Reviews and Comments

I finished this thing, I couldn't stop reading until I ran out of pages. Awesome series!!!

Oh yeah it's all coming together

I guess I am almost done with this adventure, it's awesome!!!

Original review here

The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster, was a fantastic short story that blew me away as much as the previously mentioned anthology.

It was published in 1909, and yet it contains one of the scariest, most accurate depictions of what a world dominated by reliance on technology could look like—and one might say, already looks like today.

The story is in the public domain, you can find a free copy of it in Alice & Books’ website, the story can also be found in The Eternal Moment, and other stories which is at Project Gutenberg, I hope Standard Ebooks does their own edition as well soon.

While Orwell’s 1984—published in 1949–deals with a corrupt form of government using surveillance, rewriting history and in a state of constant war; the world in The Machine Stops is honestly kind of perfect—at least on paper.

Humanity lives underground after the atmosphere is no longer inhabitable. There’s an hexagonal room assigned for one person, and everyone gets to live in one, everything can be reached at the press of a button: food, music, films, literature, a bed. There is instant video communication, video conferencing, online shopping.

Ideas, knowledge, cannot, and should not, be obtained from their original source. It is wrong after all, since feelings and experiences only undermine reality and facts.

Physical contact is frowned upon, you don’t visit people in person. Water is hot, the lights are comfortable. You can request to become a parent, you can request euthanasia, but birth and death rates have to stay balanced. No matter, there is no pain anymore, the Machine knows best.

Travelling is mostly unnecessary, but flying machines exist, although everyone closes their windows, nobody wants the Sun shining over them, nobody wants to look down to the old cities and landscapes found in the surface, there are no ideas to be gained there.

I don’t usually talk so much about what a book contains, but this is just the idea and the setting, there is also a story to be told, despite it all being so short, there’s still a lot more. It is an easy read to fly through in a single sitting. I highly recommend it.

Original review here

Earth, two million years into the future, stopped rotating, half of it is in light, and the other half, in eternal darkness.

Vegetal life reached the peak of the food chain, humanity has devolved to tribalism and has lost most of its intelligence, spending most of their time surviving in the upper levels of a giant tree forest that covers half of the planet.

This book describes a completely alien world, where the Sun’s radiation has evolved plant life in unimaginable ways. No one is safe, and everything that moves is trying to eat you.

The descriptions, the environments, the prose in this book was mindboggling from start to finish. Many times my mind truly get to work trying to comprehend many of the events and concepts exposed here, but it was never a chore, I just wanted to fully experience what was going on, trying to picture how the creatures and the landscapes would be like in this dystopian future.

At first it kinda felt like there was no plot at all, and the characters were all too simple-minded to be interesting to me. However, this quickly changes as a series of events start to unfold and it just keeps going. This story is a journey of discovery and survival. Characters will die left and right, and the question of how things ended up like that will pop up quite a bit. But such is the way of life.

This is not a super fun story, or high stakes and action packed. However, it is not boring, and the more I learned about the world and how it worked, and the more the characters were faced against, only led me to want to keep turning pages, filled with interesting and inventive ideas, that I would never imagine someone could come up with.

Spaceships and faster than light space travel? sure. Alien life and lasers? sure. But the almost lovecraftian vegetal life and the different wildlife and interactions that can be found here are really, really incredible.

I think this is a novel everyone should read, it tackes a variety of topics, but I don’t know if I could say it was the most thought-provoking thing ever, in fact, I barely highlighted any sentences or ideas that I could reflect on compared to Dune or Childhood’s End, but it for sure provoked my mind to imagine, and the ending left me thinking, what would I have done?

Original review here

This was a series I frequently saw compared with some of the all time classics of Science Fiction, such as Asimov’s Foundation or Herbert’s Dune. So I really wanted to give them a go for a while.

I have to admit the book was completely different to my expectations, but not in a bad way.

When I think of grandiose space opera classics, I kind of imagine humans expanding throughout the universe, faster than light travel and cosmical events we can’t comprehend, and technology advancements beyond compare. Of course these concepts are used in widely different ways in the genre.

In a lot of classic and modern works of science fiction, the style is usually filled with minimalist architecture, brand new tech, shiny spaceships and sterile, practical interiors.

In The Expanse’s Leviathan Wakes features Humanity expanding just in the Solar System, with more grimy and lived-in ships and stations, decades old future technology and patched up space stations overpopulated with humans, trying to survive another day. Of course, I think it’s pretty similar to the style of the Rebel Alliance from the Star Wars universe, during the original movies, and the Nostromo of the original Alien. There are some more technologically advanced structures and ships in the book but the overall look of the world is that of “a future with a past,” as George Lucas would say.1

Humans are split into three main factions, Earth, Mars and the Belt, the latter refers to people living beyond the Asteroid belt in space stations and moons, and there’s a certain tension and dynamic between them. Earth is the OG, overpopulated and with older military technology, used to gravity and such. Mars has more technological advancements, since they are still making the planet habitable and need to be on the vanguard, but they are less numbers too. The Belt is conformed by a bunch of stations and satellites, some more fancy than others, constantly farming resources both space, asteroids and such. There are pirates, there are workers, people are taller, adapted to lower gravity, and there are lots of other details and nuances, and of course, space racism.

The story follows two characters and two different plotlines, interchanging every chapter. One of them is detective Joe Miller, living in a station in the Belt, the other is James Holden, the second in command of a spaceship. As the story progresses the protagonists end up involved in lots of events unfolding one after the other, eventually crossing paths, uncovering a huge conspiracy with implications that will completely revolutionize how humans see the Universe, and pretty much have to save Human civilization by the end.

