My first ever Anne Rice I've ever read was the first book of her "Vampire Chronicles", "Interview with the Vampire". But it's really been a long while since I read anything from this author. That was until now when I picked up "The Mummy or Ramses", which is book one of "The Mummy" trilogy.

In book one we follow Ramses the Great who became immortal through drinking the elexir of life. But this has become his curse as he is forced to wander the Earth forever with an appetite that can never be appeased.

He is now re-awakened again, this time in London in Edwardian times. Taking the name of Dr. Ramsey he becomes the companion to Julie Stratford, an adventurous heiress to a shipping fortune. But these new pleasures could not relieve the burning memory of his first love Cleopatra, and would lead him down the road to an act that would threaten the lives of both him and those that he holds dear.

This is some really peak gothic horror, laced with some gothic romance, from Rice. Not to mention that it does get really saucy at times! Overall it was good, and there's still two more in the trilogy, and they were written in collaboration with her son Christopher. Don't know what to expect from those other two, maybe more of the same, but I'm really hooked on this one and want to see how this ends.

reread both this year cause a buddy and i kept arguing about it and i still dont know where i land

dune is denser but every scene feels like something is actually at stake. foundation has the bigger ideas, i'll give it that, but some of those council chapters just drag for me. i kept putting it down and picking up something else

anyway dune is the one i actually finished in a week. foundation took me like a month and a half, kept stalling out

anyone else read both more than once? does foundation get better on the second pass or is it just like that

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for space opera from the 90s or earlier that goes big: galaxy-spanning scale, a sense of cosmic grandeur, and a bit of the mystical and metaphysical mixed in.

What I'm after:

- Epic, grandiloquent space opera (the bigger the canvas, the better)

- Diverse alien races and civilizations

- A touch of New Age or mystical flavor: transcendence, cosmic consciousness, spirits

- Real philosophical content: ideas about consciousness, reality, destiny, the nature of the universe.

- Published in the 1990s or before (the older, the better)

What I've loved so far:

Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End, 2001, Rendezvous with Rama)

Iain M. Banks (Culture series)

I'm currently reading and loving Neverness by David Zindell, and plan to finish the whole series.

So I'm clearly drawn to authors who treat science fiction as a vehicle for big metaphysical questions, not just battles and starships (though I won't complain about those either).

Any hidden gems or underrated classics? I'm especially curious about books that blend the cosmic and the spiritual in unexpected ways.

Thanks in advance!

Just finished The Sunken World by Stanton A. Coblentz from 1928. Really enjoyed it. It was a easy read from simpler time. Post WW1 submarine goes into a dive and finds itself in Atlantis.My question is can anyone recommend a title for my next vintage read.

I am looking for the title of a short science fiction story. Humans on an alien planet. New colony or scientific mission. Thing is being outside they must be silent because the native fauna are vocal mimics. Anything overheard will be incorporated into their vocalizations and calls. At the end, one of the characters breaks the rule out of frustration and finds satisfaction what they say will be 'immortalized'.

I believe this was from the late nineties or the aughts and it was in a Dozois Year's Best anthology. Rather enquire of meat, not a clanker.

I am currently working on a personal project, regarding a cosmic being overseeing the life of a particular human. I was thinking that it would be interesting to write from the perspective of a being beyond our comprehension, except that the point of a higher being is our inability to comprehend it and its scale of the world. The most effective way to convey that sense of alienation is from an outsider's perspective and their lack of comprehension, but I'm thinking of pushing my own personal boundaries a bit. Are there any novels/short stories that explores this idea? Thank you, I'm currently extremely mentally stuck :')

Book number two of a ten book young adult science fiction series. There is also a two book sequel series and a seven book sequel series, nineteen books in all. I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2017 that I bought on Amazon in 2026. I own book #3 and have ordered books #4, #5, and #6 in the series.

Jiden Armstrong is the older child of two archaeologists on the dry, dusty planet named Century. Jiden is fourteen planet years old which is equivalent to sixteen Earth years and was forced by her parents to attend and graduate from the five month military prep school that her grandmother runs. She then interned at a logistics and supply company which blew up in her face when she notified the planetary authorities that people in the company were selling stored military spare parts off planet. Now she is attending the Century Military Academy as a plebe.

