Sagas and trilogies be damned! The Summer Dragon was a really entertaining book and having it end as a mere episode in a larger story that hasn't been written yet is quite frustrating.

Todd Lockwood is mostly known for his fantasy illustrations, not writing, and Summer Dragon is his debut novel. It is an YA story, with a similar structure as so many others: young nobody discovers they have special abilities and are thrown in a world of mystery, wonder and danger, with adults being either weak supporting characters and/or villains, but done right! The heroine - yes, a girl - is thrown into a situation in which politics and culture are forcing her to either be completely passive and submissive or to take action by herself. She doesn't do it with superpowers, but with the knowledge she learned from her father and her own personal courage and ingenuity. In the end she does overcome some pretty insurmountable odds, but it never gets too annoying. If there is a flaw I have to talk about it is the fact that each chapter is written with the same hero's journey structure, with new tension added at the end and character building in the middle. The author is a bit too neat in following the writing guidelines.

I liked that the protagonist is a woman. This is, so far, a perfect feminist book, since she is fighting real issues, social, political and military, using her own skills and in the few situations where she is a love interest she doesn't automatically feel she needs to either reciprocate or condescend and insult her suitor. It is also a book about dragons, but she is the daughter of a dragon breeder, rather than a kid that suddenly discovers there are dragons or other crap like that. The world is not very detailed, but what is in the book is pretty consistent and has a lot of potential.

I don't want to spoil the book by giving details, but there was also something that I felt was a missed opportunity. In an already existing conflict a third party emerges, a super villain, if you will. It was the perfect moment to switch the real source of the "evil" and to reframe an existing war as something that no one participating really understood. As written, it is very difficult to understand why career military men locked in a prolonged conflict dismiss vital tactical and strategic information for silly things like religious fervor or personal greed.

Given the opportunity I would have immediately read the other books in the series. Alas, The Summer Dragon was released just last year and it's the only published book so far. If you want to avoid frustration, wait until Lockwood writes a few more books and then start reading the series. I have great hopes for it.

There is a cover for the book that writes "Best SF Novel of the Year BSFA Award". I can only assert that it was either competing alone, that they give a prize to all contestants or that the British SF Association doesn't know what a good book is. Its worst flaw is that it is naive. First with its depiction of space. Stuff in the book would not have worked in the 80s, I believe, much less in 2012 when the book was released. The style of the prose seems to emulate works from the 50s and 60s and at first I wondered if it wasn't intentional, like a sort of parody or tip of the hat. Regardless, the book remains naive in almost all aspects, even those of the basic plot, which is not sci-fi, but rather whodunnit and escape from the room stuff.

That being said, Jack Glass is not a totally bad book, either. It presented some ideas that were rather fresh. Using convicts to prepare asteroids for colonization, for example, or having trillions of people living in the Solar System, not on planets, but asteroids and such, the idea that each of these habitats would create their own flavor of religion and culture. But other than these rare juicy details, the rest of the book is quite boring, predictable and bad. The clues to solve the mysteries, rather than being presented to the reader so that they can participate in the solving, are brought in by random plot events, like dreams. People that were supposed to be the best rationalists, Sherlock Holmes style, were being manipulated and educated by ordinary people that somehow knew and understood more. The laws of physics, psychology and sociology are being completely ignored.

Bottom line, a bad book from Adam Roberts, with the occasional hidden gem that doesn't really save the silly plot and ugly narrative.

Just look at that book cover. Someone was already imagining the multiple Hollywood movies, or at least a TV series. Yes, it's another young adult story, but this one is different because it is from the point of view of a girl. Besides, I've read several YA books and I liked some of them.

In Cold Magic, Kate Elliott describes a feudal world in which the rulers are either princes or "cold" mages, although there are many other aspects of magic in the world that are briefly explored. There is a lot of history, too, parallel to the European one - if magic was real in the Napoleonic times. For the first quarter of the book I lapped it up. I was curious to see how this young girl manages to untangle the mystery of the things that are happening to her and if she will thwart the powerful people who want to use her and her girl cousin. However, after a few chapters in which kind of the same thing happens over and over again, with no real reason, I was getting restless. Add to this the long descriptions of personal fashion, grooming and judgement on how people look and what it tells about them and I was starting to get a little annoyed. When it all turned to romance, I was simply disappointed. It wasn't that the point of view of the young woman ruined the story, but that it irritated me enough to make me attentive to the plot holes.