Honestly, I don’t even want to say much more than that, maybe it sounds kind of standard sci-fi fanfare, but really, the story is just too good, there is are detective noir style investigations, there are space battles, there are cosmic horror elements and of some other classic science fiction tropes. There is not as much hard sci-fi explanations as I thought there would be, it is a pretty digestable adventure that borrows from a lot of genres, and sci-fi just happens to be there.

This is an absolute page turner, chapters are short and end at the perfect spot that would made me go “I can read another one” again and again. It was a pretty fast paced book that still handled multiple plotlines with grace, and the characters had lots of great moments and developments. The last 12 or so chapters were impossible to put down for me and many in the book club.

Even if this book is the start of a series, the finale ends really well, you can leave it alone and while not every question will be answered for obvious reasons, there’s definitely a lot to enjoy if you only want to read this one. But I plan to keep going.

Original review here

This book was a bit confusing at first with the dozen or so characters that are presented during the beginning chapters. However, I quickly familiarized with them—I still mixed up some of the last names but I knew who was who. It is a simple story in theory: a rich lady with an inheritance, a second husband, two sons and a wife of one, some servants, a doctor, you know the drill.

Honestly, this was very fun to read along someone else, after each chapter we each had our suspects and opinions on the cast, it was as entertaining as the novel itself every time Poirot explained his findings and changed our whole perspective on the events all the way up to the final reveal, which is just amazing.

It is funny and well written, a definite page turner for me, I read the last four chapters altogheter because all the revelations and explanations were quite mind-boggling to me—also because isa kept reading ahead, so evil lol.

I recently acquired And Then There Were None, considered to be one of Agatha Christie’s best work, and one of the best selling books of all time, because if this one amazed me, I can’t help but wonder what her best writing would be like. Yes, I have an e-reader but I couldn’t help myself. Good stuff.

I might continue my read of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, just to refresh myself and see the way both fictional detectives work, and have some more fun outside of the Science Fiction genre.

Original review here

This novel surprised me, as it was chosen mostly because of its page count and because it wasn’t a space opera. I wanted to read something alongside Leviathan Wakes that I could focus on while other members of my book club catched up to me. In two more weeks I would be literally the last place to finish it, but still, at the time it was a good idea.

I was interested in reading a novel by James Blish named A Case of Conscience, since it’s apparently one of his best works, but the page count was a bit too high to read alongside something else, and I decided to read it as my main focus later on. I saw Black Easter on my Kobo in the same folder, it had a shorter page count, I saw it wasn’t a space opera, and I went for it.

The book itself starts with a note by Blish, stating that this work was trying to represent magic and demonology in a serious and viable way, instead of the romantiziced view shown by other books of the time.

I found this interesting since the book was published in the 1950s, and I honestly don’t know what were the works that was referrencing at the time. My guess is it was something similar to the movies where a girl falls in love with a werewolf or vampire, or the way astrology is used to find the ideal partner by some people. I didn’t bother looking up more about this but feel free to share if you know about the topic.

The story itself is rather interesting. In this world, sorcery is real, the spells and summonings of demons found on real grimoires from the medieval times, actually work. There are black magicians, and a Catholic order of white magicians too. Magic has real power in this world.

A rich arms dealer has decided to contract the best black magician in the business, specialized on murders, a task fulfilled by summoning demons, who take different appearances and posess different traits, the descriptions and names of those demons are like the kind of thing you would read in Revelations, multiple heads, of lions, goats, snakes; or taking on a human form, with exentric personalities or attractive traits. There are a couple of tests first where the black magician shows its skill, and after that, the real request is made: to unleash all the demons of Hell on Earth to roam free.

Pretty much everything related to how demons are summoned and how rituals are made is taken straight out of real texts and manuscripts from medieval times, the descriptions and the way the “experiments” are performed can honestly be compared to a normal science class, but instead of dealing with chemical reactions or physics, you deal with demonology, magic and symbols.

The characters have some interesting traits, and they kind of represent different views of how they perceive magic and their own desires. Some of them want to see their world burn because they are bored, others seek pleasure and lust, others just want to learn and acquire the knowledge of the Art and others want to use it for good.

The speculation and dialogue from the characters regarding theology, demonology, religion and humanity is rather interesting. With some talk about the problem of Evil, the contradiction between black magic existing and God’s Omnipotence, the downfall of mankind and its constant back and forth between spirituality and secularization, if the demons they see with their own eyes are not real and they are all just experiencing mass hysteria, among other things.

The writing style of this novel completely clashes with the previous works I’ve read, it is not an action-filled adventure after all, and it has aged a bit in some aspects, like how people talk; the spells and manuscripts quoted are usually old style English, with thou’s and thee’s everywhere. The narration has a rather serious tone, the description of the experiments and events don’t really have flare, it’s all very scientific, like a documentary even.

Despite this, I still enjoyed it. The writing was still really good, if a bit of an acquired taste. The story progressed rather nicely, and the topic at hand was enough to keep me reading until the end. I actually flew through the final pages of the book, the way it is described is honestly not what I expected, but it makes sense, and I somehow did not expect it to end as it did.

The book has a sequel novel titled The Day After Judgement, which I’ll probably read soon enough.

Overall, I really enjoyed it for what it is, it will probably not be in my top 5 of the year, but I appreciate what it is going for and respect it a lot. It made me think about things and it kept me entertained for a few hours, I’m glad I gave it a go, and I hope I read more from the author sometime soon.

I'm done with chapter 14 and this book is pretty good so far! It's a page turner like the first one haha, but I've been so busy with work

I completely forgot to add this book here, but I finished it and it was great! It is a bit more niche and even boring at times compared to the space operas I've read lately, but it was still pretty interesting and rather short too!