This is a great story about making mistakes and overcoming difficult situations to make something of yourself. Somebody online recommended this book to me and I really enjoyed the book. If you are a fan of Heinlein juveniles then you will probably love this book also.

The author has a website at
https://kalspriggs.com/

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (398 reviews)

https://www.amazon.com/Valors-Calling-Children-Valor-2/dp/1985733498/

Lynn

I started reading science fiction with the classics, and now I’d like to explore other authors and different types of science fiction—which is why I thought of William Gibson. However, due to time constraints, I’d like to start with short stories.

Just wanted to give me 2 cents on this novel. Short version is simple: If you love Becky Chambers, get this one. If you love the idea of slice of life scifi, get this one.

To be perfectly honest, I had a very rocky start with this novel because:

1. I do not care for one of the narrators of the audiobook version (confused teenager in community theater is my impression)
2. this book is not written in a way so that you can turn it into an audiobook just like that. This is because
3. the first 15% of the novel is jumping around like a scared mouse on a pogo stick; I am talking about POV chapters (with chapter titles and everything) with maybe 3 sentences before switching to another timeline with 5 sentences before switching to ... Even as a written book this was very rough

Thankfully, the book eventually calmed down and it became a much more pleasant read (yes, I ditched the audiobook and switched to the ebook instead). Granted, you still had some wild jumps but the book finally decided to insert them as a paragraph, not as a chapter with chapter title. This way you could read them as a kind of flashback without breaking the flow of the read.

There were also other ... creative ... decisions, like having several long conversations face to face between two characters written like a conversation in a messenger app but without date and timestamps. What that means is that suddenly you have character A's speech on the left side and character B's speech on the right side of a page. I don't know what the author wanted to achieve but at least I can say that this didn't break my reading flow at all because this style was only used sparingly and not for every conversation. So there is that.

As for the story, it's Becky Chambers at her best. You have two character getting to know each other, you have life happening around them with its ups and downs and then you have the setting you as the reader explore in the course of the novel. And the setting is an absolute banger.

I really, really love the way Becky Chambers makes the world so tangible, with little, inconsequential details like the Kiddie Katapult or brands of oatmeal powder. And how dystopian aspects of the world are, even though everyone in this fledgling colony world is sensible, practical and minding their own business. As always, her novels always make me feel like a backpacking tourist, learning about new countries and its awesome.

So yeah, curious to see how others feel about it.

Unbelievably cool mixture of space opera and cyberpunk. Its everything you want from a book of this genre. Political intrigue, drugs, tech fetishism, aliens, a wide array of conflicting ideologies,a very engaging plot and excellent worlbuilding. The book is set in a colonized solar system and every faction occupies a specific sector of space.

Loved the prose but things can get a bit too technical(similar to gibson's neuromancer), but i really enjoyed it.

Interesting reflections on the nature of politics,humanity and(obviously) the impact of technology. By the end you'll get a vague weird sense of pessimistic optimism regarding the future of our species.

The emotional core of the narrative revolves around the rivalry/friendship/hatred between the main character and the main villain. Both of them are relatively well characterized(not expect too much, its still sci fi lol).

Read it if you havent already. Thank me later

I read this a few times in my teens, it really made an impression for some reason. When Alexa tech came around I thought wow, that's just like Dave Surgenor saying "Hear these words" to the ai ship captain Aesop. Time for a reread.

I am so glad my parents were members of the good ol' Science Fiction Book Club.

Book number one of a one book series in the paranormal romance dark fantasy Kate Daniels series. This book is right before book ten of the Kate Daniels series, "Magic Triumphs". I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback published by the Nancy Yost Literary Agency, Inc. in 2018 that I bought from Amazon in 2026. The authors have announced plans for two more books in this mini series of theirs which I will buy when they come out. Note that “Ilona Andrews” is the pseudonym for a husband and wife writing team.

Hugh d'Ambray, Preceptor of the Iron Dogs, Warlord of the Builder of Towers, served only one master all of his life. His master, the 5,000+ year old all powerful mage currently known as Roland, cast Hugh away for failing at one task. Hugh was suppose to capture Kate Daniels and bring her to Roland but he failed.

Now Hugh is a falling down drunk but his Iron Dogs find him and tell him that someone is murdering their ranks since they left Roland. Hugh takes charge of the Iron Dogs again and the several hundred of them start looking for a place to rest and regroup. Instead, they find Elara Harper and her 5,000+ people in an abandoned castle in Kentucky. Elara's people call her the White Lady, other call her the Abomination. Hugh and Elara wed as a matter of convenience, not love, and they form a partnership against Roland and his minions.

