Rootz's Blog

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

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

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