This story takes place in Panga, where robots achieved sentience, but instead of a Matrix-type world, they just withdrew to live among themselves. The people live in a post-factory age, now low tech where people are taught to respect the environment. The main character is Dex, is a non-binary "tea monk." As a monk, their...
Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki is an unusual book. It is almost as if someone bet that they would pull several topics from a hat and the author would write a story combining them. The cast of characters includes, but is not limited to, a trans girl, a famous violin teacher, a starship...
Some Fine Day by Kat Ross is a dystopian story that takes place in the future. As a result of global warming massive hurricanes, or Hypercanes, arose that were so big they destroyed everything in their path. Unlike the hurricanes we are used to, these never dissipated. Consequently, people had to move underground and several...
The Sapiens Run Trilogy is the story of a teenager named Cass that takes place in the year 2055. She grew up in a Sapiens enclave, a community for people who do not believe in cybernetic enhancements. People who get such enhancements are called "subs," to imply they are subhuman. Her father is an important...
Children of Eden is a dystopian novel about a future time when the earth has suffered the Ecofail and the remainder of humanity lives within the EcoPanopticon, an artificial bubble city largely run by computers. Here humanity must stay until the earth is able to heal itself. The main protagonist of the story is a...
Luka Kane is a normal 16 year old who is in a Juvenile prison called "The Loop." He is on death row. He knows that he won't be going home, but he can delay his execution by agreeing, every 6 months, to participate in a medical experiment. Sometimes these experiments, or "delays," are innocuous, but...
The God Game by Danny Tobey is about a group of high school friends who are in a computer club together. They decide to play an online game, the God Game. The game is the result of some computer scientists feeding into an artificial intelligence all of the available information about religion, all religions. The...
Kindred by Octavia Butler is a very creative way of looking at the horrible and troubling history of slavery in the United States. In Kindred, the protagonist, Dana, time travels from the 1970s to the American South in the years before the Civil War and the end of slavery. In the story, Dana is descended...
"According to science, humans have no souls. There is no afterlife or guardian angels or ghosts or spirits or anything at all supernatural. Our world is purely physical. The government has systematically removed God from society." So begins The Gifting by K.E. Ganshert, a dystopian science fiction story where "science won." The protagonist of the story,...
I enjoyed reading The Enhanced by T.C. Edge. It is the first book of a series. The story takes place in the city of Haven which is a relatively safe place in a world that has been decimated by nuclear war. It is a class-based society. At the top are the Enhanced, people who have...
Have you ever had a dream where you felt like you were running down an endless corridor? Well, that is what the middle of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch was like. A little boring and frustrating. Fortunately, the endless corridor feeling was surrounded by some engaging suspense in the beginning of the story and a...
Writing teachers tell their students to keep a journal, that by writing you learn about yourself. This book gives a twist to that age-old wisdom. First the title, every twelve years everyone in the community forgets everything. To combat the periodic forgetting, everyone carries around a book where they write about their lives so that after the forgetting...
Children of the New World is a collection of 13 short stories, each taking place in a different, though future, place and time. I’ll start off by admitting that I’m not usually a fan of short stories. If I’m really enjoying a book, I like to stay with it for a while and really get...
Dark Matter is a fast-paced science fiction/mystery/thriller of a book. It is the story of Jason Dessen, a physics professor who had the possibility to make it big but decided to marry his girlfriend when she became pregnant with his child and settle down. His life is good, if a bit routine and average. When...
Central Station takes place in a Tel Aviv of the future…far enough into the future that humans now have colonies spread throughout the solar system. Central Station is the dominant feature of Tel Aviv; a space elevator where flights arrive and depart from all over outer space, and, as such, have inhabitants from every imaginable...