Bottom line: I am half curios on how the world building will evolve and how the author is going to describe this alternate magical Europe, but on the other hand I feel like the entire book I waited for something to happen and to make sense, when in fact all characters did things in order to move the story in a certain direction. Instead of being character driven, the plot meanders and the characters drift on it like leaves on a river. I can't empathize with people that lack almost any kind of control over what happens to them, especially since the trope of the young person thrown into a maelstrom of unexplained situations with people that speak in riddles and keep things for themselves is so overused in YA novels and I am tired of it. I will not read the next books in the Spiritwalker series. It was fun for the first half of the story, but then it went downhill.

Gotta learn to not blindly trust book reviews that appear in my favorite web sites. I mean, they have the right to be wrong (aka to their own opinion). To be honest, I just expected the book to be better, I wasn't particularly upset with it. The review called it "the next Martian"; it's not even close. It's a completely different style, mood, idea and quality. But, that being said, I enjoyed it. Better still, I learned an interesting and probably valuable lesson out of it.

You see, Sleeping Giants is the closest I've come yet to a "hand held" book. The story is told exclusively through interviews and records of discussions. I mean, there is one scene where the heroes have to disarm some guards and instead of going quiet, they keep talking into their sat phone with someone so we can read what happened. It wasn't bad, but I sincerely hope that the rest of the books in the Themis Files series are not the same, although I am pretty sure I will not read them. However, I've learned from this. Even if you are shit at writing scenes, you can write a book that is being told through dialogue and short personal entries and tell the story.

So the story that Sylvain Neuvel tells is about us finding pieces of a giant alien robot and finding out how to operate it, even if the way it functions seems incomprehensible. I've covered the style, so now I have to tell you about the plot, which is naive to say the least, but enough to suspend your disbelief as you read the book. The beginning promises a lot more than the ending provides and, while I understand there is another book, I don't really care how the story ends.

Bottom line: a little fun sci-fantasy, with no real consequence or worth of mention. However, Sony did option the rights for the book, so who knows when we're going to get an alien robot defending the Earth against Godzilla movie, or whatever crap like that.

The Obelisk Gate immediately follows the story from the first book in the Broken Earth series, The Fifth Season. N.K. Jemisin now makes clear which are the sides in the conflict and, with the characters thoroughly fleshed out in the previous book, she is free to let things happen, to finally feel there is a story, and a root cause and a purpose and some action. That is why, in many regards, even if it is just another part of the same story, The Obelisk Gate is the better book.

Unfortunately for me, I won't be able to read the third book, The Stone Sky, until it is released and then... err.. made available, which happens sometimes in August of this year. Yet at the same time I have to say that there was enough in this book to appease my desire for more Broken Earth. I may even not read the third book, even if I am curious on how it will all end. It is an important lesson to learn, that stories can burn themselves out before their time, just like an orrogene using too much power and dying of it. Somehow, at the end of Obelisk Gate there is not enough mystery left but what was so bluntly left out by the author with all the silent and "I'll tell you just enough" type of characters she used. I have to wonder if there is even enough material for a third book. The fact that there is a 2014 short story that seems to happen long after the third book makes me think that it was always planned as a trilogy and this will probably be it.

Bottom line: The sides become clearer, characters align with them and a lot of the education of normal people is being discarded in favor of the brutal way of thinking in case of terrible cataclysm and dire need. There is still a climax to come, but what will it entail except the obvious outcome and some fighting? To me, the important part of the story has been told already.

The first book in the Broken Earth series, The Fifth Season is a good book. I liked the world building, the characters, even if there are so few of them and grabbing all the action in the story, and I am going to read the second book in the series, The Obelisk Gate, next.

The story is mostly a setup for the series, where the main characters are introduced and the world is built. As a far into the future post apocalyptic Earth, it is a mixture of old dead civilization influences and pure human survival. That is why some words that are particular to our culture stick out when used and N.K. Jemisin does slip a few in there, although not enough to be annoying. The book is split into three view points: the basically orphaned Damaya, the talented Syenite fast climbing in the ranks of the Fulcrum orrogenes and the old rogga Essun, walking a damaged landscape in order to find her husband... and kill him. The Essun point of view is written in second person, which may be off putting for a while, but one get used in time.

