book review
Books reviews of the best science fiction stories, texts, educational texts, and journals.
'Beastly'
Looks aren't everything Now we all know the famous tale of Beauty and the Beast. A beautiful young women name Belle gives up her freedom to save her father and is forced to live with a beast. Over time they begin to love each other, the beast turns into a handsome prince and they live Happily Ever After.
By Kailah Pierre8 years ago in Futurism
Best Children's Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
It's hard for some kids to read—it can seem boring, difficult, and a chore. Adults too, perhaps even more so. But in either case, the key to creating voracious readers is finding them the right books—and for kids of all ages, that often means helping them dive into fantastic worlds of magic and mystery, bravery and adventure, and really cool technology.
By Nicola P. Young8 years ago in Futurism
Need a Great Summer Read? This Epic Fantasy Novel Is It
Chaos reigns. In a remote island kingdom, a tyrannical king indulges his basest desires. He murders for pleasure and terrorizes the peasants who have built his empire with their backs. Yet, the king’s madness may be preferred to the horrible cruelty of his son and heir to the throne. As the callow prince and his mother the queen conspire to commit the ultimate form of treason, the people of Norteras clamor for justice and talk openly in the cobbled streets on a revolution. A dragon has been prophesied to come to the land to save the oppressed and vanquish the nefarious overlords.
By Stanley Gray8 years ago in Futurism
Review of Naomi Alderman's 'The Power'
Never one to be pigeon-holed, Naomi Alderman is a British novelist, game writer, and radio host. Her debut novel, Disobedience, published in 2006, immerses the reader into an Orthodox Jewish community through the eyes of a rabbi’s lesbian daughter. Controversial, the novel was critically acclaimed and the San Francisco Chronicle described the story as “acerbic and self-aware.” The Sunday Times named her their Young Writer of the Year in 2007 and Waterstones included Alderman in their 25 Writers of the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in 2010 and her third novel, The Liars’ Gospel, followed in 2012. Alderman became the professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2012 and was included in the British Granta list of 20 best young writers in 2013. During the writing of The Power, Margaret Atwood selected Alderman as her protégé as a part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, an international philanthropic program, pairing masters with emerging talents.
By K.E. Lanning8 years ago in Futurism
Ten Amazing Urban Fantasy Novels You Should Read
Urban Fantasy is a literary subgenre of Fantasy Fiction, but rather than focusing on big swords, magic rings, and squabbles over who gets to be King, it’s an entirely more modern focused affair. Set in cities and the modern world, the genre largely sets out to explore the folklore and strangeness that might surround us, without heading into Horror territory (though the two genres are closely linked if only because they share a cast of monsters). We’ve chosen some of the classic Urban Fantasy stories that define the genre, and the nature of the city as an environment, or that underline part of our modern way of life in a way that later works simply don’t. Not all of these classics are set in cities, but they all reference them in some way.
By Steve Cotterill8 years ago in Futurism
Science Fiction Novels That Have Predicted the Future
Albert Einstein stated that time travel could never be possible for humans, but these following authors looked past this very notion and went beyond their times to a place more realistic than that of their imaginations: the future. It's still unclear whether any one of them were time travelers or not, but it's safe to say they all had experiences reminiscent of the next phase in history. Their detailed storytelling foretold many events, or more specifically, the very machinery that would revolutionize our time.
By George Herman8 years ago in Futurism
Shout-Out to Jack Dann and Joseph F. Patrouch
This came up at Monday's conference on Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion, which I organized at Fordham University. It arose in my answer to a question I posed to the panel on "Science Fiction Looks at Space Travel and Religion" about what was each panelist's most memorable, profound, or otherwise significant example of a science fiction story, book, movie, or TV series they read or saw, in which the subject was space travel and religion. On the panel with me were David Walton, Alex Shvartzman, and Lance Strate. Among others in the audience were conference participants Guy Consolmagno, Molly Vozick-Levinson, Brittany Miller, Michael Waltemathe, James Heiser, Mark Shelhamer, and Tom Klinkowstein.
By Paul Levinson8 years ago in Futurism
Best Science Fantasy Authors
The art of science fiction is that it can be, and simply represent, pretty much anything within or without the boundary of reality. Imagination, in this regard, is free and open for practically any formulation, connotation, and activity. If one presses even deeper into these vast confines of unreality and shape-shifted real worlds never before beheld, they will find the very contexts of sci-fi fantasy. This is the subsetting, or the subgenre, of science fiction, a place where not only the real can be distorted, but even that of the distorted can be compressed and compounded even further.
By Salvador Lorenz8 years ago in Futurism
He Wanted to Believe
Crashed spaceships. Alien abductions. Cattle mutilations. Bases that don't officially exist like Dulce Base in New Mexico. Thanks to countless movies and TV shows, these conspiracy theories regarding government cover-ups regarding the UFO phenomenon are known to millions around the world. The origins of such ideas are far more humble, troubling, and far closer to home as Greg Bishop reveals in his 2005 book Project Beta.
By Matthew Kresal8 years ago in Futurism
Every Reason Why You Shouldn't Read the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' Series
Who hasn't heard of the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams? Or at least the movie of the same name? For those who raised their hands, the first book and the movie follow Arthur Dent (portrayed by Martin Freeman in the 2005 movie) and his lackluster group of...friends may not be the right word...companions? There's Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox (the President of the Galaxy), Tricia McMillan, AKA Trillian, and a downright depressing robot named Marvin. Now, the plot of the film and book differ slightly and I don't want to make this too confusing for either of us, but both involve the end of life as we know it, the question of the universe, the answer to that question, and mice being the second smartest organisms on Earth (only because aliens don't understand that cars aren't organisms).
By Elijah James8 years ago in Futurism
2018 Nebula Award Nominees Are Coming to You in Audiobook Format!. Top Story - March 2018.
Sci-fi has very few awards that are solely dedicated to the genre, and of those awards, none are quite as esteemed as the Nebula Awards. Ever since Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America presented its first award in 1965, the Nebulas have become the ultimate achievement marker for any serious science fiction writer.
By Ossiana Tepfenhart8 years ago in Futurism
