DenebStation SF Book Reviews

This book has everything I like in it. Non-linear writing, info dumps, big ideas, and I should love this book. What happened? Am I too old? In 2005, Time magazine listed Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson one of the best 100 English language novels written since 1923. (It ranked #84 right before Slaughterhouse Five.) Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel inspired tech giants like Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, inspired programs like Google Earth and Meta and popularized terms like Metaverse and avatar.   Set in a hyper-capitalist future where corporations rule tiny neighborhood block republics, the story follows Hiro Protagonist, a pizza delivery guy for the mafia and hacker, and Y.T. a female teenage skateboarder. Together they investigate a computer virus called Snow Crash, tied to an ancient Sumerian language that will not only crash out your avatar in the Metaverse but will also damage brains in real life. Their adventures take them in and out of the Metaverse, back into the re...

We Are Legion, the first book in the Bobiverse, has a lot of the same problems as Old Man's War by John Scalzi. It is told from the point of view of a sarcastic character with a weird sense of humor. It commits my major book sin of using too many pop cultural references. But I still enjoyed it.   We are Legion , We are Bob was written by Canadian Computer programmer Dennis Taylor in 2016. It is the first book in the Bobiverse series. They are currently five in the series, the last was just released on Audible.  It is about an engineer and programmer who signed up for a cryo-storage company, to freeze his body until it could be revived sometime in the future. Not long after, he gets hit by a bus, and wakes up a couple of hundred of years in the future.  His mind gets uploaded into a Von Neumann probe to explore nearby star systems in order to find life sustaining planets and to save the Earth.  A Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating probe that can be used to m...

  All Systems Red is the first book in the Murderbot Diaries series written by Martha Wells in 2017. It won the 2018 Nebula Award and Hugo Award for Best Novella and is still very popular in the Science Fiction World to this day. There are currently 7 Murderbot Diaries Books. After reading two books in a row about the end of the world, I decided to read something more light and fun.  We follow the character, Murderbot, a self-aware cyborg called a SecUnit. It calls itself, Murderbot. It has a mixture of robotic and cloned human parts, apparently with a human head that it likes to keep under a helmet. It has no genitals so it calls itself an it. Murderbot overrides its governor module making it independent. Instead of being a mass murdering murder robot, it watches hours of soap operas and true crime dramas.  We follow Murderbot on its journey to learn to become more human as it develops a relationship with the humans it is tasked to protect. As the team of humans do resea...