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Rating: 4/5 Neal Stephenson, Anathem (New York, NY: William Morrow, 2008). This is a book that’s all about the journey. It’s quite long (almost a thousand pages), and I’d certainly classify it as a “slow burn.” The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world (but not your run-of-the-mill post-apocalypse) in which...

Rating: 4/5 Robert Charles Wilson, Spin (New York: Tor Books, 2005). I managed to squeeze in at least one new book this summer. Wilson’s Spin is a sci-fi novel that follows two families (three main protagonists) as the world tries to figure out what happened to the suddenly invisible stars. The narrative alternates...

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Rating: 5/5 Hugh Howey, Wool (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). What a pleasant surprise! I just kept hearing about this book from all sorts of different people, so I finally checked it out from the library. I’m so glad I did! When it comes to speculative fiction, authors are faced with the very difficult challenge of...

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Rating: 4/5 Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011). Well the book was a fun read, but saccharine. Like the best Disney and Pixar films, Ready Player One is targetted to younger readers but cannot be fully appreciated except by older ones. Unfortunately, unlike movies like Wall-E (my...

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Rating: 3/5 Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art (London: Orbit, 1991). Well this book is more of a novella. It’s grouped with a number of short stories, not of all of which take place in the Culture universe. They do sort of belong together, though. The main story “The State of the Art” is a recounting of the Culture’s...