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Books Online

Category: Science Fiction

Jurassic Park; Michael Crichton, pages 423.

I really enjoyed the way that Michael Crichton combined chaos theory with a scifi fantasy of bringing dinosaurs back to life, and I consider Jurassic Park to be among the best written science fiction works of all time.

Crichton pieces together some very interesting thoughts on math, evolution and biology in a highly entertaining book. Jurassic Park is one of those rare books that you simply cannot put down.

Of course, what I liked most was that Crichton embedded chaos theory into the very structure of the plot. Each chapter seems to bring us back to a sense of order and normalcy, only to have a loose thread from the previous chapter blow up into even a greater spectacle of chaos. Sane people, of course, like the dinosaurs the best.

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Snow Crash; Neal Stephenson, pages 440.

I admit, it is a bit hard to classify the work. Stephenson shifts styles several times. The first pages come across as a witty, Douglas Adam's type parody of Hiro Protagonist "the deliverator" crashing through futuristic suburbs, trying to deliver a pizza at all cost. Failure to deliver the pizza on time would not only would be a major media event. It would cause some rather sticky problems with the Costra Nostra pizza chain.

We soon transfer into a cyberpunk metauniverse, created and run by the hacker elite. Avatars wander around in a life like simulation, but only the coolest of the Avatars can make it into the ultimate hacker's hangout - The Black Sun. Before settling into a pure cyberpunk story, we suddenly find ourselves sucked into the political intrigue of mysterious religious cults (the type you would find in Robert Heinlein), then, with little warning, we are in pure adventureland battles - fierce enough to make Dirk Pitt cringe.

The long explanations of the history of religion was a tad tedious. But it is interesting to see how he draws on Richard Dawkins ideas of religion and ideas (memes) behave like computer viruses, with different survival strategies.

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Seventh Son; Orson Scott Card, pages 241.

Seventh Son is the first book in the Alvin Maker series. Orson Scott Card presents us with an extremely interesting alternative reality. Rather than looking into the future. Mr. Card looks into the past. He presents the readers with an early American notably different from the one that created the United States of today.

The most notable difference between Alvin's world and ours is that the people in the work tend to have very pronounced "knacks."

The work is a wonderful play on history, and presents the reader with a simple, yet magical universe. Thankfully, the first book in the series is self contained. Read Seventh Son, if you like it, you will find another four books in the series.

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Douglas Adams, pages 216.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the classical Sci Fi comedy. This four part trilogy follows the adventures of a Arthur Dent through some of the stranger parts of the universe in a ship powered by an infinite improbability drive. This books is the pinnacle of Monty Pythonish British humor.

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