Weird in the wonderful way Mieville is, but it was also a bit all over the place. The story starts with the seemingly impossible disappearance of a giant squid specimen from the London natural history museum. Billy is our main protagonist, who was in charge of preserving the specimen and who first discovers that it …
Tag Archives: Standalone
Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
A bit of a mixed bag but definitely interesting. Tower of Babylon: Very strange, more Fantasy than Science Fiction but I found it intriguing. Understand: I really liked this. The first thing I did was check whether the movie Lucy is based on it but I don’t think it is. What happens if you gain …
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The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
It started slow but I got hooked quick enough after that. Set in the future after a Nuclear Holocaust, the story follows the early life of David as he realises that he and some others are ‘different’ than the people around him and how that puts him in conflict with his family and his town …
The Employees by Olga Ravn
This was really not my style of book. The basic premise is that of a series of employee interviews after an incident aboard a spaceship set sometime in the next century. You gradually learn that there are human and humanoid interviews though it can be very difficult to tell the difference in some cases. Honestly …
Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark
An unusual mix of history and cosmic horror. The premise of this is that during the height of segregation in the American south in the early part of the twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan are secretly being controlled by monsters called Ku Klux’s who feed on human’s hate and pain. Fighting them are monster …
Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
More of a fairytale than a science fiction book but entertaining. Set in Ghana in the near future, it tells the story of Sankofa who gains mysterious powers that can cause massive destruction and death. We find out how she came to get the powers and her wanderings around Ghana, first trying to find a …
The Buried Giant by Kazou Ishiguro
Wasn’t expecting to enjoy that as much as I did. Set sometime in the ‘Dark Ages’ of Britain, this is the story of Axl and Beatrice, an older couple, who set out to find their son who’ve not seen in a long time who apparently leaves in a village nearby. Along the way they are …
of Ants and Dinosaurs by Cixin Liu
A decent read but the style made it difficult to invest. This is an imagined history of the Cretaceous Period where Ants and Dinosaurs set up a kind of symbiotic civilization based on mutual needs. It covers around two thousand years of history and details how the relationship between the two species started and developed …
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Some nice phrases and imagery but I found my mind glazing over far too often. Our protagonist Mark Spitz is part of a civilian clean up crew in New York. The only slight difference here to a regular cleaning job is that it is zombies that he is cleaning up rather than dirt. What follows …
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Wow, I just enjoyed that so much, it’s a beautiful book. Piranesi (not his name, he’s not sure what it is and doesn’t particularly care) leaves in the World, which is a series of halls and chambers that are full of statues, which cover three levels. The ground levels contain the sea whereas the upper …
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