning their sorrows in a bottle of wine. Lyz Lenz is one such woman whose life fell apart after she reached a breaking point in her twelve-year marriage. But she refused to take part in that tired narrative and decided to flip the script on divorce." (From Bookshop.org) [more inside]
April 23
Book: Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde
It's the UK, but not as we know it: civilisation has rebuilt after an unspoken 'Something that Happened' five hundred years before. Society is now colour-based, the strict levels of hierarchy dictated by the colours you can see, and the economy, health service and citizen's aspirations all dominated by visual colour, run by the shadowy National Colour in far-off Emerald City. [more inside]
April 11
Book: The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones
The final installment in the most lauded trilogy in the history of horror novels picks up four years after Don’t Fear the Reaper as Jade returns to Proofrock, Idaho, to build a life after the years of sacrifice—only to find the Lake Witch is waiting for her in New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones’s finale. -- Simon & Schuster [more inside]
April 10
Book: First Lie Wins
Evie Porter has everything a nice, Southern girl could want: a perfect, doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence and a garden, a fancy group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist. [more inside]
Book: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Cory Doctorow's gonzo science-fiction story of a post-scarcity future where "ad-hoc" worker collectives have taken over various parts of Disney World and compete for whuffie, the reputation-based currency.
March 12
Book: Birnam Wood
A guerilla gardening collective in New Zealand forges an uneasy alliance with a mysterious American billionaire. [more inside]
March 9
Book: By Sound Alone
In a slightly skewed-off timeline of mid-20th-century Earth, the surface of the ocean has become a contested place. International shipping is forced undersea, carried out by subs fitted for transporting cargo. Captain Sylvia Percy and her small crew run one such boat, the "Prospect". They fight a daily battle to keep their rusting submarine from dropping into the depths. It's just another grimy job until they find themselves pursued by a military sub driven by some inexplicable violent purpose. To survive, the crew of the Prospect push the machine that is their home to the very edge of its capabilities, while still trying to make their delivery on time. [more inside]
March 7
Book: Prairie Fires
Rendering this biography as effective at racking nerves as it is at provoking thought, the story of Wilder’s emergence as a major sculptor of American identity pushes far past the usual boundaries of probability and plausibility. For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder’s “Little House” books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading “Prairie Fires” will provide a lasting cure. Just as effectively, for readers with a pre-existing condition of enthusiasm for western American history and literature, this book will refresh and revitalize interpretations that may be ready for some rattling. [more inside]
March 6
Book: Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Reduced to near penury by the iniquitous demands of the Inland Revenue, young barrister Julia Larwood spends the last of her savings on an Art Lovers holiday to Venice. She can't pay her taxes if she takes a vacation, but then again she can't pay her taxes if she doesn't take a vacation. Likewise, her friends worry about her ability to go it alone in a strange city, but that's also true in London. So why not? Her penchant for disaster outdoes itself, though, when a fellow Art Lover is found murdered, himself an employee of the Inland Revenue, with Julia's inscribed copy of the Finance Act beside his corpse.
Book: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
A thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. [more inside]
February 25
Book: House of Flame and Shadow
Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she's going to need all her wits about her to get home again. And that's no easy feat when she has no idea who to trust. Hunt Athalar has found himself in some deep holes in his life, but this one might be the deepest of all. After a few brief months with everything he ever wanted, he's in the Asteri's dungeons again, stripped of his freedom and without a clue as to Bryce's fate. He's desperate to help her, but until he can escape the Asteri's leash, his hands are quite literally tied. [more inside]
Book: Raising Steam
All Aboard! The steam engine has come to Discworld, and with it the prototype locomotive known as Iron Girder. It's new! It's flashy! It's noisy! It's smoky! It can get seafood from Quirm to Ankh-Morpork while it's still worth eating! It can easily kill you if things go wrong! It can let you work in Ankh-Morpork while living elsewhere! And it signals undeniable, major social changes for anywhere the tracks can get to. Moist von Lipwig has handled a lot of dangerous enterprises in his life, but he's never had to take on Dwarven terrorists before now... (Industrial Revolution #7, Discworld #40) By Terry Pratchett. [more inside]
February 22
Book: I Shall Wear Midnight
Well, it's the Chalk's annual Summer festival, and Tiffany Aching has no one to kiss, as her erstwhile beau Roland is now engaged to Leticia Keepsake, daughter of the Duchess. Not that it really matters, as Tiffany is busy enough with making the rounds, burying bodies, stopping lynch mobs, tending to the dying Baron, being accused of the Baron's murder, flying back and forth to Ankh-Morpork to find the heir, escaping from the castle dungeons, guiding two very different young untrained witches, and battling a foul-smelling demonic ghost that is turning the whole disc suddenly and viciously against her... (Tiffany Aching #4, Discworld #38) By Terry Pratchett. [more inside]