Book #38 of 2026: Mars by Ben Bova This is probably the Grand Tour novel that stood out the clearest in my memory before my current reread, telling a thrilling yet grounded tale of outer space exploration that paved the way for so many subsequent releases (and not just from author Ben Bova, though it …
Tag Archives: science-fiction
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick
Book #37 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick (Virgin New Adventures #12) This Doctor Who novel is so bad that it had me looking back over previous stories I’ve rated as three-out-of-five stars, wondering if I’d been too harsh on them. It’s both overstuffed and incredibly disjointed, offering not so much a …
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Book Review: UnWorld by Jayson Greene
Book #34 of 2026: UnWorld by Jayson Greene In the not-too-distant future of this novella, people can create digital copies of themselves to serve as a backstop for their fallible physical memories. Generally the uploaded consciousness stays close to the human original, but Ana’s has asked to be set free following the death by apparent …
Book Review: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen
Book #32 of 2026: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen (Berserker #7) I’ve never read anything else in Fred Saberhagen’s classic Berserker series (1963-2005), but I know that its core idea of killer self-replicating spaceships programmed by a long-dead race to destroy all life in the universe has been fairly influential in the science-fiction genre. …
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Book Review: The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon
Book #31 of 2026: The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science #1) This 2024 title unfortunately hasn’t hit the mark for me, much as I love author Kate McKinnon’s work on Saturday Night Live. The …
Book Review: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik
Book #29 of 2026: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and …
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Book Review: Empire Builders by Ben Bova
Book #27 of 2026: Empire Builders by Ben Bova I don’t know if this third Grand Tour installment (in chronological order) is objectively any weaker than the stories before, but at a minimum I’m growing pretty tired of our recurring hero Dan Randolph, dashing genius billionaire tech CEO and inveterate womanizer. A decade has passed …
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell
Book #26 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell As usual, a strong episode of Doctor Who leads to one of the better novelizations, helped along in this case by a few neat additions that author Gareth L. Powell has sprinkled in throughout. (In an afterword, he mentions that he grew up …
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Book Review: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Book #23 of 2026: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz This 2025 novella imagines a future in which robots are free but second-class citizens, their status a contested compromise between those humans who see them as worthy of full equal rights and those who would deny their sentience and return them to a state of legal …
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Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams
Book #22 of 2026: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams The assembled titles in this collection of time travel short fiction get nearly the full range of ratings from me, which is often true of such anthologies. But since there are only six stories here, I guess I might as well review …
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