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 …
Tag Archives: science-fiction
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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Book Review: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson
Book #19 of 2026: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This short novella was written in the early 2000s and included as an extra gift to backers of author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Kickstarter campaign in 2023 (now subtitled as A Sanderson Curiosity, …
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Book Review: Privateers by Ben Bova
Book #16 of 2026: Privateers by Ben Bova This 1985 sci-fi novel is the debut volume that author Ben Bova wrote in what became his Grand Tour sequence, although it would subsequently be rendered non-canonical by real-life events influencing how the later books developed. The story here is set in the mid-twenty-first century, in which …
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts
Book #15 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts (Virgin New Adventures #11) Author Gareth Roberts hasn’t had any fiction published professionally for almost a decade, ever since falling down the same transphobic pipeline as J. K. Rowling. (I can’t say how much of that is by choice versus industry blacklist, though …
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Book Review: Slow Gods by Claire North
Book #14 of 2026: Slow Gods by Claire North Here’s a space opera full of imaginative worldbuilding detail that still manages to feel empty without compelling characters to populate the setting. Both the narrator’s tone and the general plot remind me of the Animorphs spinoff The Ellimist Chronicles, in which an alien being survives the …
Book Review: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor
Book #13 of 2026: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor I got my hopes up during the introduction to this collection, in which series editor John Joseph Adams explains the selection methodology: he himself read several thousand short stories of genre fiction published throughout a single calendar year, aiming …
Book Review: The Rise of Neptune by Scott Reintgen
Book #6 of 2026: The Rise of Neptune by Scott Reintgen (The Dragonships #2) The first volume in this middle-grade sci-fi series about dragons in outer space didn’t blow me away, but it was promising enough that I decided to check out this sequel to see how the cliffhanger resolved. And I guess I’m reasonably …
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