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Tag Archives: sci-fi

The Windup Girl

by Rob Friesel

“What took you so long to pick it up?” I did not believe the hype. Before The Windup Girl, my exposure to Bacigalupi’s work was through two short stories: “The People of Sand and Slag”–which seemed to pop-up everywhere 1 for a while; and then “Yellow Card Man”–which was in the same milieu as this […]

Federations

by Rob Friesel

In many ways, I’ve started to come to believe that you can’t go wrong with a John Joseph Adams’ collection. Wastelands was incredible, The Living Dead was great, and Federations…? Also very very good. The “dust jacket description” of this anthology pretty much sums it up… It collects a few different modern takes on the […]

Worldmakers

by Rob Friesel

Arranged chronologically from 1955 through 2001, Dozois’ anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, is a tightly-themed collection of science fiction shorts. It’s a good overview of the terraforming subject’s treatment within the genre but the anthology seems to lack any stand-out stories – there are no great masterpieces in here. Which is not to say […]

Eclipse 1

by Rob Friesel

Eclipse 1 is a good-not-great anthology of speculative (née “science”) fiction and fantasy (rather: “new weird”) short stories edited by Jonathan Strahan. My “good-not-great” may be stemming from my disappointment that there was more “new weird”/fantasy than there was science fiction 1 but there were still quite a few “big wins” in the pile that […]

classic sci-fi time-wasters (4 of 4): MegaTraveller 2

by Rob Friesel

The “classic” sci-fi time waster is not just restricted to colonizing distant suns and/or flying around blowing up shit. No. Sometimes it involves flying to distant suns that are already colonized, geting out of your spaceship and then blowing up shit. And after all, isn’t that — the epic space opera, anchored on some Byzantine galaxy-spanning empire […]

classic sci-fi time-wasters (3 of 4): Privateer

by Rob Friesel

In the previous two installments of this series, we discussed two “classic” science fiction games from the PC world: Sierra On-Line’s Outpost and Microprose’s Lightspeed. A theme common to both of those games is a sense of isolation — you’re cut off from the rest of humankind and you’ll have to live by your wits […]