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By Sean Clark, on May 11th, 2012 [This steampunk homage to Sherlock Holmes is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: George Mann
2008, Snowbooks
Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.
Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 3rd, 2012 [This entertaining, fast-paced sci-fi novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Brian Evenson
2012, Tor
Filed under: Sci-Fi
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I’ve been in a long, dark reading drought lately. I’ve been reading only mediocre books, it seems, for months now. I could barely remember what a great read felt like when I got hooked by Immobility.
It begins with a well-used premise, albeit one I’m a sucker for: a man wakes up with no idea where he is, what he’s doing there, or who he is. As the answers come in fits and starts, the questions of his identity and place in the world become dreadful, ominous, and traumatic.
His name, they tell him, is Josef Horkai. He’s been “stored,” as it turns out, which is dystopian lingo for cryogenic freezing. As he regains his wits, he instinctively, almost unconsciously, tries to murder one of the men who woke him up. He fails only because he falls off the bed; he’s paralyzed from the waist down. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 6th, 2012  Author: Julianna Baggott
2012, Grand Central
Filed under: Sci-Fi
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
[WARNING: This review contains minor spoilers about the premise behind Pure's setting.]
When I first read about Pure, it sounded a lot like Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games series, but for adults. As it turns out, that’s a fair description, but it entails as many negatives as positives. Both series (Pure is the first in, of course, a trilogy) follow teenage girls in post-apocalyptic dystopias who find themselves thrust into central roles in the fight between the haves and the have-nots.
The Hunger Games offers a simple premise and structure, with obvious good guys and bad guys. The main character, Katniss, has to survive a battle royale fight to the death with 23 other teenagers. The rich people who orchestrate the battle are evil, and the poor children forced to fight are good (mostly).
Along the way, Katniss’s progress can be tracked by how many children still survive, and Collins offers regular twists and turns that propel the plot. Collins’s prose is plain and slightly juvenile, as should be expected, and you could call just about any facet of the series “simplistic” without stretching the truth. The characters, the setting, the way the action plays out, the moral questions with easy answers—all of these aspects of The Hunger Games are as uncomplicated as they are primitively satisfying.
By contrast, Pure offers a messier, more tangled, much less satisfying dystopian world. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 2nd, 2012 [The taut time-traveling novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: David J. Kowalksi
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.
Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.
As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.
Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 12th, 2012  Author: Gary Shteyngart
2010, Random House
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.
I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.
For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy. …
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By Sean Clark, on February 21st, 2012 
Author: Haruki Murakami
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Literary, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
I finished this book almost 2 weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: I’m still not quite sure whether I like it. Murakami is a brilliant writer, and I found a lot of joy while reading this book. But now that I’ve finished his latest (very long) novel, I’m not sure if I can say it’s a good book. That is to say: while I was reading, I was liking what I was reading; now that I’m done, I’m not sure I liked what I read. Does that make any sense at all? If your answer to that is yes, you’ve probably read Murakami before. (Note: I’ve tried to avoid spoiling anything in this review, but the zany nature of what Murakami writes means I’ll certainly reveal things that some readers might rather be left to discover on their own.)
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 13th, 2012  Author: Ryan Boudinot
2012, Grove Atlantic/Black Cat
Filed Under: Literary, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Ryan Boudinot is a great writer. He’s funny, weird, humane, endlessly creative, and exceptionally talented. But this is not my kind of book.
Boudinot operates on the continuum between science fiction and surrealism. The world has ended, near enough. The vast majority of the world’s population was wiped out in a time of chaos and human/robot wars called “The Age of Fucked-Up Shit.” In the aftermath, America is a ravaged, fragile place full of bizarre eddies. …
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By Arthur McCulloch, on February 8th, 2012 Author: Scott Lynch
2006, Bantam Spectra
Filed under: Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Follow it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
In The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch has created an incredibly unique world, populated it with engaging characters, and orchestrated a driving, action-filled plot.
This book features one of the best, and most pertinent, prologues written in the fantasy genre. We get introduced to the protagonist from the eyes of two very different thieves—Chains and the Thiefmaker. Most prologues are written from incredible distance and only give a sense of pre-destiny, myth, and/or a generic world setting. Lynch delivers main character backstory while simultaneously introducing us to his world. After exiting the prologue, I was aching to know more about Locke Lamora and what thievery and mischief has got him into so much trouble. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 18th, 2012  Author: Daniel H. Wilson
2011, Doubleday
Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:
There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.
Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.
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By Sean Clark, on November 17th, 2011 Author: Scott Westerfeld
2011, Simon Pulse
Filed Under: Young Adult, Sci-Fi, Historical.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
Goliath closes the YA trilogy Westerfeld opened barely two years ago with Leviathan (if you want to get caught up, you can read my review of Leviathan here, and my review of the middle book, Behemoth, here). Like its predecessors, Goliath is a fun adventure set in a creative alternate history, where World War One is a fierce battle between the steampunk Clankers (Germany and friends) and the Darwinists (headed by Britain) whose army consists of giant biological weapons created by genetically modifying lifeforms–the titular Leviathan being an armored airship supported by a flying whale.
Deryn, the girl posing as a midshipman in the British Air Navy, and Alek, the Hapsberg prince hoping to find a means of peace, continue their adventure right where things left off. There’s plenty of spectacle in this book, and even more historical figures make their way onto the pages (Nikola Tesla, William Randolph Hearst, Pancho Villa, and others). …
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