For the past few years, I’ve organized and hosted a Science-Fiction book club based out of Vancouver. Since the pandemic, we started meeting online and our membership base has grown to include people from San Francisco, Calgary, and Japan.
Every year we look back at the books and short stories we read as a group and give them a rating. People are always asking me for book reviews and what we’ve read, so I thought I’d add them all here.
A few notes on the scores:
Books are rated on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being the highest…except you can’t choose 7 ( I always feel that 7 is a sort of cop-out rating: “Yeah, I guess I liked it,” and forces people to take a side).
Not everyone in the group read all the same books, so the scores are from a variety of different people. On average, 6 people gave each book a score.
Most of the people in the group are self-described sci-fi fans.
We mostly tried to avoid books that were part of a series…but if you’ve ever read any sci-fi you’ll find that’s almost impossible.
Season 1 (2019)
Books:
Century Rain - Alastair Reynolds 5/10 - Reynolds is hit or miss for me….I loved his “House of Suns,” his Prefect books are decent…and I don’t like much else. This one included. It was a bit of a hodge-podge of a story about a version of Earth trapped in the past and one trapped in amber or something.
UBIK - Philip K. Dick 5/10 - Ubik is wild! A truly psychedelic PKD story, where psychic powers are the norm and you can use a phone to talk to your dead relatives. It starts off strong with some noir-ish detective elements, then goes a bit rogue with reality-changing spray. Not widely loved by my book club, but a classic and worth reading.
Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin 4/10* - Goodreads calls it “groundbreaking,” my book club thought it was a bit plodding. It was my introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish books, which are all worth reading. The general plot is that an Envoy of the Ekumen (like, the Federation from Star Trek, maybe?) visits a planet on which there is only one gender. It sounds like a bit of a gimmick but ends up being more of an exploration of gender and relationships. I loved it and gave it a 9/10.
Europe in Autumn - Dave Hutchinson 5.2/10 - An alternate-history Europe with spies and countries the width of train tracks. I don’t think I loved the book when I first read it, but it’s slowly growing on me as I think back to the intricacies of the plot and Cold War-era world-building.
Player of Games - Iain Banks 6.6/10 - Imagine if there was a planet where everything was decided by a giant game of Catan. Well, that’s the Empire of Azad, and it is where The Culture sends their best game player. A good introduction to Culture books, and a great standalone story.
Fall or Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson 4.2/10 - An epically long book that needed an editor. It was basically two books in one, with parallel stories. If you have any interest in mythology or the metaverse, this book is for you. If you like short, tight stories then this book definitely isn’t for you.
House of Suns - Alastair Reynolds - 7.8/10 (Season 1 “Book of the Year” winner) - This might be my favourite sci-fi book: a woman clones herself into a thousand “shatterlings,” who go forth and explore the local galaxy. Every 50,000 years or so, these clones meet up and share memories with each other. Two of them fall in love, meet a handsome robot, and uncover some of the greatest mysteries facing their galaxy. Big, fun concepts. Big, crazy ships. Epic scales. 11/10.
Short Stories:
Pop Art - Joe Hill 7.6/10 (Season 1 “Short Story of the Year” winner (tie)) - Short story, short review: Boy meets balloon boy.
New Rose Hotel - William Gibson 6/10 Corporate espionage in a cyberpunk world. Read it so you can make sense of the movie starting Christopher Walken and Wilhelm Dafoe!
The Last Question Isaac Asimov 7/10 A sci-fi classic.
I have no mouth and I must scream - Harlan Ellison - 5.5/10 This one creeped me out. It was weird.
Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu 7.6/10 (Season 1 “Short Story of the Year” winner (tie)) Sci-fi? Maybe not. Fantastic? Absolutely. Try not to cry.
Season 2 (2020)
Books:
Dawn - Octavia Butler 7.6/10 Aliens abduct the last survivors of Earth and…strange things happen.
Spin - Robert Charles Wilson 8.1/10 (Season 2 “Book of the Year” Winner) Imagine if one day the stars just disappeared, and it was like there was a giant dome over Earth. That’s Spin, and it is definitely worth reading.
Dhalgren - Sam Delaney 3.2/10 I could not read this book. Only one person from our book club got anywhere in it…and I can see why. One reviewer on GoodReads referred to it as “Everest”
10,000 Doors of January - Alex Harrow 4/10 - A young girl finds a book in a big, weird mansion. Mystery unfolds (I actually don’t think I finished it?).
A Fire Upon The Deep - Vernor Vinge 5.7/10 Big, sprawling sci-fi story that plays with time scales and technology levels in an interesting way.
Short stories:
The Mercurial - Kim Stanley Robinson 6.6/10 Mystery on Mercury. Probably only worth it for devoted KSR fans.
The Island - Peter Watts - 8.8/10 (Season 2 “Short story of the year” winner) - Part of his “Sunflower Cycle” of books: Spaceship of wormhole-builders barely outrunning the horrors behind them comes across something bigger (and smarter?) than them.
Key Performance indicators - Random blog - 7.1/10 - I have no idea where to find this one.
The Tactful Saboteur - Frank Herbert 5.3/10 I just read the Wikipedia article about this, and I’m like “really??” I’m not sure I was paying attention the first time I read it.
Season 3 (2021)
We didn’t do ratings for Season 3, but here’s a list of what we read:
Hyperion - Dan Simmons - A classic of the modern sci-fi pantheon. : The gist is that each of the 7 pilgrims (no, 6? Het Masteen’s story never gets told) take turns telling the others why they’re on a pilgrimage to visit the “Time Tombs” (giant structures that flow BACKWARDS through time) and see The Shrike, an interdimensional metal demon. Come for the Starship Troopers-esque story of The Colonel, stay for the cyberpunk story of Brawne Lamia, and swoon over the romance between her and an android version of John Keats. These two books have everything you could want in sci-fi story.
Klara and The Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro - Beautiful story about an android.
The Only Good Indians - Stephen Graham Jones A spookier book chosen by my book club to read in the weeks leading up to Halloween. I crushed the entire thing over two days while visiting my family on Vancouver Island, partially because I had the time but partially because it is very well written. Give it a read if you’re ready for creeping horror written by an indigenous author.
Ministry For The Future - Kim Stanley Robinson I’ll preface this review by saying that I am a HUGE fan of KSR, and actually put off reading this book until I was “ready,” that’s how stoked I was for it. Then I forced it on my book club to read it as one of our official selections, though it’s tough to categorize it as a traditional fiction book. There are characters, sure. But the main character is climate change. And the story is told in snippets of conversation, shorthand meeting notes, and scientific journal entries. One entire chapter is just a list of the names of social media accounts for (fictional) conservation organizations. I’m probably not doing a great job of selling this book, but it actually is fantastic. And there is a lot more to it than “conversation snippets.” If you care about the future of the planet and want to feel inspired to do more, then give it a shot. My book club loved it (except one dude who didn’t finish it). I loved it. You should read it.
What else?
We occasionally do short story contests within the group (you can see the results of one of them here), and we support Books For Me! as our charity of choice:
Books for Me! is a non-profit Society and a registered charity based in Vancouver. For many families, buying children's books just isn't possible. Books for Me! provides children from these families an opportunity to build their own libraries for free. Our program comes to life as children choose their own book to take home and keep.
You should check them out (and give them a donation) on the Books For Me! Vancouver website.