We open up with six year old Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggins having a tough day at school. He’s getting his monitor removed, he’s teased for being a Third, and he nearly beats another kid to death. Once home he is threatened with death from his older brother and seems to have a little too much affection for his sister. He’s worried that he has washed out of his military training, but it’s all good, these are just more tests for him to pass. Right off the bat I’m a bit confused by one of the core systems in place in Ender’s…
Category: sci fi
Ender’s Game
Orson Scott Card wrote Ender’s Game in 1985 and it was pretty much an instant Sci Fi classic. It’s been a long time since I read the book, but the film seems pretty close to what I remember. The main difference being that Ender’s brother and sister have much smaller roles in the film than they did in the novel. Ender’s Game is the story of a military academy which trains children to do battle using complex computer simulations. This is necessary because, well, I’m not sure why it’s necessary. Something about the youthful mind. At any rate our boy…
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
I read Connie Willis’s Bellwether when it came out in 1997 and was pretty impressed with it, but not impressed enough to look for any more of her books. The time limits of life make it difficult to read every book I might like. Not too long ago I found a list of the Top 100 SciFi books, Doomsday Book was on the list. Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction in 1992. A few spoilers within. Connie Willis is an interesting writer with a great style and the ability to breath life into her…
Gravity
Bad things happen in space. Especially in movies. In Gravity Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are busy on a routine mission when they run into a bit of a problem. A couple of tons of space debris is working it’s way around the earth every ninety minutes, and it randomly destroys everything not in direct contact with Sandra Bullock. Gravity is a damned good movie. The pacing is such that time seems to fly by as George and Sandra float and drift and tumble in the void. There are time limits, such as running out of air and running out…
The Colony
In the not too distance future-2045-the world has become a giant snowball thanks to mankind’s nasty global warming habits and his attempts to put an end to global warming. We find our heroes in Colony 7, where once four hundred people lived, but now a good deal less are muddling through. Filmed in an old NORAD base, the sets looked pretty good and while the CGI was not great for the exterior shots, it wasn’t all that bad either. The acting was good, for the most part. I like seeing Bill Paxton and Lawrence Fishburne in movies and as for…
Woken Furies
Takeshi Kovac, mad killer, body hopping ex-Envoy Agent returns home to Harlan’s World-where we find him busy body hopping, killing lots of people and using his Envoy skills. Oh yeah, he has sex with a couple of people as well. Woken Furies has a lot going for it. Many of the mysteries from the first two books are explored and Takeshi seems to have a mission in life for a change. On the other hand, his mission is killing off fundamentalist believers, so that may not make him much of a hero in some people’s eye. I’ve read other sci-fi…
Altered Carbon
Our story opens with the hero and his girlfriend being killed-which leads to them being sentenced to digital storage for a hundred years. In this brave world of the future death is a little less permanent than it is now. Unless someone burns your stack-then you get the Real Death. Altered Carbon is filled with future slang and it does a pretty good job of sliding in a ton of backstory about the many elite groups that have a hand in ruling the universe. The main gimmick is the digital downloading of consciousness upon death and how a rich person…
Safety Not Guaranteed
The story of a lowly intern working at a newspaper who gets the chance to follow up on a quirky human interest story. In article-writing-speak: Safety Not Guaranteed buries the lead, and buries it pretty damned good. 99 and 44/100th percent of the story is the fairly mundane business of tracking down leads, wasting time that should be spent tracking down leads, and wasting a bit more time getting wasted. Just as Moby Dick only shows up on the next to last page of Moby Dick, so too does Time Travel play a backseat role to the lives of the…
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Image you’re a Lit Major who has made a number of amazing and critical discoveries about the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust. Now image your disappointment at finding there is no real money to be made criticizing Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust. What do you do with all that damned research and all that time wasted reading the Iliad, the Sonnets, and Swann’s Way? Why you write a space opera, of course. Or so it seemed to me while I was wading through Dan Simmons Ilium. Ilium is a long book that is basically three novels morphed into one. Two…
Red Shirts
A group of low ranking officers on a star ship come to the shocking conclusion that going on away missions is often a death sentence. The odds of dying go up or down depending on how many of the senior officers are also on the away mission. Our hero is a new member of the crew-one Ensign Andrew Dahl, who discoveries a number of odd things about the Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. In addition to the high death rate for away missions, there is also the odd way that many problems are solved-by putting…