There isn't much else I can say without spoiling the story. The feeling at the end of the book is clearly not one of closure and catharsis, as it ends abruptly and you realize it is just the first part of a larger tale. While I can't say I was awed by the content or the writing style, they are both solid and professional. The book captivated me and I will be continuing to read the story, mostly to see where it goes.

It is tough reviewing a book like The Night Ocean because it is about so many things and at the same time about nothing much. Paul la Farge describes the experiences of a female psychotherapist who is married to a man obsessed by a book about the sex life of another writer (H.P.Lovecraft) so much that he follows leads, writes a book himself, based on the memories of a man who in the end turns out to be something different than anybody thought. So it's a book about a book about a book about books, basically, only written through the eyes of the people writing and being affected by said books.

Half of me screams in rage against the book, now that I have finished it, because it wanted some science fiction, some lovecraftian horror, some fanciful escape from reality. But the other half laughs, because no other book in recent memory is more about escape from reality and lovecraftian horror and even science fiction. Only not in the way I expected. It is so difficult to talk about the book because even minor details might spoil the experience. I can ruin your reading within a mere sentence, so I will try to talk about my personal feelings about the book, rather than its contents.

The writing is good. It is filled with details that pull you in into the places it describes. Sometimes it gets a little too much, I caught myself several times asking why is that detail there, what the hell does it have to do with the story. Well, let me guide you on how to read this book: there is no story. There is no cathartic ending that explains all. Instead the journey is the important part and instead of complaining about specifics, you should cherish them as you would a good meal. Since I am a fast eater, especially if the food is good, I can only advise you to do as I say, not as I did.

The subjects the book touches are many and La Farge spent a lot of time documenting them. It goes through homosexuality before and after the war, differences between Canadians and Americans, American paranoia against communism, the world of writers - science fiction in particular, but also various types of academics, German concentration camps, antisemitism in the U.S., history of the world and so on and so on. In a strange case of congruence, there is a scene in the book that is almost identical to one from a previously read book (Arkwright), with a science fiction convention in New York 1939, where a rebellious and revolutionary group of writers are not permitted to spread their particular views in the convention so they leave and form their own group.

Bottom line: while the subject itself felt unimportant and a bit boring, the writing and the world and character building kept me reading. It is not the type of book I usually read, but I can recognize a good book even if I don't particularly like it. And this is The Night Ocean for me, a great book about people that I should have not cared about, but the writer forced me to.

This short but compact book is about all the stuff that I am really weak on: geography, history, politics and economics. Yeah, like everything remotely related to the real world. Yet I actually liked it a lot, especially the first half. In The Next 100 Years, George Friedman submits his thesis that geopolitics is what shapes history and that countries are pretty much locked in patterns that they cannot escape. Using this theory, he attempts to predict events in the twenty first century. While he starts with comparing historical expectations and predictions with reality twenty years later and finding they are completely different, the author concludes that some things factor too heavily in the long run to not predictably shape the direction of history.

What I liked about the book was how easily, cynically and depressingly he describes the underlying reasons for stuff that has happened, things that are published and marketed as triumphs of humanity or struggles of heroes and that, really, were quite unavoidable. An example is female emancipation. As having 8 children per family (which was the norm in the 19th century!) became unprofitable - as children were less needed as unskilled labor and getting them to school to give them skills was expensive - and as child mortality fell and as life expectancy grew, families started having fewer children. That meant a woman would not have to dedicate her life to breeding and raising children. With that much extra time, it became unavoidable that they would do something with it. Same root for changes in family structure, violent splits between conservatives and progressives and the contraction of religious power, which is trapped in defending unsustainable societal models, like keeping women as household administrators.

Same thing about the way countries react, why the U.S.A. became the global power that will shape this century and how the actions of the great actors in global politics, sometimes appearing as chaotic or insane, are very clear and even predictable once one determines the real goal behind those actions. As the leading global power, the United States of America doesn't need to win any wars, for example, just keep the other major players locked in situations of local crisis. Ending terrorism or bringing peace and stability all over the globe, while declared as the goals of international policy, are against American interests.

I was saying that I enjoyed the first half of the book more, because it was more theoretical and more broad. Some interesting predictions there, such as Turkey, Poland and Mexico becoming important actors in the political conflicts in this century. The second half goes into economics and becomes really American centric, using concepts that are only familiar to one that lives in that economy. Yet it describes some interesting dynamics, such as predicting that in the 2030s immigration will not only not be a problem anymore, but something leading nations will compete for, as working population decreases.

