Sci-Fi Month: Recommendations
As part of Sci-Fi Month hosted by Rinn Reads I’m sharing a few science-fiction recommendations. Science-fiction is a very broad genre, but often reduced to “books with spaceships”. Sci-fi is a lot more than that though, as my recommendations will show. Like I did with my Stephen King recommendations during #SKweek, I’m going to give different recommendations for different kinds of readers. Feel free to share your recommendations in the comments!
For the romance lover
For Darkness Shows the Stars was one of my favourite reads of 2012. It’s basically some kind of post-apocalyptic Jane Austen retelling. There are lots of love letters, pining, angst and some forbidden genetic enginering and a repressive government. If you like your heroines to be smart and responsible and you like the idea of childhood friends turned lovers, For Darkness Shows the Stars is the book for you.
It’s been several generations since a genetic experiment gone wrong caused the Reduction, decimating humanity and giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.
Elliot North has always known her place in this world. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. Since then the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress, and Elliot’s estate is foundering, forcing her to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth–an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliot wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she let him go.
But Elliot soon discovers her old friend carries a secret–one that could change their society . . . or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she’s lost him forever.
For the fairy-tale lover
Another retelling, but this time a Cinderella one. In this book Cinder is a cyborg mechanic, that meets the prince of New Beijing when he visits her shop. I was a bit hesitant to read Cinder because of the hype, but it totally deserves it. The third book in the Lunar Chronicles will be released in 2014, and I can’t wait!
Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl.
Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.
For the disaster scenario lover
There is no one that does disaster scenarios as well as Mira Grant. In her previous Newsflesh trilogy she took the zombie apocalypse and made it into a nervewrenching story of friendship and loyalty. In Parasite a company called Symbogen has developed a parasite that takes over your immune system and kills diseases for you. But what if the parasites aren’t as harmless as Symbogen wants you to believe? How far can money stretch when the human race starts to get in danger?
A decade in the future, humanity thrives in the absence of sickness and disease.
We owe our good health to a humble parasite – a genetically engineered tapeworm developed by the pioneering SymboGen Corporation. When implanted, the tapeworm protects us from illness, boosts our immune system – even secretes designer drugs. It’s been successful beyond the scientists’ wildest dreams. Now, years on, almost every human being has a SymboGen tapeworm living within them.
But these parasites are getting restless. They want their own lives…and will do anything to get them.
For the old-school sci-fi lover
If you’re a bit more used to crazy science-fiction scenarios, Enormity might be for you. This book is definitely… special. Due to a quantum explosion one guy suddenly becomes huge – we’re talking a mile high huge here. When he walks, he leaves destruction in his wake. When he sneezes, he can flood cities. The bacteria on his head and skin can kill a grown man. Now his wife is the only one that can try to talk sense into him – if only she wasn’t as small as one of his ear hair.
Enormity is the strange tale of an American working in Korea, a lonely young man named Manny Lopes, who is not only physically small (in his own words, he’s a “Creole shrimp”), but his work, his failed marriage, his race, all conspire to make him feel puny and insignificant-the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling.
Then one day an accident happens, a quantum explosion, and suddenly Manny awakens to discover that he is big-really big. In fact, Manny is enormous, a mile-high colossus! Now there’s no stopping him: he’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction. Yet he means well.
Enormity takes some odd turns, featuring characters like surfing gangbangers, elderly terrorists, and a North Korean assassin who thinks she’s Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. There’s also sex, violence, and action galore, with the army throwing everything it has against the rampaging colossus that is Manny Lopes. But there’s only one weapon that has any chance at all of stopping him: his wife.
For the alien lover
Okay, so I decided to add one alien book. In Touched by an Alien inhabitants of Alpha Centauri have been sent to earth to help protect us against alien forces that want to colonize us. The male AC-s also happen to be drop-dead gorgeous. We follow main character Kitty in a turbulent romance and in her battles with the big bad aliens.
Marketing manager Katherine “Kitty” Katt steps into the middle of what appears to be a domestic dispute turned ugly. And it only gets uglier when the man turns into a winged monster, straight out of a grade-Z horror movie, and goes on a killing spree. Though Kitty should probably run away, she springs into action to take the monster down.
In the middle of the chaos a handsome hunk named Jeff Martini appears, sent by the “agency” to perform crowd control. He’s Kitty’s kind of guy, no matter what planet he’s from. And from now on, for Kitty, things are going to be sexy, dangerous, wild, and out of this world.
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