Grady Elrod

“Who would have thought saving the world would be so boring?” thinks Dr. Ryland Grace, the protagonist of Andy Weir’s newest novel. Nobody who reads Project Hail Mary would think so. Employing the same strategem of interspersing scenes from space with scenes from Earth (in this case they are flashbacks)  that he did to such marvelous effect in The Martian , Weir has created another New York Times bestseller (as I write, it is currently number fifteen on the Hardcover Fiction list after fifteen weeks). The sun, as in the 2007 Danny Boyle film Sunshine , is losing energy. If this goes unchecked, of course, ecological disaster and mass extinction are not far behind. And this time just nuking the sun isn’t going to solve anything. In fact, the solution needs to be discovered outside of the solar system, and it needs to be discovered fast. The clock is running out and so the quarterbacks of Earth have this one last chance to heave a pass towards the end-zone. And far away from the Earth...

You and I were born with a purpose; and I’m a little bit unsure what mine is. But Ima, the protagonist of The Human Son , knows hers. “Mine was to save the world,” she says. And as the story begins, she already has. Ima is one of the Erta, a race of superbeings created by humanity to roll back the damage we had done to the planet. The Erta are stronger than us, they live for hundreds of years, and they are far more logical and less swayed by emotion than we are. Or so Ima thinks. The Erta achieved their goal by first conducting a reasoned analysis of the problem and realized that there was one contributing factor to the planet’s degradation that simply couldn’t be fixed. Yep, the humans. So they phased us out. Sounds rough, and yeah maybe so, but they did throw us one tiny bone- they promised to reintroduce the species once the planet had returned to its pristine, pre-human state.  In chapters two and three the “High Council,” the top hundred and ten Erta (comprised of the second a...

Fugitive Telemetry is not the best book in the Murderbot Diaries series. Fans of Murderbot will not care; they get to spend more time with Murderbot! Let me say it again- Murderbot! The funnest, murderiest, nicest robot in the universe, even with the anxiety disorder and the aversion to human feelings of all kinds.  When I discovered last week that my public library had a copy of Martha Wells’ newest Murderbot book, I got in my non-robot car and drove over. I looked on the shelf in Science Fiction. It wasn’t there. I looked in General Fiction (because human error, right?). It wasn’t there. I looked in the new books. Nope. Staff Recs? Nuh-uh. I looked on every endcap and display table. Not present. I started to feel more depressed than usual- what to do? Leave the library and deal with my real life? No way, son. So then I did something crazy; I asked the human librarian for help. I said I’m looking for a book called Fugitive Telemetry and it’s not there! She said, “I can’t spell th...

The Psychology of Time Travel is a ring of a very strange shape. It’s full of genies and visits from dead people. Characters flit and fly about like stray bullets, from the 1960s to the 24th century. Although the majority of the narration takes place during 2017 and 2018, the action is all over the place, or rather all over the time, and sixty-two chapters assault the readers with titles including thirteen different characters’ names and dates ranging from March 1967 to April 2019. It’s all rather disconcerting and one would do well to stop fretting over details and resign oneself to fate and just read on to enjoy the zaniness of it all as the mystery unravels itself inexorably. Odette is an archaeology student volunteering at a toy museum. At the beginning of her second shift on the job she finds a body in the basement. The corpse has multiple gunshot wounds. Even weirder, the body is in a room that had been bolt-locked from the inside. The door is the only possible means of egress or...

For fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series, To Be Taught, If Fortunate will be a bit of a surprise. Some elements that we know and love remain, like the chummy camaraderie of crewmates onboard a spacecraft, the sex, the proliferation of worldbuilding details about things like food, plants, and the delineations of the idiosyncrasies of individual characters. But Chambers also finds a different voice, or at least a new tone, which emphasizes the science in science fiction. To Be Taught, If Fortunate is very crunchy and sciency. Aliens of human-level intelligence are absent. There’s no AI. And while the premise of the novella is futuristic, the idea of Earth sending four astronauts fourteen light-years into the universe to explore several planets that allegedly have the conditions necessary for life to evolve isn’t one that gives readers pause the way it might have even seventy years ago.  Narrator Ariadne O’Neill and her crewmates (and lovers) Elena Quesada-Cruz and Jack Vo (yep, i...

Remember that time you were stuck somewhere for an extended period of time with a bunch of strangers and you all became best friends? So much fun, right? Becky Chambers takes this Gilligan’s Island type of concept, in what appears to be the final installment of what is being called “The Wayfarers” series ( including The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few). Chambers, who includes lots of anthropological details about the societies of the members of the various races which comprise the “Galactic Commons” throughout the series, gets even more ethnographic in The Galaxy and the Ground Within.  The protagonists are all GC- outsiders in some way, and Chambers focuses on some of the less- described races from the first three books including the Laru, gregarious, long-necked, furry, and flexible, the Quelin, beetle-like, officious, and arrogant, and the Akaraks, short-lived, birdlike, and xenophobic to undercut all of these stereotyp...

Anyone who has seen at least one X Men movie has already seen this circus. Since 1980, one percent of the population has been born “brilliant,” gifted, possessing more advantages than others- not just in real life but also in Marcus Sakey’s novel, Brilliance (is it? You decide). One such dude is supercool government agent Nick Cooper, who has an amazing talent- for pattern-recognition (he can kinda-sorta guess what everyone else is about to do next)! Wow. Nick works for the DAR (no, not the Daughters of the American Revolution, silly- the Department of Analysis and Response) and gets pretty Jason Bourney on some terrorists from time to time.  But when the brand new stock market building gets blown up (allegedly by “abnormal” terrorists working for evil genius John Smith), Nick’s world gets disrupted. He and his boss concoct a crazy scheme to make it look like our man Nick has gone rogue so he can infiltrate John Smith’s gang of super-brilliant terrorists. Nick leaves his job, his k...

Hello Cleveland! And Tulsa...and Fresno. The “Children of Darwin” have shut down your power grids. Enjoy the looting and fires, the food shortages and trigger-happy National Guardsmen who have been sent to quarantine you. Perhaps consider joining your local Neighborhood Watch. Sakey’s back, and you’re going to be in trouble, America. Nick Cooper is back too, and after a brief “leave” from the Department of Analysis and response, he takes a new job as special advisor to the new President (the last one having green-lighted an attack on American citizens, and consequently removed from office (as sometimes happens- but only sometimes)). Nick sees his primary goal as preventing a civil war between norms and abnorms, but he is opposed, on one side, by the nefarious Secretary of Defense Leahy and his associates in the intelligence-military-political complex who believe: A that they would benefit from a war against the abnorms (that one percent of us born “brilliant,” with special abilities an...

It is safe to assume that somewhere in Hollywood, Michael Bay is at this exact moment trying desperately to convince a studio executive to let him direct the movie version of Written In Fire. Did we have to have a book three in the Brilliance Trilogy? I guess we had to figure out exactly how blown up the New Canaan Holdfast was going to get. And whether our hero Nick Cooper ends up with his tough-as-nails, brilliant girlfriend, Shannon, or with his suddenly very interested ex-wife, Natalie. And whether the slimy Secretary of Defense Owen Leahy gets what’s coming to him, finally. And we do. Gunfire and explosions, vehicle crashes and daring escapes abound as former DAR agent Nick Cooper, now presumed dead by the administration, goes solo and tears around killing bad guys and trying to stop the imminent civil war between norms and abnorms. If it isn’t very predictable, it’s all predictably unpredictable, and for readers of Brilliance and A Better World it’s much more of the same.  Af...