I can't possibly comment on the veracity of the book's predictions or on the validity of the author's methods, as I am a complete noob in any of the fields required to analyse this book. I can tell you that Friedman expected much more to have happened in the late 2010s than it actually happened. Also, I did a quick google search to look for opinions and I will detail them below. Yet first I will summarize the book as I see it.

Friedman asserts that the US will be the pivot around which all history will revolve in the twenty first century. It had the largest military force, it controls both oceans with its powerful navy, effectively dictating who can or cannot use it to transfer resources, and even if a heavy importer of resources, it had enough of its own. Moreover, its territory is unassailable by land. Other players will attempt to balance that power, such as the European Union, Russia, the Muslim nations or the South Asian nations, while the US will actively work to destabilize them so that they never get there. Europe is pretty much over, though, decadent and divided. China will fail economically, then split into regional powers easily manipulated against Chinese stability. Also, constrained by history and culture, Japan, China, Korea will never be able to effectively work together to create a regional power stable and strong enough to balance the US. The only country that can do anything to rally Muslim countries around it is Turkey, the rest just fight among themselves and whenever one manages anything, America pulls the carpet from under its feet. Yet Turkey is a secular country so far and even with the strong hand of Erdogan it will never convince countries that are essentially religious barbarians. Last and most important, Russia, which will also fail because it relies too much on its hydrocarbon exports, something that the US will subvert by investing heavily in alternative energy sources and is surrounded by countries that will never fully come under Moscow control, with the US always encouraging the opposite. He then asserts that by 2080 Mexico will emerge as a competitor to the US.

Many of the comments online mention the shock value of dismissing European or Chinese importance in the world in the long term. Personally I feel that if the US will be such a comfortable global power, the world is going to be boring at the very best and probably really sad. Friedman himself wrote another book two years later called The Next Decade: What the World Will Look Like, in which he expresses his fear that so much power will corrupt the very foundation of the nation and turn republic into empire. Many feel that this century is so much different than any other and cannot be accurately predicted by looking back to history. "break it or make it" century, they call it. Let's hope it's the latter.

Other criticism goes towards the singular focus of the book on geopolitics and less on economics, technology, religion or culture. I believe he did that for shock value, also, trying to pull people into the discussion by underestimating or even completely ignoring things with so much emotional value for a lot of people. He basically said "the world works like this, not like you would like it to work, deal!", then waited for the comments. A bit trollish, Friedman is.

Finally, the more military oriented criticize Friedman for relying too much on conventional military paradigms and ignoring space warfare, WMDs and the informational angle. I can only consider this as a stabilizing force, rather than a destructive one. If the possibility that a pissed off enough player might destroy the whole board exists, then the actions of all the players will be more subdued than possible. Warfare was made more subtle, not more unpredictable, by this type of possibility.

Bottom line: an eye opening book, more valuable for its concise analysis of global history than its predictions, probably, and for explaining why so many countries behave like idiots. In the end, the very purpose of the book, that of predicting this century, is made moot by its thesis that it can be predicted. If that is so, then whatever happens happens no matter what anyone does. Also, I believe it is great material for fiction writers that want to ground their universes into reality. While the predictions themselves, either wrong or spot on, are irrelevant, the method for their creation is most interesting and worth investigating. I mean, George Friedman is not Hari Seldon, but he is the closest we've got.

George Friedman has a lot of video talks and interviews detailing his views. Once can easily look them up online.

In the first pages of the book I hear about a man who discovered teleportation when he was about to die. Like telepathy, it was a mental thing and most people seemed to be capable of it for short distances. I immediately thought it was quaint and that I was going to read one of those hopelessly out of date books. Indeed, published in 1955, the book didn't age well in terms of social or technological depiction, but it was really entertaining.

First of all, with all of its flaws, this book isn't boring. Alfred Bester managed to create a true antihero as the protagonist and maintained it as far as close to the end of the book. In The Stars My Destination (also known as Tiger! Tiger!) the hero is a brute who has no ambition, no desire for improvement, content only to exist. When left for dead on a derelict space rocket, his survival instinct leads him to obsessive hate towards the ship that didn't save him and his whole life turns to revenge against it. Imagine The Count of Monte Cristo in space, where everybody can teleport at will. And he is hardcore. The first thing he does when he gets back is train his teleportation powers and, when discovered by a negro woman (in '55 it was an OK word), he blackmails her with knowledge of her family and promptly rapes her. Yup, that's the hero.

