Science Fiction

The Bastard Legion is an action-packed thrill-ride into space warfare.  Gavin Smith stays in the very top tier of science fiction writers with his future mercenaries.  When I first saw the back of the book, I thought this military science fiction sounds like Suicide Squad.  And I was right - it even has a science fiction Australian guy with a killer boomerang.  The next question: is this space opera more like the mess of the movie or the well-crafted graphic novels?  

The answer is dramatically the latter.  This is a wonderful addition to Smith's amazing fiction of imaginary wars and

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of #NewTitleTuesday, where we take a brief look at a new title that's hitting the shelves at your local library! It's late July, summer is in full swing, and lines on new releases are long, so if you're looking for something great to read, always reach out to your friendly neighborhood library staff; we're always happy to help. 

This week's selection is DRUNK ON ALL YOUR STRANGE NEW WORDS by Eddie Robson. Robson, a British writer who's been in the business for a while, working on radio plays, short stories, comic books, and television scripts

Wonderfully quirky, nerdy, and compelling.

The narrator is reflective, curious, self-conscious and insecure. He is also a washed-up former star of a fading industry, suffering a mid-life crisis and looking back on how he has gotten to where he is. It almost reads like an alternate reality autobiography, feeling confessional, personal, and true. And it features ruminations on math, science, death, ritual sacrifice, mysticism, and repeated use of the word "chthonic."

I have to admit, though, I was hooked from the moment I read the author bio on the back jacket flap.

James Kennedy is the

This is Grant Morrison’s superhero swan song, as they bow out of writing DC and Marvel superheroes after decades of producing some of the weirdest, most colorful, most imaginative mainstream comics. Superman and the Authority makes a good finale for their time with DC. An aging Superman, his powers waning as he gets older, his idealism tempered somewhat by a sense of practicality, assembles a group of younger, edgier supers (including one of his biggest detractors, the villain/anti-hero Manchester Black) to help him save the world in ways the Justice League would probably avoid.

Superman is

Hello and welcome to NewTitleTuesday, where we take a look at a new book that gets released into the publishing world this week. Today's novel is a love story - well, let me stop right there, as it's not exactly a love story, it's a love story that goes wrong. In the beginning, anyway.

The novel begins with Nick, a struggling novelist, who accidentally sends a furious text to a wrong number. Bee, who works on refurbishing cast-off wedding dresses, gets the text and she, snarkily, sends a message back. They both begin a relationship of sorts over the phone, with both of them feeling the

Hello and weclome to another edition of #NewTitleTuesday, where we take a closer look at a book that hits the shelves in bookstores (and the the holds shelves at your local library) today!

John Scalzi is an author known for writing witty and accessible science fiction. (And, on a personal note, he's also an author I love to put in patron's hands when someone tells me that they don't like to read science fiction. Titles like OLD MAN'S WAR or his Star Trek-inspired REDSHIRTS are almost gateway drugs to the genre.) His newest, THE KAIJU PRESERVATION SOCIETY, written in the opening months of

Light Years From Home by Mike Chen is a family drama with science fiction flavor. If you’re looking for hard sci-fi with intricately plotted space escapades, this is not the book for you. What this book is instead is a very real, intimate tale of a family with a lot of issues - only one of which is aliens.

The Shao family was always a little dysfunctional, but the real turning point in their lives is when Jakob Shao goes missing for 15 years. Jakob’s father claims that he was abducted by aliens and hopes to bring him home. Little sister Evie is drawn into this “conspiracy,” working with

Sometimes a sci-fi novel comes along with such a knockout premise that even readers of other genres cross over to take a peek and see what the fuss is about. Take Andy Weir's 2011 breakout smash THE MARTIAN: what if one astronaut was stranded on a planet all alone after a botched Mars expedition, and the rest of Earth raced to save him? After ten years, a flopjillion copies checked out, and a Matt Damon movie later, we still get patrons at the library asking for readalikes who never normally ask for sci-fi. Today's #NewTitleTuesday selection is a bit similar, in that it has such a killer

Baked beans, bog mutants and interdimensional travel are the ingredients in this hilarious middle grade debut novel by John Cusik. 

I listened to the audio version of the book, which I highly recommend.  The narrator, Gary Furlong, does a remarkable job of giving life to the full cast of strange and quirky characters with the added bonus of doing so with a British RP accent. 

The story begins in the 21st century.  Lola Ray, a typical, responsible older sister, is looking forward to a vacation away from the annoyances and hassles of her everyday life.  However, at the airport something

     Steve Epting's art in comics and graphic novels is fantastic.  Eptig is able to give Batwoman: The Many Arms of Death a classic feel with modern sensibilities, as he has with other superhero comics.  

