Fans of Michael Crichton know the formula. You take a sliver of technology, let it go awry, and then send in a mixed team of experts to stop it or rescue the previous team. What you get is Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, Coma, Runaway, Disclosure, etc.…
Read the rest “7th Sigma is a Crichton Wanna Be”
I just finished reading
Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi. This is a reimagining of H. Beam Piper’s
Little Fuzzy. John Scalzi brought he bit of classic sci-fi up to a modern style. The story features a prospector, Jack Holloway, and his dog who stumble upon a valuable gem deposit on a planet devoid of intelligent life.…
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Kristine Rusch has created a future where Earth is part of a sort of United Nations of planets but in this UN the Earth is about as important as Tuvalu. I’ve only read the first three of the novels but I am looking forward to the next one.…
Read the rest “Retrieval Artist”
I finally managed to get to the abrupt ending of Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star. It was agonizingly long. I stayed with it thinking that the end was drawing near. After nearly a thousand pages, the story stops at a minor cliffhanger.…
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Great source of classic books in EPub format available for free and compatible with iBooks on iPad
http://www.epubbooks.com/genre/science-fiction
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For me Barnes & Noble and Borders are pretty interchangeable experiences. The one thing that distinguishes them is the way they handle their membership cards. At Borders, its free. I have one and I keep the card on file in my phone.…
Read the rest “@billwesterman That’s one of the main reasons I shop a Borders.com, free member rewards card”
I just finished Stephen King’s new novel Under the Dome. The immediate reaction might be, didn’t
The Simpons’ Movie cover this same topic. Well, yes. But in the author’s note Mr. King claims to have been working on this story for quite a while and did not draw (much) inspiration from the Fox cartoon.…
Read the rest “Trapped Like Carrots Under the Dome”
In the Dan Brown novel
The Lost Symbol a character finds an IP address but is confounded trying to figure out whose IP address it is. She enlists the help of a hacker friend who is also confounded but claims to be able to hack it in no time.…
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Armor is a another take on the future warrior story. It is similar to the novel Starship Troopers (not the movie) except that you really get inside the main character’s head. Felix throws himself into incredible nuke-wielding battles with aliens. The reader must pay attention as the perspective changes throughout the story.
I’m not really sure how I stumbled on to this book. I found it in paperback and read it years ago. I recently heard that they were going to make a movie out of it. I decided that I wanted to revisit this Hugo and Nebula Award winner.…
Read the rest “The Forever War”
Michael Crichton books all read like screenplays. The bad guy is usually technology and not an individual. Then he finds a group of people and puts them in a situation to confront that technology. Next differs slightly from that formula in that all of the main characters are not brought together all at once at the beginning.…
Read the rest “Next” 
