Sci-Fi Saturday 9-5-26

I’ve posted quite a few Sci-Fi Saturday posts devoted to specific works, but it has been almost exactly four years since the last post carrying the “Sci-Fi Saturday” title. Such posts usually cover a number of works and therefore need a generic title.

As mentioned last post, I’ve been in a bit of a blogging lull lately. One reason is that I’ve been reading and watching a fair amount this summer. Much of it, of course, is SF, so there is plenty to record here today (hence the generic title).

Starting with a seriously strange book.

I’ve posted about John Scalzi (1969–) before. I first encountered him back in 2019 when I read his wonderfully delicious Star Trek pastiche, Redshirts (2012) [see Scalzi: Redshirts]. I originally read it as a library loan but liked it so much that I bought it and read it again.

[I was a very young teenager when Star Trek aired the late 1960s and already a science fiction fan, so the show was ambrosia to me.]

A few months later I read and really enjoyed (and also bought) The Android’s Dream (2006) [see A Bit of Huang and Laurie for more details].

So, I was thinking, “I really like this Scalzi guy,” but in early 2021 I read his Interdependency trilogy and didn’t care for it [see Scalzi: The Interdependency]. In his defense, he wrote it during COVID and confesses it wasn’t his best work. It did put me off trying his Old Man’s War series, at least until I really need something to read (and there is always a lot in the queue).

Later in 2021 I read his Lock In books, Lock In (2014) and Head On (2018). I recall liking them okay. Overall, I was still thumbs-up on Scalzi.

Still am (very much so) after reading When the Moon Hits Your Eye (2025) — definitely one of the stranger books I’ve read. As hard SF goes, this one is about as hard as a warm brick of brie. It might be labeled as magical realism, but I’m dubious. I see it more as straight-up surrealism.

Except that it’s entirely realistic except for its central premise: one day, during the moment of the new Moon, the Moon — along with all the Moon rocks on Earth — turns into (a never-specified type of) cheese. What NASA throughout insists on calling “an organic matrix” of some kind.

[One of the really clever things about the story is that Scalzi never specifies the type of cheese, and NASA never admits that it even is cheese (though it clearly is).]

Each chapter is one day of the lunar cycle, and they are episodic in character and style. Most introduce a new character and describe their reaction to the change. A few characters appear in several chapters, but most don’t. Various chapters are presented in different styles, chat messages or news reports, for instance.

I won’t spoil the ending, though if you have a strong sense of narrative, you might guess at what happens (I did). I want to mention that a key tension point involves a consequence of a cheese Moon. Being organic, it compresses under its own weight and begins to heat up. This disassociates the “organic matrix” resulting in, among other substances, a fair amount of greasy water. Which the heat turns to steam. Which results in huge steam geysers. One of which blows a very large chunk of “organic matrix” away from the Moon.

And towards Earth. It’s much bigger than the dinosaur killer asteroid, so it looks like life on Earth’s near-term fate is to die due to cheese bombardment.

Very hard to put down and it gets a Wow! rating.

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Despite having read (and enjoyed) six of his books, I haven’t posted much about Edward Ashton (1968–). Poor guy, he doesn’t yet rate a Wikipedia page even though one of his books was adapted into a recent movie.

The sole time I wrote about him [see TV Tuesday 12/9/25] was to express my strong dislike of that adaptation, Mickey 17 (2023), which is based on Ashton’s Mickey7 (2022). As is usually the case, the book is much better. And it has a sequel, Antimatter Blues (2023). Ashton may not have gotten a Wikipedia page, but those two novels of his did (I assume because of the movie).

Since then — this year, in fact — I’ve read four more of his books and liked them all. In order of reading:

The Fourth Consort (2025) is a dark comedy billed as “part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle” and that it “asks an important question: how far would you go to survive? And more importantly, how many drinks would you need to go there?” I found it an offbeat enjoyable space opera.

