Karl's Reading List

Published by Victor Gollancz Ltd: London, 1974 (1963). First published 1949. I first read this story as a kid, and have fond memories of it. It is also very weird, something that Elise pointed out as well. This is the only book I have read (so far) of Robert A Heinlein, and yet I know by reputation that he was a prominent science-fiction writer in his day. This book, first written in 1949, is certainly of its day. We get a Mars with canals, native plant and animal life, and a sentient Martian species with ruined cities on the surface and still-thriving (if less populated) sections underground.  Our main character, Jim Marlowe Jr, is a teenager living in South Colony. He has befriended a local 'bouncer', a basketball-sized Martian creature that can perfectly mimic what it hears, parrot-like, and also has some level of intelligence. 'Willis', as Jim calls the creature, is a hugely important part of the plot, helping Jim and his friend Frank get out of numerous scrapes, as...

Published by Tui/HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Ltd: Auckland, NZ, 1994. Book 3 in 'The Solar Colonies.' Preceded by ' The Ghosts of Triton. ' Elise and I (along with Ezekiel) have just returned from a two-week holiday/church ministry time in Australia, visiting friends in Tasmania and Melbourne. It was a great trip, with lots to unpack, but one without a lot of time for reading. Also, the main book I've been working my way through - Moby Dick - is in a big omnibus, which would have weighed too much to justify taking on the plane.  So, instead, I took two books with me that were a little bit smaller, one of which - Fear and Trembling - I was already part of the way through, and the other - this one - a book that I knew was an easy read to unwind with in the little bit of downtime I would find. Both were finished while in Australia, but this one (the easier read) was the first I completed. Both of the two Solar Colonies books I have read have had a differen...

Published by Noisy Crow Ltd: Crosby Row, London, 2021. Having finished Scavenger: Zoid too quickly to use in the Reading Challenge, I needed another book featuring AI or robots, and got this one from the school library, knowing nothing about it except what I saw on the cover. In a lot of ways, Adam-2 is similar to Scavenger: Zoid. It is set in the distant future, in a world where robots have turned on humanity and now pockets of humans try to resist against them. Like in Scavenger: Zoid, a more sophisticated robot is introduced who starts trying to help the humans. That robot develops a friendship with a main human, while other main humans remain suspicious. The difference here is that the robot - the titular Adam-2 - is the main character, whereas the robot in Scavenger: Zoid was a supporting character. Having the story be told primarily from Adam's viewpoint is an interesting touch, particularly as Adam learns about both sides in the conflict and begins to have doubts about the ...

Published by Macmillan Children's Books: London, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2014. I began reading this book in class when I was nearing the end of reading The Jungle Books , by Rudyard Kipling. I had selected The Jungle Books to fit the next category on the reading challenge I'm doing this year, and decided that I was near enough the end of that book that starting this one (which fits the   category after that one) was safe enough, especially since I would only be able to read this during silent reading times, and it would likely take a while. Whoops. I under-estimated how busy my home life would be, how slow The Jungle Books would be, and how quickly I'd get through this book, which probably took just over a week of class time! So, now, I find myself in the mildly annoying situation of having read a book that fits the 'robots or AI' category of the challenge, but - because of my self-imposed rule of doing them in order - not being able to use it. And I only finished i...

Published as an audiobook by Audible Studios, released 04-05-2021. Audiobook narrated by Ray Porter. Originally published 2021. This book surprised me, despite being very much what I expected. I know that author Andy Weir wrote The Martian (aka, the book that the 'Matt Damon growing potatoes on Mars' movie was based on) and expected that, like that book, this one was going to be a science-heavy piece of science-fiction. Tick. The plot of Project Hail Mary unfolds gradually, with protagonist Dr Ryland Grace awakening from a medically induced coma in a mysterious location, being tended to by a mysterious medical robot. To begin with, he is suffering from amnesia (Grace tells us that long-term comas are not good for people, and that it must have scrambled his brain), but as he slowly regains his memories he realises he is on a mission to save all of humanity. A "space bacteria" - given the name 'Astrophage' by Grace - is slowly consuming the light from the sun, a...

Published by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd: London, 2014. This is a weird book that's been on my classroom library shelf for quite a while. The main character, Travis, had terminal cancer five years ago, and agreed to have his head cryogenically frozen, in the hope that in the future it would be possible to attach it to a donor body. Now, he has woken up, only the second patient to successfully have the procedure complete, to find that everyone in his world, including his parents, his best friend and his girlfriend, have lived five extra years of life. Travis is sixteen, and the difference between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old is a much bigger difference than it would have been had Travis been an adult. Also, his girlfriend Cate is now engaged to someone else. The difference between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old is also small enough that it is conceivable that Cate and Kyle (his former best friend) would also still be keen to in-some-way have Travis back i...

