Tag: SF

Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer (1997)

I have been reading Sawyer’s books for a long time on-and-off.  This one I acquired recently and got inscribed to me when I met Rob at Balticon this year.  I just got to the book this week and finished it in a couple of days.

Like all of Sawyer’s books, it takes an interesting premise and creates an engaging story around it.  I will say that while I figured out one minor plot point in advance, I missed a couple of biggies, which makes for wonderful reading!

The only “negative” point I’d have about this story in particular is that some of the details hinge around the O.J. Simpson case from 1995.  This is a case of “in 1997” this stuff was fresh with everyone; however, I never watched a moment of the trial and to this day still don’t know a lot about most of those involved.  It’s a minor quibble as I remembered enough, but not as much.  I had a similar feeling about the WWW trilogy because of the tech involved, some of which I never used, but it was cutting edge when written.

One of these days I’m going to have to print off a list of Sawyer’s novels and figure out which ones I have missed reading.  If you didn’t know, Sawyer now controls most (if not all) of his backlist and it’s easy to find his stuff at sfwriter.com

Lunar Descent by Allen Steele (1991)

This is apparently the third in Steele’s “Near Space” series.  I am very late to the party in reading it, as I’ve only read one other Steele book.  It read well not knowing about the other books.  An interesting premise, following workers on the Moon.  Lots of interesting extrapolation, although it did throw me a bit to be reading a book set in 2024 that has so little bearing on our present use of the Moon’s resources. 🙁

I liked this one well-enough that I will be continuing to search out more from Steele’s backlist.

Growing up Weightless by John M. Ford (1993)

Original Cover Growing Up Weightless This one came to me as a recommendation from a “Heinlein friend”.  Several reviews compare it to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; that alone begs a read. It also won the Philip K. Dick Award in its year of publication.

The book reads very much like a YA piece, or in Heinlein-speak, a juvenile.  That’s not an insult. It’s fairly short. One of my big complaints is that it gets to a certain point and stops, after having spent a good chunk of the book ‘on the holodeck’ with most of the main characters.  There are some tantalizing hints of the formative Luna years that I wish Ford had explored.  He passed away in 2006 and it took until 2022 for this book to come back into print.  If you can find a copy, it’s a decent read.

I just had a “smack the head” moment.  The author is the same one who wrote the amazingly funny Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? in 1987, which was one of the best ever written.  That alone raises my esteem of the book.