Elysium Fire is a solid, interesting mystery with Reynold’s typical fantastic worldbuilding and strong characters. However, several issues made this book a bit of a disappointment for me.
Category Archives: Far-future
Review: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
As a straight white middle-aged male, I’ve often felt like science fiction’s target demographic. Most SF feels like it’s aimed right at me.
Midnight Robber is definitely not aimed at me. Which, honestly, made it a lot more interesting. Being extremely well written helped a lot, too.
Review: House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
Author Alastair Reynolds isn’t afraid of big, strange ideas, and he puts on a parade of them in House of Suns.
Review: The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards in 1975, The Mote in God’s Eye has not aged particularly well. There are some clever twists and exciting sequences in this far-future first-contact tale, and the alien Motes are, in some ways, truly alien.
Review: The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
A ship, powered by a tame black hole, is on a multi-million year mission to place wormholes throughout the galaxy, allowing humans to travel interstellar distances. The people on this ship are awoken by an AI for a couple days every ten thousand years or so to create these wormholes.
The people on board the ship discover something’s not right. But how do you solve anything when you’re in cryosleep for thousands of years at a stretch?
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Review: The Maiden Voyage of the Destiny Unknown by Nicholas Ponticello
Like his earlier book Do Not Resuscitate, Ponticello’s prose reads like a less-angry Vonnegut. However, in The Maiden Voyage of the Destiny Unknown, he gets wilder and funnier.
Two hundred million years in the future, the sun is about to engulf the Earth, so a spaceship filled with people is sent out towards a likely star in order to save the species.
The outrageous situations and badly-behaving people on the spaceship are entertaining as hell, and are nicely balanced with an occasional thoughtful perspective from the narrator, a non-interfering alien observer.
The Maiden Voyage of the Destiny Unknown is bold and fun, and I found myself eagerly waiting for the next time I could get back to reading it.
Recommendation: Buy it. The bright yellow spine pleases me whenever I see it on my shelf.
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25 Best Far Future Science Fiction Books
Art by: ANTIFAN-REAL @ deviantART
Far future science fiction (usually meaning about 10,000 years from now) is the most optimistic SF subgenre because it assumes humanity will still be around in some recognizable form.
4 Things You Didn’t Know About Dune
Sneak preview of forthcoming graphic novel.
Written almost 50 years ago, Dune is the world’s best-selling science fiction novel. As recently as 2012, the readers of Wired magazine voted it the top science fiction novel of all time. Continue reading