DWD's Reviews

  Originally published in 1959. Finalist for the 1960 Hugo Award. The Sirens of Titan is the second published novel by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). I decided to do a systematic reading of Vonnegut's books and I started with this one. Why did I start with his second bookbecause it mentioned the fictional planet of Tralfamadore and I know that Tralfamadore figures into several other Vonnegut books later on. I must admit that I am a huge fan of Vonnegut's essay collections, but I have found some of his books to be...a bit too chaotic. That's funny, because I love that about his essays. This book features a couple of very rich men. One had become a space explorer because of a phenomenon called the chrono-synclastic infundibulum that exists in a spiral in the solar system. Earth governments have stopped sending people on exploration missions because they could just disappear. Winston Niles Rumfoord built a private, luxury space ship and he and his dog headed directly for the chro

  Published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Robert Petkoff. Duration: 8 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: This story of Shadows Have Offended is set in season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation . The command team of the Enterprise  is split. Data, Riker and the doctor are helping scout out a planet for a group of refugees. They are planning to resettle there, but there has been a glitch in the last round of data.  The Enterprise is in orbit around Betazed. The ship delivered several ambassadors to the planet to participate in a planet-wide ceremony. Counselor Troi and Captain Picard are participating as well.  But, things go awry on Betazed when three iconic relics are stolen and taken off world in the middle of the ceremony. Meanwhile, the away team scouting the new planet is having its own issues... My Review: I liked the idea of a story where the command team is split into two parts when there are multiple crises and having them work in areas that they were no

  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019. Originally published by Tor Books in 2011. Read by P.J. Ochlan. Duration: 47 minutes. Unabridged. When the President notices that he can't force his head to go underwater during his morning swim and he complains of being lightheaded, his aides take him off for a medical checkup.  The author, John Scalzi During the checkup, the President's doctor determines that the President does indeed have a major medical problem - his brain is missing but he continues to walk and talk like normal. His aides scramble to try to figure out what may have caused this and what they should do. ****** First things first in this hyper-political time: This audiobook is not a commentary on either President Trump or President Biden since the story was originally published during the first term of the Obama's presidency. In a way, this is very much a piece of throwback science fiction, like a Twilight Zone story. It takes a weird premise and runs with it for a

  Winner of 2012 RT Reviewers Choice Award. Winner of the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Winner of the 2013 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Published in 2012 by Tor Books. This book is considered a modern classic and I absolutely jumped at the chance to download it for free thanks to Tor Publishing's e-mail newsletter  and their monthly free e-book offer. I don't take every e-book they offer, but this is a book I've been considering for a while and you can't beat the price of free. The title of the books tells you that there is a Star Trek tie-in with this novel. As every Star Trek fan knows, on the original series the joke is that the character wearing red shirts (except for Scotty and Uhura) are expendable characters that die in a number of weird and sometimes horrible ways.  This book features a universe similar to that of Star Trek . The characters are based on the flagship of the Universal Union fleet - the Intrepid . The fate of the redshirts on the

  Published in 2020 by Tantor Audio. Read by Romy Nordlinger Duration: 3 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. A 2021 Hugo Award Finalist A 2021 Locus Award Finalist A 2020 ALA Booklist Top 10 SF/F Pick A  Booklist  Editor's Choice Pick Book Riot's  Best Books of 2020 So Far Named a Best of 2020 Pick for  NPR  |  NYPL  |  Booklist  |  Bustle | Den of Geek I have a weakness for dystopian literature. I don't do too much of it because so much of it is repetitive - usually it is World War III caused by a nuclear or bio-warfare attack by the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, or the Americans. But, I do enjoy seeing where the author thinks we will break down and how we might recover and rebuild. Upright Women Wanted fit the bill - a future world in which the western United States has devolved back into a Wild West environment ruled by iron-fisted sheriffs that enforce a strict moral code. Their rules include a death penalty for sexual crimes, such as homosexuality

  Audiobook published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio..  Originally published in book form in 1988. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 8 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: This book is entry #1 in a series with 24 published books and short stories. Leo Graf is an engineer. Actually, he's more than an engineer. He's a space engineer - he builds habitats, space stations, space ships and more. And - he's really good at it. He has been brought by his company to a space station in orbit around an out of the way space colony to teach outer space welding. But, his students are not what he expects. He finds the station has nearly 1,000 genetically modified residents that are named quaddies. They are designed to work in no gravity environments - they have no legs. Instead of legs there is a second set of arms. They can grip onto something and still have two or three hands to work with.  Graf finds out that the quaddies are not considered to be people. Instead, they are company prop