Mal Goes to War (2024) is about an Ai (named Mal; guess what it’s short for). Mal lives in cyberspace and mostly ignores the human world. Which, in America, is divided in a bitter civil war. When digital links are cut, Mal is trapped in the body of a cyborg in that war. A fun romp.

The End of Ordinary (2017) is about a genetic engineer. And corn. And a dark conspiracy. Turns out there’s more going on with a seemingly harmless strain of genetically engineered corn. Inventive. Very inventive.

After the Fall (2026) is about an alien invasion that happened one hundred years before events in the book and twenty years after the supposed fall of human civilization. The aliens — the “Greys” but think elephants not super skinny dudes with huge eyes — claim they saved us from Certain Doom. In return, they treat us as pets. One book blurb reads:

Humans must be SILENT.
Humans must be OBEDIENT.
Humans must be GOOD.

Another asks ‘would humans make good pets’ (and I’m pretty sure narrative determination pre-answers that one; this is a humans über alles story). As with all Ashton’s books so far, I found this an enjoyable read and an interesting rumination on pets. I give it an Ah! rating.

Reminds me a bit of a story idea I had long ago told from a dog’s point of view but without revealing the main character is a dog. I wanted it to come off as if a human was living among gods (or hugely powerful aliens). I’ve long wondered what it is like for dogs to live with these magical beings that provide food, shelter, and love [see Animal Gods].

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I’ve mentioned William Gibson (1948–) here a number of times [see this list of posts]. Last year I wrote a TV Tuesday post about the Amazon adaptation of his recent novel, The Peripheral (2014), the first book of an intended trilogy.

[“Recent” in terms of his body of work. As in that and the second book is all he’s written in a while. In his defense, he’s 78. We may never see the third book.]

I only read the first book because of the TV series. I put off reading the second book, Agency (2020), until the third book was out.

[I learned a lesson regarding incomplete series back with the Riverworld books by Philip José Farmer. I learned it good and proper with The Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan (which I bailed on around book eight after book six in which almost nothing happened). I prefer a series to be complete so I can read them all.]

After deciding I might never see Jackpot (TBD), the third book, I decided to read Agency. Which turns out to be only somewhat related to The Peripheral; only a few characters from the future timeline appear. Even so, I wanted to reread the first book.

As I have said before, Gibson can be a challenge to read. His descriptions and dialog often require some parsing. I’ve found it’s usually worth the effort. He does fulfill my primary ask with stories: take me someplace different.

One thing I like about the Jackpot series (interesting that the series is named after the last thus-far unwritten book) is that it handles time travel, normally an incoherent notion, in the only way it could make any physical sense at all. When you reach out to the past, from that moment a new timeline is created that branches off your past into a new future (because in your past, no such time travel occurred). This removes the time travel paradoxes: killing your ancestor or receiving new information from nowhere.

That said, three good time travel movies: Looper (2012), Primer (2004), and most recently, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020). The first one is my favorite time-travel movie (stars Bruce Willis and directed by Rian Johnson). The second one is perhaps the best time-travel movie ever made but is opaque and requires a guide to follow (plus, it’s hard to find). The third one is a delightful treat, a low-budget indie production from Japan that I’ve seen three times and enjoyed each time [see Infinite Two Minutes].

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I read two books that didn’t do much for me…

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The first, Platform Decay (2026), by Martha Wells (1964–), was merely kinda repetitious and not hugely creative. Sort of a standard characters-need-to-invade-hostile-territory-and-rescue-someone(s)-or-steal-something story. It’s the eighth and most recent novel from her The Murderbot Diaries series (which also sports a few short stories).

After reading eight of these, I’d give the whole thing an Eh! rating. Diverting if you like them, increasingly boring if you don’t.

The titular character, Murderbot, is a highly weaponized cyborg with a very negative attitude towards humans. He would vastly prefer to be watching his shows (which he downloads from “the feed” by the gigabyte). His bad attitude comes, in part, from being a product that is rented out as a security “consultant” (aka muscle). Such units always contain a “governor module” that essentially enslaves them to their owners and users.

