Reviews

You should read this book, if you haven’t already.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Monks, Nuclear Apocalypse, and the Second Coming

BY Paul Jarvey

This book surprises with its first six-century jump, from dirt-eating survivalism to rediscovery of electrical power, and then shocks with its second leap to a rebuilt world of interstellar travel. That the spectre of nuclear apocalypse hangs over this renaissance, neither forgotten nor properly respected, is only to be expected. But, again, this is not a story about governments or fallout victims. It’s a story about vultures and about the desperate unkillable thread of humanity that remembers itself.

Review: The Sunless Countries

The Sunless Countries: Book Four of Virga

BY J.J.S. Boyce

In four books Schroeder has had four completely different main characters, in four completely different locales within Virga, with four completely different (immediate) plots. There’s a larger story, but Schroeder has almost been building it up by sonar. We’ve been getting a sense of larger, looming events by a series of glancing blows — collisions between our many protagonists and the greater story, as they pursue their own ends. But with Book Four, The Sunless Countries, one gets the distinct impression that we’re almost at the main event.

TRIGGERS by Robert J. Sawyer

BY AE

It’s no secret that Triggers was inspired in part by the adaptation of Robert J. Sawyer’s 1999 novel, Flashforward, as a television show on ABC that recast the central conceit of the earlier book as the core to build a thriller around. With this in mind, I can’t help writing the screen treatment for Triggers in my head while reading it, crafting a hook that goes something like: White House Down meets one of those episodes from Star Trek where something strange happens on the holodeck.

The Road Not Taken: Neanderthals in Science Fiction

BY J.J.S. Boyce

This is how it begins in many of the stories: A prominent scientist thinks he can reconstruct a Neanderthal genome and puts out a call for a willing surrogate mother. Is this real-life Harvard geneticist speaking out of turn, or is he really as close as he thinks and claims? Because if this really happens, we’ll be entering a new era. A new (or rather, old) species of human being will walk the Earth alongside our own, for the first time in 30,000 years.