  Published in 2019 by Random House Audio. Performed by multiple readers. Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged . Part of the new Disney "canon" books, Dooku: Jedi Lost is a look at the origins of one of the characters of the Star Wars prequels - Count Dooku. It is part of a series of "stand alone" books. For me, Dooku just shows up in the movies with a minimum of explanation - not nearly enough.  We learn a lot more about him in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon show but not enough for me. Dooku is interesting as the original model for Anakin Skywalker - the talented Jedi who often argues with the Jedi Council and eventually falls to the Dark Side. This book tells little about Dooku's activities during the Clone Wars. Even though it is set in the first half of the Clone Wars cartoon series, that is mostly a frame that is used to lead the reader through a series of flashbacks that tell about Dooku's early life. The use of all of the flashbacks was anno

  Published in 2017 by HarperAudio. Read by Eva Kaminsky. Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States.  Sort of. The United States is long gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp.  The author, C. Robert Cargill Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence.  As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violence by a group of humans shocks the wo

  Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by multiple readers (see text of review). Duration: 9 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. A leader in the tech industry has built a completely new type of housing development in rural Washington state.  They are designed to use as little energy as possible, recycle the human waste and run on solar panels. The community is small and isolated - just a few homes in order to lessen the overall environmental impact. If you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helen eruption in 1980, in this novel, the same thing happens to Mt. Ranier. This is a complete possibility in real life and it is generally believed that the consequences would be much, much worse with Mt. Ranier. When Ranier erupts, this community is completely isolated by the chaos that follows. The government is doing the best it can, but this is a full-blown crisis and a few missing people in the woods (even if they are rich and connected) can't compare to the floods, bridge failure

  Published in 2021 by HarperAudio. Read by Vikas Adam. Duration:  8 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. Pounce is a top-level nannybot in an unspecified future time in the combined city of Dallas and Austin, Texas. The world is an unsettled place because robots like Pounce replaced people in all of the repetitive and unskilled jobs all over the world. But, those people didn't go anywhere, they are simply given a Universal Basic Income and left to live their lives without any sort of work. Some find productive ways to live their lives, some turn to drinking, drugs or even fringe political movements.  The author If you can imagine that Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger character as a robot, you get the idea behind Pounce. He was purchased to be the caregiver for an eight year old boy named Ezra.  Pounce works with Ezra's parents and the older housekeeper robot to help maintain a safe and supportive environment for Ezra. Pounce walks Ezra to and from school and is his constant compan

  Published in 2005 by RazorBill (Penguin Group) In the novel Peeps , author Scott Westerfeld has written a very original take on one of the oldest monster stories of all times - the vampire story. Cal Thompson knows something that almost nobody knows - he knows that vampires are real because he is one. Sort of. Cal Thompson also knows how vampirism is spread. The bite on the neck made famous in the movies is really just one way to spread. It is commonly spread sexually, much like HIV. The virus compels its host to engage in sexual contact, ensuring the spread of the virus - much like rabies encourages animals to attack and bite other animals in order to spread rabies. Infected people are called "parasite positive" or "peeps". Cal Thompson was infected as the result of a one night stand sexual encounter on his first day in New York City. However, he is one of the rare carriers of the disease. He has some of the characteristics of a vampire such as being able to see

  Published in April of 2021 by WordFire Press. Gunslinger: The Dragon of Yellowstone is part of a series of books set in post-Civil War years, but with a major twist - the giants from Norse mythology crossed through a thin spot between their reality and Earth in an attempt to conquer Earth.  The fighting began in Andersonville, Georgia. It interrupted the Civil War but everything East of the Mississippi was basically lost. As the army of the giants pushed west, they were finally stopped in an epic battle featuring a number of names that were big names in the normal timeline of the Old West and an uneasy truce is in place, mostly because both sides have exhausted themselves. This book features a threat to end that uneasy truce that is investigated by a minor character from other books in the series, a teenaged gunslinger named Beth who was trained by none other than Wild Bill Hickock himself.  I really appreciate the world building that went into this series. This reminds me of the ki

  Published in 2008 by Usborne Publishing, Ltd. Travis McClure is a teenaged cowboy with a horse named Deuce. He's good at his job and starting to work more and more on his own and he really enjoys being trusted with more responsibility, even if the work is hard and mostly boring. If they make enough money his family can finally return to their own ranch on Earth and make a go of it. You see, Travis and his family are part of a terraforming operation in a future where human beings are starting to move out into the galaxy. They are on Aletha Three, a planet with a climate and atmosphere similar to Earth's. Terraformers bring a few animals, a few planets and try to jump start a biosphere by spreading grass the old-fashioned way - by having animals eat the seeds and spread them in their manure. Or, as the book more delicately describes it: "On Earth, animals like wild bison and wild horses had once covered the grasslands, their hoofs churning the barren soil like a million t