The story gets a little bit inconsistent afterwards, as this low life unambitious person suddenly is capable of immense personal change, in behavior, knowledge and social status. However to follow his mad maniacal hunt for the thing that offended him is hallucinating. The world depicted by Bester is a quasifeudal multiplanetary society led by dynasties named after the successful brands at the time, like Kodak (yeah, I know) and devoid of any social justice or human empathy. In fact, when describing the emergence of teleportation, the immediate effects he predicts are diseases spreading through the world, carried by vagrants and immigrants who just teleport out of poor and backward countries in the civilized world (I told you the book has not aged well). Yet for all of this it is a mesmerizing world.

As the book was short, I finished it in a few hours, there is no reason not to delve into something that is both incredibly quaint and amazingly refreshing. While the ending felt a bit too inconsistent with the beginning, the story was interesting and I loved the flawed and brutal character, something I doubt you will see in any mainstream story today. Like its protagonist, it is one of those works that I couldn't not like, despite their many flaws.

I think I am way too trusting of book reviews, as I was with the one from Andrew Liptak about Becky Chambers' debut book The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. He said it was the most fun space opera book he'd read last year and the review was published in September, so I just automatically added it to my list without reading further for fear of spoilers. It was a bad idea.

The book is the space opera version of romance novels. There is a ship run by a quirky team of multispecies crew on their way toward a planet that is to become the interface point between the galactic federation analog and a new species of warring and incomprehensible aliens. So far so good. The problem is that the book is all about the one year trip there with the focus solely on the personal histories, dramas and emotions of the crew members. They fall in love with each other, they transgress stupid specieist prejudice, love conquers all, that sort of thing. Then the book ends, with everybody nicely paired and friendly towards everyone else. That's it. I mean, that is literally it. The book ends when one is already bored to death and waiting for some interesting stuff to happen. And it never does!

While I have to admit that 50 Shades of Grey was way worse and sold a lot better, that is in no way a recommendation to read this book. It is technically obsolete, morally ridiculous and abhorrently politically correct. It becomes pathetic to see how the author attempts to justify interspecies romance and sex and to condemn biases about other sentients, even inventing new pronouns, only to fall into other more boring clichés about what our future society should be like and how people should behave with one another and how nasty people look (unkempt fair skinned dark haired antisocial techs or chitinous insect like creatures) and how inner beauty translates to outer beauty and the making of easy friends and so on. It felt like a highschool story with aliens. I mean there was a moment when their ship is boarded by pirates and the resolution is to politely talk to them and reach an agreement, because this particular species was culturally bound to only take what they need and no more. Really?

Bottom line: it is a puerile make believe fairy tale about space lovers which has almost no science in it. It is a another fantasy novel that tries to trick readers in by posing as science-fiction, only it is a romance fantasy novel. And if you are eager to read passages of interracial space sex, forget it, the most controversial word you will see printed in this book is "banging" and I believe it is used but once.

I don't remember where I got the idea to read Finity's End, but I had no idea it was one book in a long series of Merchanter Aliance/Union books. So at the same time I liked that it started with a rich world and a very clear idea where it was coming from and going to, but also felt the missing information that I would have had if I had read the series from the beginning.

That being said, I have to say I liked the book. I found C.J.Cherryh's world building extraordinary and considering she has written more than 60 books, her attention to detail and the way things click was really nice. Yet at the same time, this made the story slower, more grounded in a larger reality that didn't really interest me.

The story of Finity's End is of a young boy who wants to live on a planetary station and study the intelligent indigenous life with which he made the only personal connection he values. Instead, he is being pulled up to a spaceship he doesn't care about for the only reason that his mother was originally born there. Faced with prejudice and culture shock, his story of adapting to the new environment is a lot more interesting that the political and economical dealings the ship is engaged with and often I felt that, while I appreciated the realism of the plot, I couldn't wait to get to the personal part, with the characters I really cared about. Perhaps if I had read the entire series I would have felt more connected to older characters and less to this adolescent coming of age subplot.

I found it interesting the author's description of two entwined cultures that live in different space and even different time: there are the planet and station folk and then there are the space ship people. They interact, but for most of their existence they are almost different species. Perhaps if the viewpoint on this was more modern I would have enjoyed it more, but as such, it felt like a book written in the 70s.

