Lucas Blogs About Books

A 2000s sci-fi period piece you say? Tell me more.   So, what's this book's dea—Wait a minute, it's by Lindsay Ellis, the YouTuber? Yes, that Lindsay Ellis. She wrote a book? She wrote a book. I like her video essays. As do I. In fact, that's how I found out that she wrote a book. Wanna talk about the book? Yeah. Okay. So it's 2007, and Nils Ortega has just leaked a government memo detailing the fact that the US government has been hiding a group of aliens for decades, and that scientists have made no progress in attempting to communicate with them. Enter Nils's estranged daughter Cora Sabino who's just trying to get by at a temp job after dropping out of UCI, when she finds herself under surveillance by the FBI following both the release of the Fremda document and the Ampersand Incident. Ampersand Incident? It's the codename for a recent meteorite strike in Southern California. In light of the recent leaks and the fact that the government is being parti...

Oops! I left in the bookmark. You may have heard of N.K. Jemisin because she's been a bit of a big deal in the speculative fiction scene lately. And there's a good reason for that: each entry in her Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. That's three consecutive Hugo wins (obviously), and it's also the first time every entry in a series has won. Which is why I picked up this book and decided to give it a shot. The Fifth Season  is the first of the Broken Earth books, and it begins with the end of the world, sort of. See, it takes place on a supercontinent known as the Stillness. This is a bit of a misnomer as there is a colossal fault running along its east-west axis which is subject to extraordinary seismic activity, These earthquakes and volcanic flare-ups are referred to as seasons, and when they're bad enough to cause something akin to a nuclear winter, they're referred to as fifth seasons. But we're just getting started on the...

I usually make some silly joke here, but I am legit diggin' this cover design. Good on you, Jeffrey Alan Love. So, what's this book's deal? You ever wonder what it would be like if bigfoot were real? Wait, do you not believe in bigfoot? Well, I believe it's possible that there's some sort of unkown hominid species, but I am unconvinced by the specific evidence that has been offered of such a hominid existing in the Pacific Northwest. Anyway, Wild Life by Molly Gloss is an epistolary novel made up of diary entries and other writings, mostly by the novel's protagonist: Charlotte Bridger Drummond. Drummond writes speculative adventure novels while raising five boys in turn of the century Oregon. Wait, the turn of which century? The Nineteenth to the Twentieth, of course. Ok, boomer. Wow, that meme must be played out if it's appearing on this  blog. Anyway, Charlotte's husband disappeared a few years ago, when their youngest son, Jules (a...