Murderbot has managed to eliminate his governor module and is essentially free. But if anyone found that out, he’d be destroyed immediately. Self-willed advanced weapons systems with serious infiltration skills are too big a threat.

The series has been adapted on Apple TV (which I don’t, and won’t, subscribe to, so can say nothing about it).

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I actively disliked the second book, The Adjacent (2013) by Christopher Priest (1943–). Which is a pity because I rather liked The Prestige (1995). And, for that matter, the same-named movie adaptation by Christopher Nolan [see TV Tuesday 2/24/26].

Priest is more a literary author than a science fiction author (even more so than Iain Banks), and I’m not big on literary science fiction. Some of it is good, even excellent, but a lot of it… well, maybe those authors should stick to their lane and leave SF to those with a better feel for it. [See, for instance: VanderMeer: Annihilation and “King”: FKA USA.]

The story takes place in three different times: the near future, the present, and one-hundred years ago. It’s sort of a Many Worlds Interpretation story; in the present a theoretical physicist develops a new way of diverting matter, and this ends up having consequences that echo through history.

This may say more about me than the author, but I found it incoherent and incompetent. And the diverting matter thing seems too much an echo of the SF gimme from The Prestige. Also from that book, the trick of including some genuine historical characters (Tesla in The Prestige and H.G. Wells in this one).

It gets a Meh! rating, though I might try some of his more highly regarded books (Wiki does not list The Adjacent among his Notable Works).

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I haven’t yet made up my mind about Peter Watts (1958–). Perhaps it says something that one of his books, a collection of short stories and essays is titled Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays (2019). The “angry sentient tumor” in question is his brain — which is perfectly normal (within the broad spectrum of humanity) but which he views as a malignant growth, an evolutionary adaptation, that complicates life for us all.

Besides a couple of short story collections, I’ve read three of his novels this year. My mixed feelings come from the combination of inventive ideas told in seriously depressing and dour ways. His text — almost every adjective or adverb — reeks of negativity. And his characters and plots aren’t particularly loveable.

But he certainly is creative.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution (2018) takes place on a spaceship that is run by an Ai and has multiple crews in deep freeze that can be revived when human hands are necessary. The story involves a rebellion by the humans under the watchful “benevolent” eye of the Ai. It’s a slow-motion rebellion because the rebels are only awake for short periods.

Starfish (1999), his first novel and one that received some acclaim, is about a crew of people physically altered to work maintaining a power station on a deep-sea rift (using the heat to generate electricity). It’s mainly a psychological study that considers the type of people they selected and the effect of deep-sea isolation and rapture. It began as a short story, was expanded into a novel with a number of sequels.

Blindsight (2006) received even more acclaim (and has its own Wiki page). This is another people-on-a-spaceship story. At its center, the main character, Siri Keeton, is a philosopher’s zombie. (Usually referred to as a philosophical zombie, but that’s a nonsensical notion because these zombies, or any zombies, are far from being philosophical.)

If that wasn’t enough, the ship’s captain is a vampire. A real one. Seems vampires are an ancient subspecies of humans that died out long ago due to their life-threatening aversion to right angles (which never appear in nature). But their species was revived because vampires are a bit like the Mentats in the Dune books: their brains are superior in data capacity, judgement, and speed.

Making the philosophical atmosphere pretty thick, the ship is named Thesus. Siri, the main character (and narrator), because half his brain was replaced with machinery when he was a child, is effectively the “Chinese Room” described by John Searle [see The Giant File Room for my post about it].

The book is certainly of interest to anyone interested in consciousness, though I think those with little exposure to it would get more out of it. It was interesting, but I can’t say I learned anything or found any new ideas for consideration.

I will say I’m mostly thumbs-up on Watts, but his writing is very dour and dismal. It may be understandable given his personal history (which includes contracting a flesh-eating disease). From his point of view, it may indeed seem the universe is only a cold and bitter place.

Myself, I think there are at least some warm moments by the fire.

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Stay reading, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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