Brian Behrend’s microblog
Consistently creative and baffling in so many great ways. Not a huge fan of the just normal old shitty human storyline instead of more fun bizarre living planet that makes babies in you storylines, but didn’t take too much from the season as a whole. Binged all 10 episodes in 3 days including like 5 in a row to wrap it up.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Crossposted on Trakt
Watch Scavengers Reign on Max
Loved this. Not the fastest pace show but loved every episode and binged all 10 episodes in 3 days. Even stayed up late two nights which is super rare for me these days. Enjoyed the world building, character development, and the story reveals as well. Looking forward to Season 2 and also added Foundation and a bunch of other Asimov to my Goodreads backlog as well.
Rating: 5 stars
Crossposted on Trakt
Watch Foundation: Season 1 on Apple TV+
So do they ever explain why ivory is so valuable in the future?
Really enjoyed this animal conservation/climate change story and went along easily with the science fictiony parts, but was regularly distracted by the premise that in the near future ivory would become seemingly the most important substance on earth. One note about it being needed for future iPhones or something would have helped.
Between this and The Mountain in the Sea I’m now very interested in catching up to Nayler’s short stories and will definitely be excited for whatever he writes next. Great book covers too.
Rating: 4 stars
Crossposted on Goodreads
Buy The Tusks of Extinction on Bookshop
I apparently need to re-read The Three-Body Problem because this trailer for the upcoming Netflix show looks great but I have ZERO recollection of reading any book like what was in the trailer.
Consistently surprisingly weird (in great ways) with some extremely well fleshed out, endearing characters that I was rooting for all the way until the end. I thought the author Ryka Aoki had lost me there for a minute near the end but there’s a couple final twists that really wrap up this combo of science fiction, fantasy, classical music, and donuts with a completely satisfying ending.
Rating: 4 stars
? Crossposted on Goodreads
? Buy Light from Uncommon Stars on Bookshop
A little unsatisfied with the main mysteries wrapped up and some details left unexplored, but overall really enjoyed this quite a bit. Thought the main character was great as well as the various AIs, and in particular really found the idea of the point-fives conceptually intriguing.
Rating: 5 stars
? Crossposted on Goodreads
? Buy The Mountain in the Sea on Bookshop
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
? Buy All Systems Red on Bookshop
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
? View my Goodreads review
? Buy Mickey 7 on Bookshop
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.
? View Goodreads review
? Check out Lost in Time by AG Riddle on Amazon