Tag: Population

Emily St. John Mandel – Station Eleven | Review

April 8, 2020
Authors P-T (By Surname)Fiction

Title: Station Eleven

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 340

Rating: 4.25/5

I’d heard a lot of good things about this book going into it, and then it was picked out for me by a friend who I asked to pick out a random number to coincide with a book on my wish list. This is what she picked out for me.

It’s also a beautiful little book as well, and so my expectations were pretty high going into it. I’m happy to say that it didn’t disappoint me, too. It’s beautifully written and does a great job of examining a bunch of different themes and subject matters and asking the reader some questions.

But for me, though, what I was most impressed with was the depiction of a world in which a super flu has taken out most of the population. It was extremely well done, and it was also pretty unsettling considering what’s going on in the world at the moment. I mean, there was even a scene in which one of the characters started panic buying and ended up stocking up a trolley entirely with toilet paper.

So I mean, I’m not sure if it’s the best book for you to read if you’re looking for a little bit of a distraction from what’s going on in  the world around us, but if you just want something that’s genuinely well-written and a pleasure to read, you’re going to struggle to find something better than this. Having now finished it, I can say that it lives up to all of the hype.

Would I recommend this one? Hell yeah I would, even during these troubled times when you might not really feel like engaging with this sort of subject matter. It’s not far off being a masterpiece and definitely a top contender for my top books of the quarter, even though it’s only just begun. It’s just a little bit scary how realistic it all was, you know? Bit nuts.

Learn more about Station Eleven.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – The Long Mars | Review

August 18, 2019
Authors A-E (By Surname)Authors P-T (By Surname)Fiction

Title: The Long Mars

Author: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 448

Rating 3.5/5

 

 

By now, we’re up to book three of five in this series, and while I do think that the first book was incredible, it’s struggled to live up to the same high standard as the series has continued. We’re helped by the fact that the basic idea behind the story is pretty good and so it’s fun to watch the authors investigate.

In the first of these books, we follow what happens when stepping, a sort of new technology, is unleashed on the unsuspecting population of the world that we live in. With stepper boxes, people can hop from our world to a sort of adjacent parallel world, and that opens up whole new horizons when it comes to exploration.

The last two books have focused mainly on what’s been happening on our world, but in this one we see what happens when some explorers from a version of the earth near the Gap decide to head for Mars. Once there, they discover that you can hop between worlds on Mars too, and that opens up an entirely new type of exploration.

 

 

These books tend to take it pretty easy when it comes to the plot, and so sometimes it can feel as though the plot is dragging as you’re waiting for things to happen. In the first one, I quite liked that because I was having a lot of fun looking at all of the underlying science and the other ideas that it had in it. The problem is that the more time goes on, the more I kind of want the plot to accelerate.

Still, there’s plenty of good stuff here, and I’ll be continuing on with the last two books in the series and maybe even finishing the series by the end of the month. I just think that the series set itself up for a fall because the first book was so good, and the vibe that I’m getting so far is that pretty much everyone should give The Long Earth a go and then only the people who really enjoy that should keep going.

All in all then, I am of course glad that I read this, but at the same time I can appreciate that it’s not for everyone. Still, if you’ve read the first two books and you were thinking about continuing, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t. And it didn’t even end on a crazy cliffhanger like the first two did, so it has that going for it too. And that’s it.

 

 

Click here to buy The Long Mars.