DenebStation SF Book Reviews

After reading the depressing Blood Music and Childhood's End, I decided to read something more light hearted. I decided to read City because I thought it would be a cute story about a future where there were no more humans and Dogs were the major sentient creatures. Well, it ended up being more like an obituary to humanity.  Thousands of years in the future, dogs will have inherited the earth with their robot helpers. Dog researchers are debating whether or not humans ever existed. Some use folklore, others research old stories and manuscripts found about when men lived on earth. They published the stories with their notes in between.  Each of the stories follows the Webster family through thousands of years of history. Each story centers on an individual Webster family member dealing with the slow evolution of mankind. Humans slowly walk away from civilization to the point that they choose to no longer live as humans. Sometimes the Websters become so anxious that they can...

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke is a classic science fiction book from 1953. It is a first contact and an alien invasion story and introduced the ominous floating spaceship trope. If you don't know what the ominous floating spaceship trope is think about the giant spaceships floating above major world cities and landmarks like in the movie Independence Day.  This is a story where man never made it to space. Right when mankind finally discovered the right rocket technology and were about to send the first spaceship into space, the earth was invaded by spaceships from outer space that floated mysteriously above the cities. Humans called them the Overlords because they did not reveal who they were and where they came from. Humans weren't allowed to see what they looked like for 50 years.  The Overlords ended all poverty and all wars. Humanity lived in a peaceful, post scarcity future. They still wanted to know the Overlords intentions. Were they there for good or evil? Wil...

 Blood Music is a science fiction book written by Greg Bear in 1985. It is an expanded version of a short story of the same name. The short story won Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelette. It begins as a story about bio/nanotechnical horror and the grey goo hypothesis (here it is green goo) and ends up being a beautiful meditation on the nature of reality, consciousness, and the future of humanity.  The grey goo hypothesis is a global catastrophic scenario where out of control self-replicating machines consume the Earth and every living thing while continuing to replicate themselves. In Blood Music, the self-replicating beings are biological self-aware cells called noocytes. They were created in a lab by an irresponsible scientist named Vergil Ulam.  Vergil Ulam was working for the Genetron labs trying to develop MABs- Medically Applicable Biochips, microscopic computer that could be useful in fighting diseases and cancer.  Vergil went too far when he made th...

  A Fire Upon the Deep is a space opera written by Vernor Vinge in 1992. It won the Hugo Award in 1993 and is about the dangers of God-like AI and the singularity. It has amazing world building and is one of the first to tackle the issue of misinformation on the internet.  To understand A Fire Upon the Deep, you first must understand the setting. Vinge divides the Milky Way Galaxy into Zones of Thought. The innermost zone, near the center are the Unthinking Depths. There is minimal intelligence there. If a ship finds itself in the Unthinking Depths, it will be stuck there forever. The next zone is the Slow Zone where Earth resides and where humans originated from. Intelligence is possible here but not sentient AI. Faster than light travel is also impossible here. The next layer is The Beyond where most of the story takes place. Here sentient AI, faster than light travel and faster than light communication is possible. Thousands of years ago, a group of Norwegian humans made ...