This frenzied page-turner takes some delightfully unhinged ideas (invasion by alien punctuation, rave-themed VR dungeons, and a plane of existence where all ideas physically exist), creates a believable spell-casting system, and inserts a bad-ass heroine as odd as her world.
It’s a fast-paced, genre-bending, bonkers ride, and I loved every bit of it.
Recommendation: Read it. Absolutely.
Rabbits is a wild, surreal story that combines the bizarre conspiracies of X-Files and geeky fun of Ready Player One. It’s ridiculously entertaining.
Rabbits is the name of a game where you, in the real world, could find strange coincidences like this:
It’s an average work day. You’ve been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air—4:44 p.m. You check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize the date is April 4—4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444.
While this could just be an unlikely number of meaningless coincidences, in the world of Rabbits, it means you’ve seen the edge of the game. Following these clues to the game’s end could result in immortality, vast riches, or even bigger prizes. Of course, the game can also be deadly. People have reportedly won the game, but many more have died.
Rabbits follows K, who’s been trying to get into the game for years. But when a reclusive billionaire tells K that there’s something wrong with the game and that K needs to fx it before the game starts, K is pulled into a game even larger that what he’d imagined.
Recommendation: Read it, absolutely.
If you have even a passing interest in math, i.e., if you see an equation and don’t recoil as if you just spotted a spider moseying up your thigh, then these books are for you.
Ecofiction are stories usually about the relationship between humanity and nature, but anything related to nature or the environment will do. That encompasses a lot of books, and I’ve tried to represent a lot of different ideas and approaches (some very weird) in this list.
The New Wave of science fiction started around the mid-60s and was an explosion of new ideas, experimental formats, and some serious weirdness. It was a departure from the more straightforward stories of the forties and fifties, so expect varying degrees of WTF-ery in these books.
Oryx and Crake is an excellent book, interesting and strange, that grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. It manages to be more about character than plot but still moves quickly.
The last few decades have seen an explosion of really well-written science fiction aimed at middle graders/tweens. I would have loved to have had these books during those (for me) wildly awkward years.
Postcyberpunk is just like cyberpunk (high tech + low life), but without a few of its tropes: you’re less likely to find an edgy loner stumbling through the rain, spitting out noirish one-liners. Postcyberpunk tends to be a little more playful, a little stranger. However, it’s still pretty ill-defined as a subgenre, so one could argue endlessly about what is and isn’t postcyberpunk. Or just read some of the books on this list and decide for yourself.
Once again, writers took a hold of the future and gave it a good throttling in 2021.
