The SF Site: Featured Reviews Archive

The reviews are sorted alphabetically by authors' last name -- one or more pages for each letter (plus one for Mc). All but some recent reviews are listed here. Links to those reviews appear on the Recent Feature Review Page.

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Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
There has been one more winter of wildly careening weather since the winter of Fifty Degrees Below. Frank Vanderwal is still working for the NSA, coordinating projects aimed at combating the causes of rapid climate change. With the election of Phil Chase as President, Frank and his co-workers' jobs are about to gain in influence and importance. Charlie Quibler, Frank's friend, is pulled away from working part-time at home and raising a son to being a full-time science advisor to the President. Frank's new love, Caroline, has gone underground, pursued by the same black ops organization whose plans to fix the election Frank and Caroline helped thwart.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
It's the near future, and chaos is in the air and water; chaos in the form of tipping points, changes in the giant system that determines the Earth's weather that could lead to sudden, severe climate change. One of those tipping points lies in the interaction of cold water from the polar ice cap with the warm water of the Gulf Stream. Too much of the polar water, which is also less salty, and the Gulf Stream could be displaced to the south, removing the flow of water that currently warms England and Northern Europe.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer
This is probably one of the most important and thought provoking books of the year. It is about how all of these fabulous discoveries and projects get snowed under by lack of funding and poor management. Companies force scientists to keep their research a secret because if there's anything good to come out of the discoveries, they want to be able to cash in. It means that people from different companies with different equipment can't compare notes and perhaps bring the projects to fruition sooner. It also means that sometimes projects are completely buried or destroyed. Greed is the key, here, and it's a tragedy.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
reviewed by Rich Horton
This is a long, ambitious, alternate history novel. The point of divergence is the Black Death in 14th Century Europe: in the author's imagined timeline nearly everyone in Europe died of the plague. This leaves the world stage free for a centuries long struggle between a mostly Buddhist or Confucian China, and an Islamic Middle East and Africa, with Europe and Christianity no factor at all. His interest is in the nature of history, and in the possible evolution of these religions, and their associated social and political structures, without the pressure of Christianity and European Colonialism.

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson
reviewed by Jean-Louis Trudel
This is a rousing book: reactions may vary according to your outlook, but indifference should not be one of them. It'll take you on an endlessly fascinating voyage to a little-known land. Comparable to the Mars of his Mars Trilogy in many ways, although smaller in scale, closer at hand, and not quite so sexy.

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