The Readin Roos

Megan Mcafferty, the author of the Jessica Darling series of books, has here crafted a smart and insightful piece of YA chick-lit. However, while the intended audience is clearly tween and teen girls, this book should be read by boys and young men as well. The story is set in a near-future dystopia, where a worldwide virus has rendered most humans incapable of bearing children after the age of eighteen. The story's main characters, twins separated at birth by the names of Melody and Harmony, grow up in very different communities in the United States - one in a closed religious order akin to the Amish or Hutterites, the other in a hyper-secularlized and commercialized open community.

This YA fantasy did not captivate me. I do like some fantasy books, but this one was very strange. The main character, Sojourner (or "Scotch"), was exceptionally compelling - a teenage bi-racial Jamaican immigrant to Canada - and the initial setting was completely realistic. However, fantastic elements start creeping in, and the entire story collapses into a mish-mash of figments of imagination from dreams or nightmares as a large volcano appears in the middle of Lake Ontario. The real problem is the randomness of the appearance of some of the fantastic creatures, and the lack of service of some of them in advancing the story.

This book was a fun read, but relied a little too heavily on the rather gimmicky premise. Steampunk and zombies meet up in 1880s Seattle after an "accident" with an experimental drilling machine. The author notes in an afterword that she takes quite a few liberties with history and that's not my main problem with this book. My main problem with it is the dialogue. I am by no means an expert in linguistic patterns of the 1880s, but the way characters spoke in this book sounded suspiciously modern to me.

I'm conflicted about this book. The first few sections read as a fast-paced farce, with plenty of snappy, pulpy dialogue. I enjoyed this part of the book very much. However, in later sections, when the novel is given over to a free-love cult, the pacing slows to a crawl and the points Heinlein makes are belabored and (to this reader) uninteresting. Does Heinlein really believe this tripe? Can this be the same author who wrote Starship Troopers?

This book has rightly been called a classic of the hard science fiction genre. The novel's portrayal of scientists engaged in research, and the internal politics of research groups in physics, is realistic and believable. I base that assessment on my own experiences working in a condensed matter physics lab as an undergraduate, as well as on my short stint as an accelerator physics graduate student working daily at a lab facility. Benford wrote Timescape in 1979-80, and the book alternates between 1963 and 1998.

There could be few subtitles for this work as insightful as the author's chosen "An Ambiguous Utopia." Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed provides plenty of food for thought. Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, a moon of the planet Urras, finds himself chafing for individual freedom within the commune-like society of this lunar colony. Shevek becomes the first human to return to Urras, to the country A-Io, in order to pursue his physical theories.

William Mandella has issues, and he's going to deal with them frankly. A conscript for an interstellar war against the Taurans, he finds himself flung through collapsars to distant maybe-battles, engaged in automation-mediated combat that wipes out most of his unit. Finally making it back to Earth and out of the service, he finds it impossible to adjust to a civilian life that has changed markedly in the twenty-one Earth-years that he has been gone (aging only a couple years himself due to lots of near-relativistic-speed space travel).

Wow! This is the first time I've read anything by Octavia Butler and I found it absolutely captivating. The title story, which Butler calls her "pregnant man story," was excellent, but I find myself still mulling over the implications of "Speech Sounds." In it, a disease causes people to lose their ability to speak and/or read and write. It is absolutely devastating. The collection also includes afterwords for each story. I'm usually not a fan of reading what writers have to say about their work, but Butler's insights were pretty compelling.

Did I ever mention that vampire books give me the willies? I mean uncomfortable, squirm-in-my-seat and put-the-book-down agitation? So why am I reading Fledgling? The answer is the author Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia Butler writes a post-modern tale of vampires. What I thought I knew about the species referred to as the Ina in this book is only partially accurate, the result of long-term contact and misunderstanding between Ina and human beings.