Matthew Hunter

Gravity, with Sandra Bullock in the lead role and George Clooney supporting, is an excellent movie for fans of science fiction, but as SF author Rosemary Kirstein points out (and beware spoilers behind that link), it is more science fact than science fiction. Though the events are fictional, the technology underpinning them is not. We have multiple space stations in orbit. We have people who work in space on a regular basis, if not continually.

Brandon Sanderson’s excursion into young adult literature, Steelheart (The Reckoners) explores the world of superheroes and supervillains… or more accurately, explores a world where there is a surfeit of supervillains and absolutely no superheroes whatsoever. The world is based roughly on our own present, but with variations ranging from the surreal (supervillains ruling various cities as dictators) to the bizarre (transforming entire cities into steel, with super-moles digging vast tunnels for people to live and work within).

The latest book in SM Stirling’s Change series, The Given Sacrifice concludes the war against the Church Universal and Triumphant with a certain sense of anticlimax. While none of the events quite surprised me, I was left with a sense – quite familiar to me from other recent books in this series – that the author had overstretched his ability to maintain dramatic tension and that the events that have occupied the past three or four books in this series would have been better served to all take place within a single book.

Having set aside my higher expectations after Earth Unaware, I was anticipating pretty much a simple adventure story this time around. That’s pretty much what I got with Earth Afire. Unexpectedly, though, we were introduced to Mazer Rackham in this book, and he was unfortunately less than impressive as a character. In Ender’s Game, Card writes Ender as a character who is convincingly super-intelligent yet childish. Mazer is supposed to be cut from similar if not quite identical cloth, but he doesn’t carry it convincingly.

A Cassandra Kresnov novel, 23 Years On Fire advances the clock a bit and brings some intriguing new ideas into the series. Although they are coming a little bit out of left field and strain plausibility somewhat, such small sins are easily forgiven in support of a good story and the philosophical questions that comes along with it. The novel opens with Sandy leading a military raid on a Federation planet suspected of using mind-control implant technology on the population of an entire planet – accidentally.

Have you ever wanted to strap yourself into a starship and light off the thrusters just to see where you would end up? Fight space pirates with your black belt in Karate while climbing the ranks aboard a merchant starship? How about just being an improbably nice fellow with the plot thoroughly on your side? Then this book will satisfy you. Just keep your suspension of disbelief handy, because you’ll need it.

Astra takes the lead of a new super-group, squaring off against the Green Man – an environmental super-terrorist who causes super-accelerated plant growth. Nothing exceptional in this straightforward superhero novel, though readers might find the page count and the price tag somewhat at odds with each other. This is the third novel in the Wearing the Cape series.

I’ve been a mild fan of Jack McDevitt’s books for a while. He does soft science fiction with a decent sense of wonder pretty well, though there’s usually a mild sour note here and there that keeps his books from being an entirely positive experience. The Cassandra Project fit that description for most of the book, which is essentially a “What if” take on the fake moon landings theory. But when I read the epilogue, I wanted to throw the book across the room.

Destroyer is the latest in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, the tale of Bren ameron’s tempestuous relationship with the alien atevi. As the paidhi, Bren is the sole human permitted to enter atevi society, and on his head rests the task of translating not only language and culture, but also the instinctual behaviors that can seem deceptively similar … with sometimes deadly results. As Destroyer opens, Bren returns to his adopted planet following the 2-year space mission to retrieve human colonists from a remote space station.

I ended up reading Orson Scott Card’s First Formic War series because of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about the central moral question of Ender’s Game: was Ender’s action to end his war moral or not? It would be a spoiler to describe exactly what he did; suffice it to say that it’s a close call based on the available information, and our opinions differed based primarily on whether the books in this series were considered canon or not.