Reviews and Comments

In this erstwhile satire, Twain rails against the monarchy, the church, and bureaucracy - the last mostly by drowning the reader in it. To show the pointlessness of battling knights, he fills pages with tedious descriptions of these battles. The brutal ending was all too prescient of world war I, still 25 years in the future.

There is wit here, but it is sparse and usually directed against the church or the monarchy. Many passages of plot are drawn directly from Sir Thomas Malory, and the whole section on hermits from another author. The rest of the story about the dried up holy well is quite good; I wonder if it was published earlier.

This book has been adapted to stage and screen many times, though I'm afraid the only one I've seen is Chuck Jones' "A Connecticut Rabbit...". Coincidentally, I've just started Carl Sagan's Contact, and the protagonist is seen reading this book. I hope she got more out of it than me. If this is exemplary of Twain's later writings, I'll stick with jumping frog stories.

A quick read, this novel reveals the setting slowly, and I won't spoil that here. Suffice to say it is set in the area of California in an authoritarian near future. The tale is told from the perspectives of multiple characters, each also developed slowly. Very much a case of a rebellion against the authority.

It also has other aspects of Campbell's hero quest - the kid, the mentor, mundane vs special worlds, etc. One of the main characters is a young minority, the other a strong female pilot. Written in 1984, it also has aspects of cyberpunk. So what's not to like?

Institutionalized sexism and overt segregation, neither with a reason in the plot, are unnecessary baggage here. The extortion between Della and Michael doesn't really make sense. Technology is used in too-convenient ways - farmers have television and play old shows (on a local network?) in the evening together, but later in the book the authoritarians use this same method to broadcast propaganda.

This story finishes with "End Book I", and it is followed by a short story and another novel. Both this book and the short story stand alone fine; the two novels were collected in one book later on. It seems familiar enough that I read it in high school, but not memorable enough that I am sure. Overall a 3 star rating.

I liked this quote, a good fit for our increasingly authoritarian present. “To think that some lousy contractors could have brought down the greatest nation in history!”

In its day, this book won the Nebula, the Locus, and the Hugo awards. It is a sequel to [b:Sundiver|96472|Sundiver (The Uplift Saga, #1)|David Brin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388176548s/96472.jpg|461555], the second in a trilogy called the Uplift Saga. It was also the sophomore effort by author [a:David Brin|14078|David Brin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1352956147p2/14078.jpg], and for me, it didn't quite measure up to either the previous book or its own awards.

The universe he created for this series is vast and populated by some really interesting species. This book shows Humankind as the local upstarts, primarily by focusing on one of our client races, the uplifted dolphins. This story also contains intrigues and politics between the main scientists, at least one of which fits the "mad" description.

The story floats through several crewmembers, and while they have their own motivations, they each feel very much the same. Without the vocal stutters, it's hard to tell the 'fins from the humans. This is something many other reviewers have pointed out also.

I quite enjoyed the plot - a spaceship forcibly landed on a planet trying to hide from several factions of the various galactic powers, all hunting them for their own reasons of course. How they try to solve this task and what they find on the planet are all a grand story. In fact the whole book fits the genre of "space opera" much more closely than "hard science fiction".

The story also stands alone - apparently this trilogy is connected in setting only. A few cameo references are given to the previous novel, and this story takes place quite a bit after.

Good plot, flat characters, not as good as the previous effort - this strongly suggests at least some of the awards were more for the author or the first book than this one. I do plan to finish the trilogy as a later book in an "80s challenge" - read one SF book from each year of that decade. But before that I must visit with Vinge, Sagan, Bova, an Bujold. 3 stars.

Half submarine adventure story, half unbelievable lost island adventure, all pulp. Probably draws a lot from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's [b:The Lost World|10155|The Lost World (Professor Challenger, #1)|Arthur Conan Doyle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320504012s/10155.jpg|1098725], published four years earlier and given much more acclaim. Both were originally published in magazines.

Judging it as pulp, the rough plot works and is plenty exciting. The tropical "island" is too unbelievable, with 3 or 4 species of early man in addition to scattered dinosaurs, and all just north of Antarctica. Worse, the dinosaurs aren't the menacing villains we would expect, and play a very minor part of the plot.

Perhaps early man (and his voyage "north") is meant to be a metaphor here? The jujitsu wielding main character works well, and his paramour is quite capable - perhaps more so than most of the time.

Overall rating, 3 stars. I'll read the sequels, especially if they are as quick as this, but I especially want to read Doyle for comparison.

To those who haven't read this, and want something in remembrance of the recently passed author, find this story and read it. It is quick, relatively local, and while none of these worlds is an exact match for ours, it is still an excellent tale of love, responsibility, and truth.

