Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
Alex White’s A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe is a curious mixup of space opera and fantasy arcana, with a dash of military SF thrown in. I missed the “magic” bit when I was adding it to my Christmas wish list, and I was surprised when I read the first few pages in the … Read more
The teaser for this novel sold me instantly: “Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan … Read more
I don’t often get to say that I’m reading a book written by a friend but that’s the case with Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes. I know Mur from back at the dawn of podcasting, when she podcast Geek Fu Action Grip and I did Nuketown Radio Active. We later wrote columns for Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine. I haven’t seen Mur in … Read more
I’ve compiled my summer reading list for 2016. As is normal for me, it’s dominated by space opera and military science fiction, but peppered with some steampunk and superhero fiction. It weighs in at 14 books and 6 graphic novels. That’s one fewer than last year, but that gives me gives me some wiggle room to … Read more
I got this book in Kindle format for Christmas 2015 and then promptly forgot about it. Since then I’ve read a number of books, so many that I was getting dangerously close to having to buy another one (or at least, check it out of the library). And then I remembered … my old friend … Read more
Sun of Suns takes place in an immense habitable Dyson sphere (or something like a Dyson sphere) inclosing the star Virga. A freefall civilization — complete with barrel-like towns spun to produce gravity — has spread throughout the enclosed habitat. The book tells the story of Hayden Griffin, a young man seeking revenge against the … Read more
The Laundry series is an amusing mash up of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The X-Files, Call of Cthulhu, and The Office. The second book in the series features its hero, Bob Howard, in a very James Bond-ish style adventure in which he has to re-enact all of the tropes of the spy genre in order to … Read more
Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel about the crew of a generational starship finally arriving at their destination … and dealing with what they find there. It’s the first Robinson book I read since I finished his Mars trilogy about a decade ago.
My summer reading list is progressing nicely. I finished up my first print novel on the list, Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon, and I’ve moved on to the second, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. The book opens with the destruction of the moon by an unknown “Agent”, and humanity’s desperate attempt to escape the impending lunar apocalypse. … Read more