     We are introduced to Kate (Batwoman) and her lost year where she spent time on an island full of degenerates, with her lover keeping the peace.  Now she returns while tracking down some arms dealers who are selling the biological weapon the monster man serum.  My biggest complaint is that we do not really get enough backstory to care about or know who some of these characters are

I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery when it premiered and...it just didn't feel like Star Trek to me. The Klingons looked like orcs from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. The overall feel was too flashy while also being too cynical--and my favorite Star Trek series is Deep Space Nine, which is overall the darkest series in the franchise. Then the rest of the series was locked behind the paywall of the CBS All Access channel and I didn't want to pay to watch a series that turned me off with its first episode, so I gave up on it. (Picture me stomping off in a huff and

One of my personal reading goals I set when Covid-19 first started turning things upside down was to read more of the books on my own personal shelves, things I'd bought but not read yet. I wasn't counting on my reading mojo plummeting, and truthfully, as far as timing went, I might have chosen a bit more wisely than to read a book that begins with a cataclysmic event that will likely be a human extinction event in time. So while I was fairly certain I would ultimately enjoy Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, first book in her Lady Astronaut series, it took a bit for me to fully

Shortly before the library closed due to the novel coronavirus, my co-worker, Adam, loaned me a set with all five of the original Planet of the Apes films - three of which are currently in the Johnson County Library collection, and two of which are available to stream from home on IndieFlix. This pentalogy (five!) of films includes Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). I really only had plans to watch the first film, and maybe try out

Ah, the one and only Brandon Sanderson. If you are a fan of high fantasy you are probably familiar with his works and can reminisce on the first Sanderson book you experienced. I say experienced- not read- because working the way through a Sanderson novel alongside his characters is an adventure. I started digging into Sanderson’s works with the Mistborn trilogy, which I highly recommend. The trilogy is a great introduction to Brandon Sanderson’s works as it is shorter, but still provides that intricate worldbuilding and thought provoking storytelling for which he is so well known. Since

You’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons.  Right?
It’s been around for 45 year and been in everything from Simpsons to Stranger things. 
What is it? 
It’s a pen and paper Roleplaying game.  A set of rules to tell a shared story with friends and family with a backdrop of classic sword and sorcery in the vein of The Lord of the Rings.

Pretty simple right?  Well that’s what Tales from the Loop is.  A very rules-simple pen and paper Roleplaying Game!  Only it ditches the old tropes of Dwarves, Elves, Dragons, and Goblins for a more contemporary setting.

You and your friends play

This is top-notch science fiction--it takes today's scientific advancements and speculates how they might play out in the future, considering legal, ethical, and practical ramifications along the way. The book does this over the course of six lightly connected stories, each progressively further in the future. The topic is gene editing and body modification.

The first story starts simply enough with improved organ transplants from one dying twin to another and ends with a distant reality in which the handful or pure, unmodified humans are kept safe on a reservation as a sort of archival

Recursion occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type.  --Wikipedia

I first heard about this book on NPR and was intrigued enough to immediately put it on my holds list.  You can find out more about how to make your own holds list here. Let me just say that this book did not disappoint!

Memory makes reality.  That's the tag line of the latest thriller by Blake Crouch.  Memory also makes you who you are.  Remembering what you learned in school, a moment from childhood, your favorite Christmas, your first kiss; but what if what you remember isn't real? 

Who hasn't

What if a machine could tell you how to be happy?  What if your results could be manipulated?  What if you had to do something illegal, immoral, or unethical to achieve happiness?  These are a few of the questions posed in the speculative fiction novel Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams.  Set in 2035, our protagonist Pearl works for a Facebook or Google-like tech organization, Apricity, whose name means "the warmth of the sun during winter".  Businesses include Apricty readings as a benefit. along with insurance and retirement packages.  Apricity is brought in to help victims of

If you don't know the basics of the British television series Doctor Who, here we go: a mysterious, eccentric, very long-lived, alien scientist known only as "the Doctor" travels through time and space in a ship that looks like a 1960s British police call box on the outside and is much, much bigger and more futuristic on the inside. The Doctor is accompanied by human traveling companions, fighting against tyranny, bigotry, and destruction in the past, present, and future, all across the universe. The show originally ran from 1963-1989 and was revived in 2005, continuing on today. It's my all

Whoa! Now here's an exercise in extended metaphor. Andrews has taken an idea that could have been a simple allegory and turned it into a fully developed novel. Imagine, if you will, an alternate reality in which physical size is literally determined by wealth. A standard person is middlescale. The middlerich are those larger than that up two doublescale and the middlepoor extend to halfscale. Smaller than that are the littlepoors: quarterscale, eighthscale, and tenthscale--about the size of a rat. The bigrich just get bigger and bigger to hundreds of feet tall. Buildings, roads, vehicles, and

There is a lot of music in the world. But have you ever thought about the music that is set in space? Here are a few space concept albums that fit perfectly into our summer reading theme, A Universe of Stories.

