Reviews and Comments

A fun, breezy story about unexpectedly landing a job at a secret scientific base on a parallel world studying giant Godzilla-like animals. Which is about as dangerous as it sounds. Plus, of course, not all humans are interested in the kaijus' welfare, and the KPS has to step up the "Preservation" part of its name.

There's some interesting world-building in terms of what kind of environment and ecosystem would actually support 100-meter-tall animals, what kind of biology would be able to handle the size, the energy, shooting beams of radiation, etc. And what might evolve to protect itself in a world with kaiju. And of course: what role nuclear explosions have in the whole thing, because these are kaiju after all!

It's also weird because it takes place in 2020. Like, real 2020, complete with Covid-19 lockdowns and everything. The main character starts out working for a GrubHub competitor at the beginning of the pandemic.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/kaiju-preservation-society/

I’d never read any of Andre Norton’s books before, so when I saw a bunch of them on Standard Ebooks, I figured I’d take a look. The first one I read was Star Hunter, which maybe wasn’t the best place to start. It’s mainly an adventure story, a jungle survival trip with ruthless rivals that could just as easily be set in any wilderness area on Earth.

Of the two main characters, one is the tough guy type who runs safaris on alien worlds, and wants to “find” the lost heir to a fortune who had crashed on the planet some time ago. The other is captured and brainwashed into believing he’s the lost heir, then dropped on the planet ahead of the expedition. Things go wrong, adventure ensues.

But the adventure isn’t really satisfying. Even when weird things start happening because it’s an alien planet, they’re never really addressed as ideas, just as obstacles. And the ending pulls a plot twist out of nowhere to wrap everything up with a bow.

Fortunately, I picked up a few more of her books that I liked better!

I enjoyed Star Born a lot more than Star Hunter. The main characters are more interesting, the world is more fleshed out and has more to do with the story itself, and the story actually has a point to it beyond “cool stuff happens!”

Again there are two main characters: one the descendant of humans who fled an oppressive Earth decades ago and were stranded on another world. The other, a member of a modern survey team from a freer Earth. The colonists befriended an ocean-dwelling species that helped them survive, but the survey team is focused on the cities built by the planet’s other intelligent species, one that looks more human and has more complex technology, but is far more brutal and warlike than the mer-people.

On one level it’s an adventure: the human born on this world is going through a rite of passage with his best friend from the mer-people. The city-builders are sifting through the ruins of their own nuclear war for lost technology. There are giant beasts to fight and so on. But woven through it are themes of colonialism, prejudice, and cultural identity, sometimes nuanced, sometimes ham-handed, but ultimately more important than the space opera.

It’s a sequel to The Stars are Ours, but I didn’t know that going in and didn’t feel like anything was missing. The book stands well on its own.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/star-born/

A fast, funny, informative read about, well, pigeons (and to some extent other birds). Readers of the author’s webcomic about nature, Bird and Moon, will recognize the quirky humor and the drawing style of the illustrations.

You might think pigeons are boring because they’re so common, but they can be as interesting as any other bird once you start looking. And because they’re found everywhere humans live (there’s a reason for that), anyone can go out and start looking in the real world for the patterns and behaviors described.

The irreverent but enthusiastic style draws you in as the book runs through the long history of pigeons and humans. We’ve bred them for messaging, food, chemistry and as pets since ancient times, and the common pigeons seen today are descended from domestic pigeons that have escaped over the years. It continues through an overview of pigeon anatomy, what types of coloration are most and least common, the extremes of modern pigeon breeds (there are still pigeon races and pigeon shows!), and of course pigeon behaviors.

If you buy an e-book edition like I did, it’s worth pulling it up on a color screen when you get to the chapters on appearance.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/pigeons/

Eifelheim is a science fiction novel written as historical fiction, following two parallel stories:

• In the present day, a historian is trying to figure out why a village wiped out in the Black Death was never resettled, while a physicist tries to work out a new cosmological theory.
• In 1348, the pastor of Oberhochwald unexpectedly makes first contact with shipwrecked aliens, who spend the next year stranded on Earth near the village.

The present-day story is interesting, but hard to follow just because the viewpoint characters are very…self-absorbed.

Fortunately, most of the book focuses on the middle ages and the story of how a tiny German village encounters and eventually learns to live with the stranded aliens. It paints a detailed picture of life in the 1300s and how their strange visitors disrupt it, and it’s fascinating to look at how someone highly-educated in science and philosophy, but with a medieval European mindset, might see concepts like space travel, electricity, or even evolution. How do you explain coming from another planet in another star system to someone who believes that the Sun moves around the Earth, the stars are all the same distance away, and the “world” encompasses all of the above?

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/eifelheim/

I’ve known the high-rolling “influencer” side of Instagram is out there, but for the most part, I’ve tuned it out by following only friends and people whose photos I find interesting (including the author, which was how I found out about this book), rather than following personalities.

The book covers three main topics:

• How and why people game the system on attention-based social networks, using Instagram as a case study.
• How attention-based social media games your brain.
• Ways to keep yourself in control of your social media experience.

I’ve read a lot about the second and third topics, so that part was mostly familiar to me, though I expect it will be more interesting (and helpful) to other readers.

The first topic - which is basically the hook to get people looking at the rest of it - proved to be very eye-opening as it describes the sheer amount of product placement and sponsorship going on, the lengths people will go to in order to make it look like they have a bigger audience than they do so they can get the deals, and the various techniques used to get around fraud detection.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/under-the-influence/

At the moment a scientific experiment begins, everyone on the planet blacks out for two minutes. For those two minutes, everyone sees through the eyes of their future selves, two decades down the line. The world is transformed: first by the millions of accidents caused as drivers, pilots and surgeons lost control of their vehicles and instruments, and second by the survivors’ knowledge of the future.

What follows is an exploration of the nature of time, destiny and free will. Is this a glimpse of the future as it will be, or as it may be? Did the experiment cause the event, or was it a coincidence? Is foreknowledge a blessing or a curse?

Flashforward is at its best when it focuses on characters’ dilemmas. The novel centers on the personal lives of researchers at CERN, particularly the two scientists who designed the experiment: Lloyd Simcoe, a 45-year-old Canadian who is shocked to learn that his impending marriage is doomed to collapse, and Theo Procopides, a 27-year-old Greek who learns that he will be dead by the time the visions come to pass. Lloyd wrestles with his responsibility for the event and whether it’s worth going through with a marriage he knows won’t last. Theo is consumed with preemptively solving his own murder.

Occasionally it stumbles into telling, rather than showing, as when presenting the view of the next twenty years worked out by correlating thousands’ of people’s visions, or when presenting a debate at the United Nations. And it does take a strange turn at one point that reminded me of Robert Charles Wilson’s novel, Darwinia.

Most of the book, though, is an enjoyable look at the different ways that people, organizations, and even nations might react to learning their future.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/flashforward/