I actually purchased Detroit, a relatively new PS4 game, for my son Christopher, who enjoys console RPGs. He told me later that he wasn't going to be able to get to playing it for a while, and thus I was welcome to try it as long as I didn't spoiler him too much. I'm glad I did. Detroit: Become Human is a game from Quantic Dream which features one of the central questions of many SF universes (including my own Arenaverse): can artificial intelligences be considered people? How and when do we make that decision? And what do we do what we are [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon
May 29, 2018 By 3 Comments
Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon make up the Great Migration dualogy, a pair of books unique in the Liaden canon by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller in that they take place entirely before all of the other books – in fact, before Liad existed. Because the "Great Migration" was a far greater, and stranger, migration than has ever been seen before. Cantra yos'Phelium is a trader – a hard-bitten independent trader who plays in the gray-to-even-black market, because she has a number of secrets in her past that she really doesn't want looked into. [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Mick Oberon
May 8, 2018 By Leave a Comment
The Mick Oberon series by Ari Marmell is a common recommendation to those who enjoyed Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. And there are certainly a lot of similarities. The following description applies, more or less, to both: A wisecracking PI who happens to use magic as well as more traditional methods keeps getting mixed up in magical hijinks out of his league in his home town of Chicago. His magic, unfortunately, conflicts with the newer gadgetry of the modern world, and he often tries to avoid having to use said gadgets. He may be considered [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Legend of Korra
May 3, 2018 By Leave a Comment
Earth. Fire. Air. Water. Only the Avatar can master all four elements and bring balance to the world. I hadn't ever watched much of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I knew it had been a successful series which spawned a well-thought-of sequel series. As I've been deliberately looking for things to show my daughters that star women heroes, and they like animated shows, The Legend of Korra looked like a good bet. It was. As stated in the quote above, while there are four elements that have their own "benders" – earthbenders, [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Martian
May 1, 2018 By 2 Comments
The Martian by Andy Weir almost managed to lose me in the first few pages. Now, that's not so bad as it sounds. As an author who's written a hard-SF novel focused on Mars (Boundary), I came to The Martian with a terrible handicap: I know a lot more about this than probably 99.9% of readers. And one thing that I know very well – that is, in fact, made explicitly clear in one of the scenes of Boundary, in which our intrepid adventurers end up going through a Martian tornado/dust devil which happens to be going at about 180km/hr, faster than [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Horizon Zero Dawn
April 24, 2018 By Leave a Comment
I was reluctant to try this one at first, because much of the material I saw made this look like the kind of action RPG that I generally fail miserably at. But after multiple people told me to give it a try, I did. And that was a really good decision. Horizon Zero Dawn follows the story of Aloy, a young woman who is just coming of age as the main story begins. The initial tutorial section of the game takes you through important events in Aloy's childhood, including her experiences finding out that she and her adoptive father Rost are [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Ready Player One
April 19, 2018 By Leave a Comment
I'd heard of this book (by Earnest Cline) off and on for years, but seeing a movie released caused me to actually pick it up and read it. Wade Watts, AKA Parzival, lives in the culmination, or perhaps nadir, of development of the trailer park – the "stacks", where trailers have been literally stacked to heights of twenty or more, sheltering the desperate and displaced in a world where a combination of climate change and energy depletion has caused the collapse of American society and most of the rest of the world. It is a dystopian, [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Aeronaut’s Windlass
April 12, 2018 By Leave a Comment
I've previously reviewed the Dresden Files and the first couple of volumes of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera (both of which I enjoyed a lot). The Aeronaut's Windlass begins a new series, The Cinder Spires. This may be Jim Butcher's most ambitious series. Dresden's adventures take place in a world that looks very much like ours, and the basic setup is easily understood, even if the supernatural underbelly of the world is complicated and often obscured to the reader. Codex Alera takes place on a world that is at least generally Earthlike and with a [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: My Hero Academia (Boku no Hero Academia)
January 23, 2018 By 1 Comment
"It is all right now. Why? Because I am here." – All-Might In a world like this one, but some undefined time in the future, civilization has been drastically changed by the emergence of strange powers, called "Quirks". At first very rare, by now over 80% of humanity has some form of Quirk – which can range from extendible fingers to invisibility, ability to project energy, and so on. In the younger generations, almost everyone has a Quirk. Due to the nature of these new powers, the profession of superhero became reality; for [ Continue reading... ]
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