Doug Lewars's Blog - Posts Tagged "sci-fi"

Super Extra Grande by Yoss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


*** Possible spoilers ***

To start with I thoroughly enjoyed this book. That said, there were a few things I didn't care for but let's start with what is most impressive. This author did not stop at world-building. He did some galaxy-building. He created several sentient races - a couple methane breathing, two more oxygen breathing and one that breathed hydrogen. I didn't quite understand the biological constructs that went around the latter. These races cooperated for the most part although the protagonist is required to save the galaxy from a war breaking out. Mostly, however, the main character is a veterinarian who specialized in large animals - very large animals. One of his patients is measured in a diameter that is somewhere around 100 kilometers and that's quite some critter. In this case it was an amoeba. That's right - just one cell but a biggy. Anyway, occasionally one of these creatures either by design or by accident consumes something or someone of value and our hero had to go in and make a recovery or a rescue. How he does this makes up the bulk of the story. In fact, the entire plot hinges around the treatment of two such patients along with a goodly amount of backstory.

As I said, I enjoyed the book and I'm pretty certain the author did a fair bit of research so as not to make any foolish mistakes although my knowledge of biology is not up to the challenge. However the one thing that I did not like was that all the dialog was in Spanglish. The narration was in English that had probably be translated from Spanish but the dialog was somewhere between Spanish and English. Apparently in the author's galaxy Spanglish is the dominant language. It was possible to read for an uni-lingual English speaker since Spanish is a romance language and one tends to pick up a bit here and there but it did break up the rhythm of reading and that's why I didn't care for it. In general, however, I thought this book was entertaining and worth reading.



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Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


*** Possible spoilers ***

On a distant planet humanity has encountered a race of intelligent creatures that living in a primitive state. Rule number one is that they must be left alone to find their own way in the universe. But it becomes clear that leaving them alone is not an option.

This book explores the themes of guilt, religion, love, truth, genocide, the relationship between humans and aliens and whether a sentient computer program can survive with humans. It's a very powerful and well-crafted novel and thoroughly enjoyable. In addition it quite relevant for today's reader as globalism makes inroads into every aspect of life. In some respects I found it a a little heavy-handed in terms of its moral perspective but overall I think this is an excellent book to read.



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