Category Archives: Science fiction

Robert Sheckley – Citizen in Space (1955) Review

Posted on October 3, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

8/10 Citizen in Space is Robert Sheckley’s second short story collection, published a year after the first, Untouched by Human Hands (1954). And, like its predecessor, it is a very neat collection of pleasant, comedic science fiction stories, written in … Continue reading →

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Olaf Stapledon – Odd John (1935) Review

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

8.5/10 This novel is only 200 pages of rather dry prose, but I wrote a whole essay about it. I found it thoroughly fascinating. This novel has the illustrious honour to be called the first Superman story. A bit strange, … Continue reading →

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R.A. Lafferty – Past Master (1968) Review

Posted on September 19, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

8/10 The planet Astrobe, about five hundred years in the future. It is mankind’s last chance to make something for itself. The Old World failed, then we got the New World, America, which also failed, and now Astrobe is our … Continue reading →

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Ursula K. Le Guin – Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1966-67) Review

Posted on September 10, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

Comprising: The three short novels contained within this collection are Le Guin’s first three published novels. Her brief warmup, you could say, before she really won fame with novels such as A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand … Continue reading →

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Adrian Tchaikovsky – Eyes of the Void (2022) Review

Posted on September 3, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

7.5/10 The author went to his basement, sweat a lot, and oozed out another novel! And it’s a doozy this time, marketing says. None of that milquetoast science fiction for tiny babies and mooncalfs! This is the real McCoy so … Continue reading →

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Isaac Asimov – The Gods Themselves (1972) Review

Posted on August 5, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

6.5/10 The Gods Themselves is a popular, successful work in Asimov’s career and it is famous for a couple of things: it won the important awards, it was a return to fiction for Asimov after a 15 year drought, and … Continue reading →

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Monday Starts on Saturday (1964), by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Posted on July 26, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

8/10 Translation by Andrew Bromfield in 2002. Sometimes published as “Monday Begins on Saturday”. In this supremely odd novel that is set in the 1960s in Soviet Russia, magic is real, and we have a Soviet science institute trying to … Continue reading →

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Blake Crouch – Recursion (2019) Review

Posted on July 20, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

7/10 After the highly successful Dark Matter (2016) which would become Crouch’s best-selling novel, he delivered another sci-fi thriller very similar in tone and subject matter: Recursion (2019). Like Dark Matter, Recursion reads very much as if it is a … Continue reading →

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Alastair Reynolds – Eversion (2022) Review

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

8.5/10 Eversion is a fascinating science fiction novel with a narrative that has a lot of peculiarities – it’s doing a whole lot simultaneously – and is therefore not easy to explain. And indeed, the back blurb reads as if … Continue reading →

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William Gibson – Burning Chrome (1986) Review

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Jeroen Admiraal

9/10 This short story collection showcases William Gibson’s first work before he won all the awards with Neuromancer (1984). And from the very first start of his career he shows himself to be a tremendously talented writer.  Fellow SF writer … Continue reading →

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