Others: Overwhelmingly positive A junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe. Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way. But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) and although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it). But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, for his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon…
Genres: science fiction
Lists: …
Nino Cipri
2021 · 169 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Leaning positiveDerek is LitenVärld's most loyal employee. He lives and breathes the job, from the moment he wakes up in a converted shipping container at the edge of the parking lot to the second he clocks out of work 18 hours later. But after taking his first ever sick day, his manager calls that loyalty into question. An excellent employee like Derek, an employee made to work at LitenVärld, shouldn't need time off. To test his commitment to the job, Derek is assigned to a special inventory shift, hunting through the store to find defective products. Toy chests with pincers and eye stalks, ambulatory sleeper sofas, killer mutant toilets, that kind of thing. Helping him is the inventory team — four strangers who look and sound almost exactly like him. Are five Dereks better than one?
What made the match, strongest first
Martha Wells
2021 · 176 pages · 6 reviews
Others: Leaning positive"No, I didn’t kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn’t dump the body in the station mall." When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people — who knew?) Yes, the unthinkable is about to happen: Murderbot must voluntarily speak to humans! Again! Cover illustration by Jaime Jones
What made the match, strongest first
Bethany Jacobs
2023 · 4 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positive"On a dusty backwater planet, occasional thief Jun Ironway has got her hands on the score of a lifetime: a secret that could raze the Kindom, the ruling power of the galaxy. A star system away, preternaturally stoic Chono and brilliant hothead Esek - the two most brutal clerics of the Kindom - are tasked with hunting Jun down. All tracking all three across the stars is a ghost from their shared past known only as Six. But what Six wants is anyone's guess. It's a game of manipulation and betrayal that could destroy them all. And they have no choice but to see it through."
What made the match, strongest first
Adrian Tchaikovsky
2015 · 624 pages · 17 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveThe last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home. Following their ancestor's star maps, they discovered the greatest treasure of a past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New monsters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilisations are on a collision course and must fight to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?
What made the match, strongest first
Edward Ashton
2022 · 320 pages · 2 reviews
Others: MixedDying isn't any fun...but at least it's a living. Mickey7 is an a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there's a mission that's too dangerous-even suicidal- the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. Mickey signed on to escape from both bad debts and boredom on Midgard. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal...and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it. When he goes missing and is presumed dead at the hands of deadly indigenous creatures, Mickey8 reports for duty, and their troubles really begin.
What made the match, strongest first
Peter Watts
2006 · 366 pages · 12 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveTwo months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them....
What made the match, strongest first
Loved itOne of his other novelas was The Elder Race that I read for the Hugos a handful of years ago and the way that he did that, it was kind of like a sci-fi fantasy mix depending on which character's head you were in. Again, fascinating.
Loved itit is a great Novella I love his writing style but it's not his best so because of that it is a little bit lower on the list
Loved itI enjoyed it. I thought it was pretty novel and well executed.
Loved iti just think it's one of the most well plotted little novellas i've read in a very long time completely surprised me i picked up this book with no expectations and it really just blew away any preconceived ideas i had about what this book was gonna be about