George Orr, dying of radiation sickness in a world destroyed, dreams of another world - and his dreams somehow change reality. To stop these dreams, he goes the route of drugs, and that leads to our first chapter - his latest reality seen from a drug addled perspective. Subsequent chapters focus on other character's viewpoints, dropping more hints about this polluted world (an all-too-possible outcome from the perspective of 1971).

I read this as a youth, and was moved by the basic structures and characters - the good hero, the evil manipulating doctor, the benevolent aliens. In 1980, the WGBH made-for-television version seemed nearly as good as the book, including the wonderful scene with the 45 of "A Little Help From My Friends".

Since then, I've read the book and watched the show, which PBS ceased to air in 1988. I've even watched the re-released version, without the Beatles version. The story is bigger than I first knew, with themes of balance, questions of the right to manipulate the world, and choices of the lesser evil. Le Guin's backgrounds have also come out more, even as they seemed less and less likely scenarios from our modern world.

This beautiful book deserves to be read. For this most recent reading, it was out loud with my daughter and in memory of the late author. I do plan to watch the video version one more time as well - will probably pass on the 2002 remake, however.

Reminds me of season of Babylon 5 or Deep Space Nine - a lot of plots and wheels within wheels. Perhaps too many. Like television, it ends in a rush which leads to the next book/season. I prefer the first book to standalone, and this one really doesn't.

This very large cast of characters has a few "main" characters that don't really change that much over the story. The plot is both good military SF and hard SF, though with a few quibbles - how was a station designed with the idea that the intelligent race from the planet was required for maintenance?

This book won the Hugo award in 1982 and is on several best of lists. It is the second novel I have read by Damon Knight Grandmistress of SF (and resident of Spokane) C.J. Cherryh, but it gets the same rating as the first. Not sure I can say more than it just didn't work for me.

A slightly dated pre-teen book about a trickster spirit from Scotland that ends up shipped to Canada. The kids are the main characters and the adults busy or clueless. I liked the environment and the problem solving our heroes go through, and found the book fun, if short.

Nine year old Jessup has more hobbies (hockey and computers) and is better fleshed out than older sister Emily. While in Toronto, there are a few too many instances of the adults not believing the kids, despite the evidence. Other than that, the plot and resolution are believable and work well. The Celtic side characters are great, and the villain is suitably creepy.

Author Susan Cooper is better known for her award winning fantasy series The Dark is Rising. She has won other awards for childrens literature and came to my attention through the World Fantasy Award she was awarded in 2013. I would definitely like to read more from this author.

This was the late Ursula K Le Guin's first novel, and it also introduced her connected books of Hain. It was published in 1966, though it's prologue is a short story published two years earlier. This is a hard SF road trip novel which introduces several alien races and ways of thought.

The prologue stands alone, the story of a strong female character who demands her inheritance of a necklace to be used in a dowry. She does not realize just how far she has to go to get this necklace, A surprise that is revealed only at the very end.

Using that necklace as a link, the main story is about a stranded ethnologist on a planet that could become the launching point for a major war against the Hain. He overhears a radio transmission and discovers where the enemy base is, then travels there through many adventures. At the very end, the satisfying conclusion, and a reference back to that initial story. As a novel, these two work well together. 3½ stars.

Most famously, this book introduced the concept of faster than light communication using the Ansible, a name which has been borrowed by many other science fiction writers.

Really fun. Having seen (and loved) the Miyazaki film first, I had to fight the expectations of character motivations and actions. That done, this story was a good read that did wrap itself up a neat bow almost too quickly at the end. There were also some major differences from the film.

First off, excellent character development, with plots and subplots galore. Sophie and her sisters are strong female characters, the latter getting a much larger role in the book compared to the film. Shy and self deprecating Sophie really comes into her own as an old person, not afraid to speak up for herself or others.

The settings were beautifully described, though war rates only a distant mention and doesn't intrude as it does in the film. One of the doors leads to a completely different place, and I won't spoil the fun but will note that it was wonderful, if too brief.

Originally released in 1986, it was an ALA notable book but did not win an award until 20 years later, shortly after the release of the film. Jones released a sequel in 1990, followed by another in 2008. This is the first book I have read by this author, and look forward to reading more.

This is astrophysicist David Brin's first novel, and it is part hard SF and part mystery (murder and otherwise). A good deal of time is spent introducing a portion of his Uplift setting, explored further in his second (and much awarded) book. I liked it.

The author's background (he was also a NASA consultant) comes through in some fascinating hardware for "diving" towards the surface of the sun and coming safely home again. Outside the basic tech, Brin relies on "galactic tech" to take care of other things, such as artificial gravity.

Of what we learn about the extraterrestrial races, I love the idea of the galactic library. Another clever idea are the magnetovores, grazing the magnetic waves on our sun. And of course the basic idea of uplift is pretty cool, from raunchy dolphins to wisecracking chimpanzees.

First published in 1980, this is the kind of science fiction I read in my youth, though I missed this one at the time. This is also a very quick read. A solid 3½ stars.