  Originally published in 1953. Digital Audiobook version published in 2008 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Paul Michael Garcia. Duration: 8 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. Legendary science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) wrote a set of novels for the Scribner's publishing house early in his career as a novelist starting in 1947. Scribner's published 12 of them. One of his most famous works, Starship Troopers , was rejected as one of this series, but it was intended to be in it.  A 14th and final book featuring a female lead character was also rejected.  They all share a theme of space exploration moving roughly from humanity's first steps away from Earth to contact with massive alien empires in far and distant places. Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) Starman Jones falls right in the middle. It is the seventh novel in the series and humanity can travel to far and distant places and has met alien species, but it is exceedingly tricky.  Max Jones is a teenager

  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called "Timescape". Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. This collection is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they

  Published in 2016 by Tom Doherty Associates (A Tor Book) Harry Turtledove specializes in alternate histories. Usually, he has a big twist - what if the South won the Civil War? What if Atlantis were a real continent? What if the Colonies lost the Revolutionary War? What if MacArthur actually dropped atomic bombs during the Korean War? The House of Daniel is a different kind of story, with a twist. To be perfectly honest, I read the description of this book, with its references to The Great Depression, baseball, "hotshot wizards" and zombies and missed the fact that it was actually referring to actual wizards and zombies, not metaphorical wizards (the whiz kid experts that FDR hired) and zombies (the unemployed masses who are desperate for work). I really thought that Turtledove had just written a straight book about semipro baseball in the Great Depression. And, basically he has. 85% of this story is about baseball. Jack Spivey does odd jobs, plays semipro baseball for a f

  Published in September of 2020 by Recorded Books. Read by Julia Whelan. Duration: 3 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Brandon Sanderson is one of the go-to names in science fiction and fantasy in the 21st Century. He has been nominated for or has won just about all of the major awards. Mary Robinette Kowal has similar credentials. Together, they created this audiobook-exclusive novella. This audiobook clocks in at 3 hours and 30 minutes, but it is an action-packed 3 hours and 30 minutes that takes the listener into an all-too-plausible (mostly) and creepy world. Mary Robinette Kowal The story begins with Holly Winseed waking up in a hospital. She has no idea why she is there and gets very confusing answers from the staff. Soon, she realizes that she is a cloned copy of herself. Winseed lives in a future filled with nano-technology, including in the human bloodstream. The tiny robots keep people healthy and young.  It also allows the government to access your mind. Then, they can clone

  Originally published in 2011. Set in a future America where the world has been invaded by inter-dimensional space aliens that are a living bio/tech hybrid, this dystopian series is full of action and does not offer much in the way of subtlety. The world has been overrun by strangelets - the cutesy nickname for creatures that can rip apart a human being in seconds. This was accidentally caused by a supercollider that opened up a rift that released an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that destroyed electronic systems across the world. I received this book for free way back in 2011 and it was quickly buried under hundreds of free Kindle book offers that I've found over the years. I was flipping through the list of books that I have not read and the title caught my attention. I have no idea how Spam is involved. I found this book to be intriguing, even if it was simplistic. The only real problem I have is this: 49% of the book is the story I picked and 51% of it is a sample of another nov

Published by Kobo Originals in 2018. Read by Meegwun Fairweather. Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. It is the latter half of the 21st century and the world has had a series of literal upheavals. Earthquakes sheared off California, global warming has changed the weather. Droughts occur in former wet spaces and dry places have become swamps. Sea levels have risen and drowned out many cities. Many animal species have died off and others are in severe decline. On top of that, the nations of the world have gone to war and most cities were destroyed, people have fled to the remaining cities. The entire world map has been re-drawn. In the future there is also another problem. Almost everyone in the world has The author, Cherie Dimaline. lost the ability to dream. Everybody except the indigenous population of the Americas - Native Americans. However, their bone marrow can be harvested for a substance that lets other people dream. The government and the Catholic Church have joine

Originally published in 1982. Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Kevin Kenerly. Duration: 7 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. An interesting part of Stephen King's long and storied career is legendary. At this point, he has 61 novels, including 7 written under the pen name Richard Bachman. At first, he wrote books under the Bachman pen name because the publishing industry had a rule - no more than one book per year per author. Clearly, with a prolific author like Stephen King that is an issue. This edition includes an essay by Stephen King that talks about Richard Bachman and his relationship with his pen name. The Bachman books have a darker tone than the Stephen King books by design. The Running Man has a particularly dark tone. Set in 2025 in an alternate history (even though it was written in 1982, it refers to things in 1978 that did not happen) in which America has become a corporate oligarchy. The economy is ruled by a company called General Atomics (presu