I've posted two review for novels on the right side of the blog. After awhile I'm going to have to figure out a way to archive these for easier access, I can't have the near five hundred novels that have been nominated just sitting there linked on the right. So these are my first two reviews, the first of many I hope. It has been awhile since I've read either of these, so I give my impression of what I remember, if the review aren't the best bear with me I read them when I was a teenager.
I won't write too much about these novels here but once you click on the reviews be aware that it's not a spoiler free space. I'm operating on the assumption that anyone that clicks on them has already read them.
I'll be jumping around a lot in my reviews, mostly because that is how I read the books as well. I'm going to try to skip back and forth between books on the list I've read recently and books that I've read a long time ago. I don't want to spend the next few years constantly writing reviews about books I read five years ago, I've got a lot of reviews to write before I get caught up to where I am now.
Also worth mentioning is that I am not, repeat, not reading these books in the order in which they were written. Try reading all the novels written in any one decade and you'll drive yourself crazy. The genre over time follows certain patterns, something I'll talk more about in the future, but the important thing to know is that science fiction is full of novels written about anything (the past, the future, wizards, talking squirrels) but overall always meant to inform about the present. Meaning these novels can almost always be dated to the time in which they were written, some more than others. To sit down and read ten straight sci-fi novels from the fifties would be to learn more about life in the 1950s than any sort of exploration of the genre.
This gives me an added difficulty. Before I open any novel I try to see the date in which it was published then place it into the pantheon of science fiction and identify the influences of the time on the novel. The alternative would be to go crazy reading novels set in the year 2000 written in the sixties that have absolutely no bearing on our modern world. To read some of these novels you really have to be a lover of the genre, we'll get more into those later.
I won't write too much about these novels here but once you click on the reviews be aware that it's not a spoiler free space. I'm operating on the assumption that anyone that clicks on them has already read them.
I'll be jumping around a lot in my reviews, mostly because that is how I read the books as well. I'm going to try to skip back and forth between books on the list I've read recently and books that I've read a long time ago. I don't want to spend the next few years constantly writing reviews about books I read five years ago, I've got a lot of reviews to write before I get caught up to where I am now.
Also worth mentioning is that I am not, repeat, not reading these books in the order in which they were written. Try reading all the novels written in any one decade and you'll drive yourself crazy. The genre over time follows certain patterns, something I'll talk more about in the future, but the important thing to know is that science fiction is full of novels written about anything (the past, the future, wizards, talking squirrels) but overall always meant to inform about the present. Meaning these novels can almost always be dated to the time in which they were written, some more than others. To sit down and read ten straight sci-fi novels from the fifties would be to learn more about life in the 1950s than any sort of exploration of the genre.
This gives me an added difficulty. Before I open any novel I try to see the date in which it was published then place it into the pantheon of science fiction and identify the influences of the time on the novel. The alternative would be to go crazy reading novels set in the year 2000 written in the sixties that have absolutely no bearing on our modern world. To read some of these novels you really have to be a lover of the genre, we'll get more into those later.
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