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Solaris - spoiler review

Solaris is a sci-fi novel about what happens when humans meet an alien. Cliche, right? It’s been done a million times, right? Wrong. It hasn’t been done quite how Stanislaw Lem does it in Solaris. This isn’t a story about humans meeting aliens that are more primitive than they are. Neither is it a story about humans meeting an advanced and warring species bent on destroying Earth. This is a story about what happens when humans meet something they can’t at all explain or understand—but this thing understands humans, or at least seems to. The alien on the planet Solaris is a giant, goopy, dark-colored ocean the covers the planet. Yes, an ocean. The ocean replicates the objects that researches lower into it. It create strange structures that grow and collapse and seem to look like man-made cities but can’t possibly because how could the planet know what Earth’s cities look like? And for the scientists aboard the research station hovering above Solaris’s ocean, it creates replicas of thin
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Ender's Game - spoiler-free review

Ender’s Game is so many people’s absolute favorite book, and for good reason. It’s well-written, well-paced and has something for every age of reader. As a kind you might gravitate to the action and the cool zero-gravity games. As a teen you might relate more to Ender’s struggles with his family and with growing up and having new responsibilities thrust on him. And as an adult you’re probably going to find the psychological and ethical angles of the book most fascinating. This is why Ender’s Game is one of the very few books the I’ve reread. Ender’s Game follows Ender, a little boy from Earth who gets sent to a Battle School, a school in space where kids barely study regular subjects and instead devote their time to a sport that’s played in a giant, zero-gravity room. Two armies of children armed with laser guns battle each other for points, prestige and the skills necessary to move on to Command School where they’re trained to command fleets of space ships, all in preparation for the
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The Left Hand of Darkness - spoiler review

I didn’t like The Left Hand of Darkness. I wish I did. I badly wanted to. But when I compare the fascinating sci-fi concepts and the cool setting (pun intended) to the plot, the plot doesn’t live up to the potential. I expected Le Guin to blow me away with a riveting story, but instead I got political intrigue and a dull and lengthy escape across a glacier. Here’s the premise: In the far future there is a collection of planets that form an alliance called The Hundred Worlds. A man names Genly travels from one of these worlds to a cold, ice-covered planet named Winter that isn’t part of the alliance. His job is to convince the inhabitants of Winter to join The Hundred Worlds, but the inhabitants are very skeptical and old fashioned. They’ve never had a visitor come from space before, and they don’t even really believe that Genly came from space at all… except that Genly, unlike everyone else on Winter, is male, a person who always displays the physical characteristics of a man. This blo
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Why There Will Always Be War - Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

This book is a book that shows how absurd everything is. It starts with Billy Pilgrim, the main character. Billy is clearly not mentally stable. His narration is unreliable. His perspective of war is not to be trusted, is not rational. We’re seeing the war through his traumatized and confused point of view. But isn’t that the point? There is no rational perspective on war. It’s all absurd. War is human absurdism at its most extreme. It swallows up so many people, all at once. It takes away innocence and joy and life itself. And yet... it’s unavoidable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being unrealistic. We’re supposed to accept the things we can’t change, and war is one of those things. The two ends of the spectrum in Slaughterhouse-Five are: war is absurd and evil and, on the other end, free will doesn’t exist. War, in other words, is unavoidable no matter how many people agree that killing other people should be avoided. The story explores both those ends in a dizzying traversal b
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All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1) - spoiler-free review

One line review: Murderbot is an antisocial, depressed security robot who hates its job and wants nothing more than to watch TV shows, but unfortunately it is contractually obliged to save its humans. All Systems Red is funny, interesting and fun to read the whole way through. It’s a story about a security robot named Murderbot who hacked its own operating system and is now a free agent. It doesn’t tell anyone this and instead uses its newfound privileges to download thousands of hours of TV shows. It is rented out to a team of researchers who are exploring a new planet, and it pretty quickly turns out that the team is in danger. Unfortunately for Murderbot that means it has to stop watching TV shows and save its humans. The story itself is pretty bland, especially if you’re expecting an intricately plotted space opera, but that doesn’t detract much from the enjoyment because the point of the story is to get us invested in the plight of this robot who has freedom and now has to figure
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House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds - spoiler-free review

If you want a one-line review, here it is: House of Suns is like We Are Legion (We Are Bob) ... just way more exciting. House of Suns is technically a hard sci-fi space opera. Technically. But that generic description doesn’t do this galactic murder mystery justice. Let’s start with the premise. Six million years before the story’s main plot, Abigail Gentian created 1000 clones (aka, “shatterlings”) of herself and sent them out across the galaxy. Every once in a while (say, a couple hundred thousand years) the shatterlings reunite and exchange memories from their adventures in space. But at the latest reunion, the Gentian Line is ambushed. Most of the shatterlings are killed. And that’s where House of Suns begins. The book follows two plot lines, one about the shatterlings and how they search out answers and revenge and one about Abigail Gentian and her story up until she cloned herself. Alastair Reynolds did an awesome job balancing action, interesting characters and a mysterious plo
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Tech Tutorial: How to Use File Paths

File paths show up a lot when you work with computers. The two most common scenarios in which you'll meet them are when you're moving around your computer via a command prompt and when you're linking files while creating web pages. (In this tutorial I'll be discussing how file paths look/work on Unix-based machines like Linux and Mac OS X, but the Windows verity is very, very similar.) File paths are pieces of text that look something like: /User/Ruth/Documents/myTextFile.txt. This particular file path tells me exactly where myTextFile.txt lives on my hard drive. Forward-slashes mean something like "go to" or "look in", and the words in between the slashes are folder names. In this case, "/User" tells me "look in the User folder", then "/Ruth" says "look in the folder named Ruth", then "look in Documents", then, finally, end at the file myTextFile.txt. Notice, the last word/name in a file path can
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