Tag: science fiction

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All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) – ★★★★★

All Systems Red

Great, quick read that I didn’t want to put down. Enjoyable humor and strong premise and character development of the titular murderbot. I was disappointed at first by the very last couple pages but then I remembered there’s 6+ other books that it leads into and am a lot less critical of how it wrapped up.

Rating: 5 stars

📚 Crossposted on Goodreads
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Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton – ★★★½

Mickey 7

I could have done without the handful of pretty average and vaguely sitcom/rom-com adjacent chapters when the multiple appears early in the last third, but I enjoyed the writing style and dialog of this quite a bit.

This ended up being pretty slight particularly with regards to the conflict/mystery of the planet itself and wrapped up the issue with the multiple quickly and unsatisfyingly, but the premise and execution (pun intended) of the expendable concept in general was really good so I’m interested in seeing where Ashton took this in the sequel. Especially considering because of the decisions Mickey makes at the very end of this.

(I’m also now excited for the Bong Joon-ho/Robert Pattinson movie version Mickey 17 coming out early next year I found out about while writing up this review.)

Rating: 3.5 stars

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📕 Buy Mickey 7 on Bookshop

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Lost in Time (by A.G. Riddle) – ★★

Book front cover for AG Riddle's Lost in Time

I’ve listened to a bunch of A.G. Riddle books and enjoyed and/or really liked them. This one I just don’t know. While being a page turner and generally entertaining, it had some real problems I just could not get over.

Spoiler filled book review continues...
Lost in Time misrepresents how death penalties, criminal deterrence, human nature, society, the justice system, and the Supreme Court work all at once. I’m not sure if this is trying to be propaganda for capital punishment or just a careless misstep in the pursuit of context for the story.

The book constantly states the prisoners the “worst of humanity” despite also being a story about the judgement of innocent man and never once mentions that others our heroes blink out of existence maybe just maybe might also have been unjustly accused.

(Also, time travel stories are hard. So many examples of “I can’t do anything different without destroying the universe” comments while constantly making a bunch of huge and small changes.)

📚 View Goodreads review
📕 Check out Lost in Time by AG Riddle on Amazon