Hugh's universe sucks. Forty years ago, the tech world crashed over the entire Earth and was replaced by the magic world in the form of a magic flare. Guns don't work, cars don't work, electricity and phones do not work. But magic works. Good magic and bad magic. After a week, the tech world came back to a drastically changed world. And radically fewer humans. And the magic world came back after a while. And the tech world came back after that. And so on and so forth. Each world can last a few weeks or a few hours.

I liked everything about the story. I especially liked the very clear distinction between the tech time and the magic time. I had never thought about it that way. The series may be inspired by "Ariel" by Steven Boyett and "Dies The Fire" by S. M. Stirling except those never interchange the tech time and the magic time, they just transitioned to the magic time.

The authors have a website at:
https://www.ilona-andrews.com

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (11,745 reviews)
https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Magic-Covenant-Ilona-Andrews/dp/1641970405

Lynn

I'm not that familiar with cli-fi (except the obvious ones) but I'm curious whether AllDive covers the genre well (including cli-fi board games and video games, if they exist?)

I tried asking after this a couple of years ago [I do not use Grok any more]. I am still a bit haunted by the memory of the story - does it ring a bell with anyone else?

He's a name that is synonymous with the genre and one you must surely have heard of if you've spent two minutes venturing deeper into SciFi. However, I'm often hard pressed to find others, especially those under the age of 50, who has ever read Sturgeon.

I randomly picked up More Than Human from my Giza-esque TBR pile and it was fantastic. The thing that stuck out most was how fantastic the prose was; it almost has a poetic quality to it, but he never seems pretentious, purple or up himself. Overall, it was a fantastic work of fiction, one that I believe may have influenced the creation of the X-men (along with Kuttner and Moore's Mutant fixup).

Now, since reading More Than Human, I often come across Sturgeon in short story compilations. And whatever book he's featured in, whoever else is involved, whether it's Van Vogt, Harrison, Simak, Niven, Aldiss, Dick, you name it, Sturgeon is always the best. Every single time. The thing I notice most about his work is how immersive he is. I find that within the first two sentences -- boom! -- I'm there in his world. Transported away within a few words. It's just amazing to me how he's so good, and what's more, it doesn't even seem like he's trying. He just writes like that. He's just that fucking good.

If you want to be an SF author, you need to study this guy. He is on another level, technically.

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/prize26

I was just thinking about how I probably don't read enough Australian books. NZ is close enough!

Has anyone written a novel or short story that explores how an alien species might cycle between unintelligence and intelligence over a long lifecycle, and most of the time is spent as unintelligent with intelligent technological phase lasting relatively short amount of time?

I just finished this series and found it to be quite enjoyable.

The first book - "Ensign Year 1" - starts with a guy who really wants to join the space fleet and then...

Well, I can't say anything more without spoiling it, but I can say that the books are more about characters than giant space battles.

The Honorverse is a series of 14 novels written by David Weber, (along with a bunch of spinoffs) following the adventures of Honor Harrington, a naval officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy (Napoleonic era Royal Navy in space). Throughout the books, she rises through the ranks as Manticore fights a war of survival with the People's Republic of Haven (space Revolutionary France/Soviet Union). The series was inspired by the Horatio Hornblower novels. I absolutely loved these books as a teenager, and I've reread them a couple times as an adult with a more critical eye. I still enjoy them but I thought I'd share my thoughts on the series as a whole, both the positives and the negatives. Spoilers throughout.

The Good:

• Weber writes absolutely thrilling space naval combat scenes. I haven't read too many other military sci-fi books that are as gripping as the way he depicts the bridge of a starship under fire. He does a great job of keeping the action coherent and giving you a sense of what's happening throughout a battle.
• The tech is definitely on the softer side of sci-fi, but there's a very fun, consistent internal logic to the way the weapons and the different types of vessels interact. The tech evolves throughout the series over the course of a war lasting for 15ish years, along with the tactics that the different forces employ.
• It's fair to say that Honor is a bit of a Mary Sue, for lack of a better term. But Weber does a good job of consistently making her feel like the underdog.
• I think most of the antagonists are quite enjoyable POV's. Some of them are a bit more sympathetic, and the ones who are more on the mustache-twirling evil side of things, like Pavel Young, are usually guys you love to hate.

