Science Fiction Book Reviews

Peter Cawdron’s Galactic Exploration contains four novellas: Serengeti, Trixie & Me, Savannah, and War. All of the stories are loosely connected and deal with the exploration of the Milky Way. Like Christopher Columbus, the intrepid explorers set out in three ships, of course they are space ships. Unlike Columbus and his crews, every crew member is a clone, or to be more exact, Homo sapiens replicas. Cawdron’s format reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. While Asimov’s short stories analyzed the limits and injustices robots had to contend with living among humans, Cawdron discusses some of the […]

William Samuel Babington, the protagonist of Aeternum Ray, by Tracy R. Atkins, was born in the twentieth century and spent his youth in the same world we now inhabit. But by the time Babington succumbs to the heart defect he inherited from his father, the world and humans have changed dramatically. Told in the form of Babington’s letters to his son, Benjamin, Aeternum Ray recounts the personal history of Babington and the larger history of humanity from the late twentieth century until the birth of Benjamin in 2161. The main action of the book is set after humanity has […]

I would classify this as a sci-fi thriller.  The science fiction genre allows us to go anywhere we want and create anything we can imagine.  Mr. Shields has successfully created an alternative earth where animals have been genetically altered to be human while retaining, to various degrees, their animal appearances and nature.  Mr. Shields works this throughout the novel, giving them very human appearance and attributes, but never too much!

The story follows Shark and his friends.  Shark is a completely believable character.  An expert billiard player (read that great-white pool shark) who embarks on an adventure to help his […]