Bottom line: I liked the book, but not so much that I will start reading the others in the series. I liked the world building and I loved the way the characters subtly evolved in their interaction with each other. I didn't really connect with the larger plot of trying to bring peace to the galaxy and I felt nothing towards the Mazian boogieman who never made an appearance in this book. While I believed the possibility of a future like that, the technological part of the book felt quite obsolete to me, even if the publishing date for Finity's End is 1997.

A friend of mine recommended this as one of his favorite books, so of course I went into it with very high expectations and of course I was disappointed. That doesn't mean it's a bad book, just that I expected more than I've got.

In Song of Kali, Dan Simmons describes Calcutta as a place of evil, in a culture of filth and senseless violence and death. He goes there with his Indian wife and their infant child when he is called to retrieve a new manuscript from a supposedly dead Indian poet. A lot of culture shock, a lot of weird mystical events and some weird and horrible people that do horrible things is what the book is about.

In 1985 this was perhaps a fantastic story, I don't know, but now it feels a little bit cliché: American man goes somewhere he sees as completely alien and where he feels out of place, usually going there with the family, so that the empathy and horror can be heightened, and where abnormal things he has no control over happen. It also part of a category of stories that I personally dislike: the "something that can't be explained or controlled" category, which implies absolutely no character growth other than realizing there are situations like that in which one can find themselves. And indeed the book is all like that: stories that make little sense, but somehow are linked to the perceptions and experiences of the protagonist, mysterious characters that do things that mean little unless the story takes them exactly to a certain point, at which you are left wondering how did they know to do that thing, and a lot of extraneous details that are there only to reinforce the feeling of disgust and dread that the character feels, but do little to further the story.

In the end, it is just some weird ass plot that makes no sense, a bunch of characters that you can't empathize with (some of them you can't even understand) and a big fat "It is so because I feel it is so", which is so American and has little to do with me. Others agree that the book is most effective when describing the humid fetid heat of the city and the inhumanity of its inhabitants and less with the so called "horror" in the text or the connection the reader feels with the characters. It brings to mind Lovecraft and his strong feelings about things that now are banal and CGI in every movie. Some are even more vehement in their dislike of the book. Here is another review in the same vein.

So how come so many people speak highly of the novel? Well, my guess is that it affects the reader if they are in the right frame of mind. My friend told me about the part that he liked in the book and, frankly, that part is NOT in the book, so whatever literary hallucination he had when reading the book I had none of it. My rating of it cannot be but average, even considering it's a debut novel that won the 1986 World Fantasy Award.

In Fevre Dream, George R. R. Martin writes about a fat bearded guy with a large appetite and a passion for food that loves to be a boat captain. Write what you know, they say. Anyways, this book about vampires in the bayou feels really dated. It has been described as "Bram Stoker meets Mark Twain", so you can imagine how much; written in 1982, it feels like written by a Lovecraft contemporary.

I love Lovecraft, but it gets worse. None of the characters in the book except maybe the main protagonist are likable. They come off as either high and mighty or ridiculously servile. And I understand that in a story where vampires have a master that can be all controlling this is to be expected, but at the same time the hero of the story, without being "compelled", still acts like a servant, enthralled (pardon my pun) by the aristocratic majesty of his vampire friend. One has to get through pages of tedious description of architecture and food and home improvement to get to the succulent part (OK, couldn't help that one) but which then feels cloyed and unsatisfactory. So many interesting characters get just a few scenes, while most of the book is how much the captain loves his food and his ship. And while it discusses some social issues, like slavery and how easily people died or disappeared at the time, it also promotes this idea of personal nobility that justifies other people getting used. This focus on aristocracy is something one sees in A Song of Fire and Ice as well, but less pronounced.

I could have given it an average to good rating if not for the abysmal ending. While at the beginning I had applauded the way the author was building tension and apparently providing a solution only to snatch it away at the last moment, the ending destroys all of it by pretty much invalidating much of the foil of the characters and a major part of the story. The time displacement also accentuates this feeling, as I thought "waited so much for this?!", and by that I mean both me as a reader and the main character in the book.

Bottom line: uninteresting vampires in a slow paced story that probably appeals to Martin fans only. It manages to insert the reader in the eighteen hundreds and the river boat mentality, but there is nothing much else to learn or enjoy in the book beyond that.

