Honestly, I don’t understand why there aren’t more science fiction writers like John Scalzi. I don’t need all science fiction to be written Scalzi style, but I do need more than we’ve got. Opening a review this way should give you a sense that I very much enjoyed The Collapsing Empire. It is, in many ways, a traditional space opera, full of imaginative technology, vivid world-building, and enormous stakes. On the other hand, it’s just plain fun to read. And it’s this latter reason that I habitually read anything by Scalzi the minute it’s published. Virtually every other notable science fiction author you can think of has him beat hands-down in the big idea department. Scalzi has imaginative concepts, sure, but there’s also always something entirely familiar and comfortable about his fictional worlds. They are populated by recognizable character types – none of them being altered or warped by alienness or futurity into something truly other. His books also feature sci fi technology that, underneath the hood, feel familiar and contemporary. If you want never-before-conceived-of science fictional musings that brilliantly speculate on how technology or climate or evolution might change humanity, look elsewhere. If you want to have a good…

Elan Mastai opens his debut (and, in my view, awkwardly-titled) novel All Our Wrong Todays, with a great hook: the world that we are living in is a mistake, a dystopic alternate timeline that never should have happened. We’re supposed to live in a retro-future paradise of flying cars and instantly-generated clothing. Our should be a world without want or poverty, where no whim or desire goes unfulfilled. Food, clothes, employment, and even sexual partners (provided you don’t mind, say, an artificial construct made from the DNA of your ex) are all available in whatever form a person might choose. This paradise was made possible by the Goettreider Engine, which uses the earth’s motion to generate limitless clean energy. So profoundly has this invention changed the course of human history, that its inventor, Lionel Goettreider has become the most celebrated man of modern history. At least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Our narrator, Tom Barren, tells us pretty quickly that the world is dangerous and messy and violent because he has somehow messed it up. I’m a sucker for this kind of alternate-reality novel. I also happen to love witty first person narratives focusing on messed up or underachieving protagonists. Rarely…

This was never going to be an impartial review. Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn novels are easily among my favorites in the genre. These fantasy novels are beautifully written, full of vivid and believable characters, and are truly epic in scope. It’s not an exaggeration to say I rarely pick up a fantasy novel without, on some level, wondering how it will compare to Williams’s series. I was therefore thrilled to learn that Williams would be returning to realm of Osten Ard with a new trilogy, the first volume of which will be published in April. Bridging the two series, this short novel (which apparently started out as a novella, but in typical Williams fashion, grew larger than originally planned) is set shortly after the events of To Green Angel Tower, the final volume (or volumes, depending on your point of view) of the original series. So, perhaps inevitably, I loved this book, which is beautifully written and full of Williams’s trademark character development and nuance. It is, however, a small work, without any pretensions to the sort of world-spanning, epoch-changing scope of the previous novels. It’s also a fairly dark tale about war-weariness and despair. Everyone in this…

“Never sell a cure when you can sell a treatment,” says one of the more unpleasant pharmaceutical executives at the center of Dan Wells’s new novel, Extreme Makeover. “A magical lotion that protects you from heart disease is great for you, but then what do we sell you in the next fiscal quarter?” This sort of cynical thinking is at the core of this very enjoyable novel, often operating in the classic social-satire mode of science fiction. A book about the destructive impact of short-sighted corporate greed is, of course, gunning for both a worthy and a slow-moving target, and if Extreme Makeover doesn’t say anything we don’t already know about the destructive power of unchecked capitalism, it provides an entertaining and clever scientific premise to justify its potshots. The story centers around the pharmaceutical and cosmetic company, NewYew, and its underachieving and underappreciated head scientist Lyle Fontanelle (who, if you doubt his nerd creds, wants to change his business cards to read “Chief Science Officer”). Fontanelle may be the perpetual office whipping-boy, and a socially-awkward older man who pathetically moons after his college-aged intern, but when it comes to science, he’s the real deal. He’s developed a new anti-aging skin cream that he believes…

A lot has to go wrong for the world to turn into an alt-physics realm of vertically-distributed islands, hovering in a breathable atmosphere, populated entirely by amnesiacs. Clearly those things have gone wrong at the beginning of Will McIntosh’s clever and absorbing novel, Faller, and much of the forward momentum of the story is fueled by the reader’s desire to find out how things could have ended up in such a disastrous and improbable state. I am a great admirer of several of McIntosh’s previous books, which are built on a foundation of big ideas, but always propped up by vivid and believable characters. Faller very much continues in that tradition. On what comes to be called Day One, when a man awakens on what seems to be a broken and floating chunk of a city. The man has no knowledge of who he is, where he is, or why the world is full of inexplicable machines, whose purpose no one can remember. The clueless inhabitants face a number of obvious crises, most pressing among these being distressingly-limited amount of food, which more or less instantly generates a Hobbesian struggle for survival. In his pockets, our protagonist finds three things…