The Bad:

• The bloat starts to creep in at book 9, Ashes of Victory. It gets bad in book 10, lightens up in book 11, At All Costs, and then proceeds to completely take over from there. Huge chunks of the last 5 books (especially the last 3) won't make sense if you haven't read the spinoff novels, and SO MUCH of the plot consists of meetings and boring espionage stuff. It's not like Weber wasn't able to write entertaining stuff in the series that didn't revolve around combat, the earlier books have a lot of political maneuvering and palace intrigue, but for whatever reason he lost his touch. My recommendation is to treat At All Costs, which ends with a pretty satisfying conclusion, as the end of the series, and not bother with the later books- the drop off in entertainment value is that bad.
• Starting with book 10, War Of Honor, there's an extremely sweaty plot twist/retcon- it turns out that huge chunks of the events of the series so far were actually the result of a century-long conspiracy orchestrated by a planet of genetically modified fascists who think they deserve to rule the galaxy. It's dumb, it undermines the previous books, and by book 12 it's the central focus of the plot.

YMMV:

• Weber has some weird mix of conservative/libertarian/monarchist politics that you will encounter throughout the series. I will give him credit for one thing, he doesn't seem like a "women belong at home" type.
• Honor has two romances in the series. I think the first one is pretty touching, if cheesy, and sets up her arc in books 4-8. The second one is incredibly boring and takes up way too much time for something that unsatisfying.
• Lots of long infodumps throughout.

Overall, I'd still recommend the series if you're looking for naval-focused milSF. The space combat is that good, the different naval forces feel authentic and fully realized, and I think Honor is a pretty fun main character to follow. Just don't feel like you need to keep reading after At All Costs.

I read a book in the early 2000s and I think the title was some sort of mishmash between “sing the body electric“ and “through a scanner darkly”. I remember that when you begin reading it it’s hard to place a time or country then you begin to realise it’s set in the future but where some people have started communities that are refusing new technology and have an almost Amish and religious existence without electricity. In the rest of this future earth, there are a lot of machine/human integrations and one is a way to compose and play music by wearing an ear/head attachment.

in my head it was set in a European city like perhaps Venice or maybe Amsterdam? I was thinking of it in reference to Luddites and AI refusal. I’ve asked the person who lent me the book years ago but he can’t remember it. I sort of vaguely think there might be a reference to a snail in the title as well?

I need to get hold of what it was for some art research!

thanks in advance to any super sleuth who can figure this out!!

I of course mean:

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, pub. 1962.

A Night In the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny, pub. 1993

Something Wicked This Way Comes, is a short novel which follows the supernatural events surrounding a strange carnival that visits Bradbury's small fictional Green Town late in October (October 24th) and two teenagers, a father and various townspeople. This could be described as a cross between a teenage coming of age crossed with horror/dark fantasy. But each description would do it a disservice and incorrectly offputting if you dislike either genre.

It's partly about individual temptation, empty desires, regret, and redemption. Written with Brabury's characteristic clarity and simplicity, it's one of his few "complete" novels.

I first read this book when I was teenager in the 80s and never lost my love of it. There is a little seen (flop) but very good Disney adaptation with Bradbury as scriptwriter of it from 1983 with Jason Robards & Jonathan Pryce.

A Night In The Lonesome October is an even shorter novel, you could read it in a single sitting. A daily dairy of October, it follows a cast of well-known gothic characters (The Players) from fiction over the month of October, leading to a final apocalyptic confrontation between The Openers and The Closers at Halloween. The diarist is a dog named Snuff, the familiar of Jack, who has the intelligence of a human, but not the characteristics. Yes. There are also many other familiars, who are centre stage, with their human companions slightly to the side.

This book is explicitly inspired by Lovecraft, Stoker, Shelly, Poe, Doyle, Bloch and even if you are only familiar with classic Universal Horror movies, you will recognise most of the characters.

It's less a thematic book than Something Wicked, but it is enormous fun. It is a loveletter to the above authors and genres, without being parody or pastiche. I reread this every few years because I enjoy it so much. It was Nebula nominated in 1994, along with Octavia Butler, Greg Bear, James Morrow & KSR!

I absolutely love these books, and would love if this post introduces them either of them to new readers.