I've seen several very positive reviews of The Call, by Peadar Ó Guilín so I started reading it. A few hours later I had finished it. It was good: well written, with compelling characters, a fresh idea and a combination of young adult and body horror mixed with Irish mythology that hooked me immediately. I was sorry it had ended and simultaneously hoped for and cursed the idea of "trilogizing" it.

So the book follows this girl who can't use her legs because of polio. She is a happy child until her parents explain to her the realities: Ireland is separated from the world by an impassible barrier and the Aes Sidhe, the Irish fairies, are kidnapping each adolescent kid once, hunt them and hurt them in horrific ways, as revenge for the Irish banishing them to a hellish world. When "the call" comes, the child disappears, leaving back anything that is not part of their bodies and returns in 184 seconds. However, they experience an entire day in the colorless, ugly and cruel world of the Sidhe where they have to fight for their lives. In response, the Irish nation organizes in order to survive, with mandatory child births and training centers where teens are being prepared for the call in hope they will survive.

One might think this is something akin to young adult novels like The Maze, but this is much better. The main character has to overcome her disability as well as the condescending pity or disgust of others. She must manage her crush on a boy in school as well as the rules, both societal and self imposed, about expressing emotion in a world where any friend you have may just disappear in front of you and returned a monster or dead. Her friends are equally well defined, without the book being overly descriptive. The fairies have the ability to change the human body with a mere touch, so even the few kids who survive returned mentally and bodily deformed. The gray world itself is filled with horrors, with an ecosystem of carnivorous plants and animals that are actually made of altered humans, from hunting dogs and mounts to worms and spiders which somehow still maintain some sort of sentience so they can feel pain. I found the Aes Sidhe incredibly compelling: they are incredibly beautiful people and are full of joy and merriment, even as they maim and torture and kill and even when they are themselves in pain or dying, a race of psychotic vengeful people that know nothing but hate.

So I really liked the book and recommend it highly.

Inspired by the writings of classics like Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, Arkwright is a short book that spans several centuries of space exploration and colonization, so after a very positive review on Io9, I've decided to read it. My conclusion: a reedited collection of poorly written shorts stories, it is optimistic and nostalgic enough to be read without effort, but it doesn't really teach anything. Like many of the works it was inspired from, it feels anachronistic, yet it was published in 2016, which makes me wonder why did anyone review this so positively. Perhaps if reviews would not word things so bombastically: "sweeping epic", "hard science fiction", etc. I would enjoy books that are clearly not so more.

Long story short, is starts with a group of 1939 science fiction writers, one of which eventually has a huge success. On his dying bed, he leaves his entire fortune to a foundation with the purpose to invest and support space colonization, in particular other star systems. Somehow, this seed money manages to successfully fund the construction of a beam sail starship which ends up putting people on another star's planet. Most of the book is the story of the family descendants who "live the dream" by monitoring the long journey of the automated ship.

First of all, I didn't enjoy the writing style. Episodic and descriptive, it felt more appropriate for a history book or a diary than a science fiction novel. Then the biases of the writer are more than made evident when he belittles antiscience protesters and religious colonists that believe in the starship as their god. It's not that I don't agree with him, but it was written so condescendingly that it bothered me. Same with the "I told you so" part with the asteroid on collision course with Earth. Same when the Arkwright descendants are pretty much strongarmed into getting into the family business. And third, while focusing on the Arkwright clan, the book completely ignored the rest of the world. While explaining how they designed and constructed and monitored a starship for generations, the author ignored any scientific breakthroughs that happened during that time. It is like the only people that cared about science and space expansion were the Arkwrights. It made the book feel very provincial. I would have preferred to see them in a global context, rather than read about their family issues.

I liked the sentiment, though. The idea that if you put your mind to something, you can do it. Of course, ignoring economic, technical and probabilistic realities does help when you write the book, but still. The story is centered on an old science fiction writer who takes humanity to another star, clearly something the author would have liked to have been autobiographical. It felt like one of those stories grandpas tell their children, all moral and wise, yet totally boring. It's not that they don't mean well and that the moral isn't good, but the way they tell it makes it unappetizing to small children. If I had to use one word to describe this book it is unappetizing

Funny thing is that I've read a similar centuries spanning book about the evolution of mankind that I liked a lot more and was much better written. I would suggest you don't read Arkwright and instead try Accelerando, by Charles Stross.