Arctic Monkeys, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

This space-inspired concept album features the Arctic Monkeys as the lounge band on the moon. It blew my mind to realize they are playing the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino as the lounge band. Give this one a few listens to appreciate the nuance and lyrics. I especially enjoy the thought of putting a taqueria on the roof and

The sixth anthology of short graphic novels, Flight Vol. 6 was a beautiful read. I found out about the series from a coworker who is well-versed in the graphic novel genre. Since all the books are anthologies, I did not feel the need to read the series in order. Furthermore, the sixth book was the only one available at my location, so it made my choice easy! For someone that has trouble reading graphic novels, this collection of short stories was perfect. The art styles varied greatly between selections, which made for an engaging read. Some of the stories were wordless, focusing on detailed

The Illuminae Files Trilogy is like no trilogy you've experienced before. Stylistically it stands apart as the story unfolds via a dossier of compiled e-mails, video recordings, military documents, interviews, maps and medical reports that all combine to make for a heady mix of intrigue, political drama, romance, and space opera. In Illuminae, the first in the trilogy, Kady Grant's colony, Kerenza, is attacked by an unknown enemy. Kady manages to escape aboard one of the three remaining spaceships, but her problems have only just begun. The enemy is hot on their tail, a mysterious illness

Good Morning, Midnight is an atmospheric story told from the perspective of two flawed characters who have struggled with or avoided human connection most of their lives. From a remote arctic research station to the vast openness of space, the settings evoke a feeling of stillness and quiet that, as I sat reading, had the effect of blocking out the world around me.

Augustine and Sully are seemingly some of the last people left alive after an apocalyptic event. Sully is a mother and astronaut racing through space on her way back to earth after a two year mission aboard the Aether. The earth

Humanity is curious by nature. Ever since we first looked up at the sky, we have been fascinated with the possibility of reaching those distant lights. Lacking the ability, we wrote stories about what it would be like on that wild frontier. The what-ifs, the hows. But it wasn't until 1817 that these stories stopped being about gods and magic and delved into the concept of science. Man, not gods, were the source of power. Since then, science fiction stories have led the way to scientific advancement.

In 1914, H.G Wells described a future in which scientists had discovered the power of the

"Some people always burn." - Ally Condie, The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe

            Poe Blythe is the seventeen-year-old captain of the last mining ship from the Outpost. In this dystopian fiction, she wants far more than the gold they tear from the Serpentine River. She is looking for revenge, and she is going to use her steampunk-ship to do.  Poe has vowed vengeance on the river raiders who robbed her of everything two years ago. This woman of steel navigates the treacherous waters of the Serpentine. As she does so, she realizes there might be a traitor among her crew.

            The

The saying goes, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

If I’m honest, I seldom follow that old adage when selecting things to read.  What can I say? I’m a Rebel Librarian. Odd thing about it is that I rarely find myself disappointed with my selections. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve found some stinkers that I didn't finish, but I’m batting well over .500 in my success.  

Perhaps the best example of this success was with the following series. 

I was in college and working at Hastings Entertainment in the book department at the time, and there were always fantastic books all around me.  Plenty

Paul S. Kemp's Lords of the Sith tells the tale of a Darth Vader who is new to his alliance with the Dark Side of the Force. Vader's allegiances to his Sith master, Darth Sidious, are put to the test in myriad ways as the two villains encounter a skillful resistance movement on the planet Ryloth. Led by the cunning strategist Cham Syndulla (Star Wars: Rebels fans will likely recall Cham as Hera Syndulla's father), this band of resistance fighters may just stop at nothing to rid their beloved home of the Empire's influence. Rather than simply strike at the military forces occupying Ryloth, only

Hi. My name is Hebah. I’m a giant nerd. I don’t just read genre fiction shamelessly; I also attend conventions dedicated to them. And yeah, going to a ComicCon isn’t really a big deal anymore, but I go to sci fi cons, which is probably a couple steps further along the grand scale of nerddom. This year, I attended WorldCon, or the World Science Fiction Convention, a science fiction and fantasy convention established in 1939. It is home to the Hugo Awards, the longest-running science fiction award around. Attendees vote on both the Hugos and future locations, so it moves around from year to year

I give An Unkindness of Ghosts a clear 5 stars for characters, worldbuilding, and social commentary. I would go with 4 stars for plotting and pacing. Though it certainly doesn't lack for excitement and intrigue, it reads a bit episodically, with an underlying emphasis on each episode illustrating an experience more than carefully crafting a narrative. But what they illustrate is powerful and significant.

"This isn't about how I feel, officer, and this isn't a personal matter. It's a Matildan matter. Our social order depends on our ethical order, and our ethical order depends on