Published as an audiobook by Dragonsteel, LLC., 2023. Narrated by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. Originally published 2023. As the title might suggest, this is a humorous book about a modern-era man who ends up posing as a wizard in a medieval-style England. As we dig into the story a little, we learn that he's not technically in the real medieval England, but rather a parallel dimension that resembles medieval England. He's also not technically a modern-era man, with the book being set a little into the future (allowing for dimension travel, as well as minor technological augments and nanites). This is smart writing from Sanderson, as it allows him to create a world that seems medieval, without needing to do too much worrying about absolute historical accuracy. In terms of story, our hero awakens in a field, surrounded by scorch marks and the scattered pages of a half-burnt copy of the titular handbook. He has amnesia, which is a great way for us to learn about him as he lea...

Published by Little, Brown and Company: New York/Boston, 2016. This book was lent to me by a student, which is the first time I've had that happen! Thanks, Savana! I became interested in reading this story when I saw the first trailer for the upcoming movie version . That trailer, almost completely dialogue-free, seems to imply a beautifully animated and heart-warming story about a robot befriending wild animals and creating a home on a forested island, told entirely visually and musically. The book (as well as the second trailer ) have a lot more dialogue in them, and although I can confirm that the story is a good one, I do also kinda want to see that dialogue-free arthouse animated film. However, although I wanted a dialogue-free book, the book I did get was a sweet story, with some great messages in it. Roz is a robot that accidentally washes up on a small island after a shipwreck, and slowly adjusts to life on the island. To begin with, the local animals think Roz is a monster...

Published by Puffin Audiobooks. Date unknown.  Narrated by James Bolam. Preceded by 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' Wow. The contrast between this book and the previous book in the duology is incredible. Both focus on Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka, but whereas the earlier book has the tight narrative structure of the competition and the factory tour to keep it bound, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator has no such limitations, and gives Dahl the free reign to go into out-of-this-world (literally, of a good chunk of the book) weirdness. Picking up right where Chocolate Factory left off, Glass Elevator follows Charlie, Willy Wonka, Grandpa Joe, Charlie's parents and (in the greatest increase of relevance to the plot) his other three grandparents, who remain bed-ridden for almost the entire book. Of the protagonists of the first book, Grandpa Joe's role suffers the most, with the elderly man reduced to a supporting role, and being left out of one side-quest altoget...

Published by Doubleday/Random House Children's Books: London, Great Britain, 2012. Followed by 'Enders.' This book with a weird and striking cover has been sitting on my classroom bookshelf for a while. I decided just to browse it to see if it was suitable to keep in the classroom, and got a lot more caught up in the plot than I expected. Set in a dystopian future, the world of Starters is one where a virus has decimated the population, leaving only the elderly (or 'Enders') and young people (or 'Starters') behind. This interesting dynamic is explained because those were the two groups most vulnerable to a coming biological attack, and therefore were the groups first immunized against it. The power dynamic is heavily weighted on the side of Enders, with enough medical breakthroughs meaning that they can live for a few hundred years, and laws passed meaning that they are the only ones who can vote, or work. Starters are second-class citizens, and those who ha...

Published by Puffin Books/Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd: Auckland, NZ, 1988 (1986). An easy story to read, The Keeper is set in a post-apocalyptic New Zealand, where a small group of villagers live on the shores of the 'Big Lake', which is later explicitly identified as Taupo. Within the village, Michael (our main character) is one of the few people - and the youngest - who can still read, and is called a 'Keeper' from the way he can 'keep' the information found within books. Michael narrates the story to us in the form of a journal he is keeping. An older 'keeper' named Charles also adds notes in a few places, expanding on the storylines that Michael remains unaware of. The Keeper is fairly typical for this type of book; there are groups of survivors, some 'outsiders' who may at times be antagonist but also may be misunderstood, there are challenges to face (Michael and his friends must help hunt down a rogue tiger, descended from those released from z...

Published by Puffin Books/Penguin Group: London, England: 2013. Book 1 in the 'WARP Series.' Followed by 'The Hangman's Revolution.' This at times surprisingly violent young-adult novel begins in Victorian London, where we meet Riley, a stereotypical Victorian street urchin. He has been trained by Albert Garrick, a stage magician and true psychopath, who has turned to the life of an assassin following the on-stage death of his lovely assistant. When we first meet Riley, Garrick is supporting him to attempt his first assassination, something that Riley is understandably a bit reluctant to do (thus the title). However, as the attempt goes sideways, Riley is sucked into a time portal, and emerges in the present day. Here he meets Chevron 'Chevie' Savano, a 17-year old FBI agent, hired under a now defunct youth programme. Chevie, who was somewhat responsible for the programme being shut down, is impulsive and a bit over-confident, and becomes our second protagon...

Published by Egmont UK Limited/Electric Monkey: London, UK: 2012 (2009). First published by HarperTeen: New York, USA, 2008. Book 1 in the 'Gone' series. Followed by 'Hunger.' I borrowed this book from a family member knowing nothing about it except that some of my students like it. I soon learned it was seen as a combination of Stephen King meets Lord of the Flies - neither of which are my usual jam (he says, having literally just finished reading a different book by the author of Lord of the Flies ). Yeah, it is like that. Particularly Stephen King's Under the Dome, which I know from the mini-series of the same name. Plus, it also has similarities to Lost (which I loved) and X-Men (some of which I enjoy). So, anyway... The basic premise of Gone  is that all of a sudden everyone fifteen and older who lives in or near the town of Perdido Beach mysteriously disappears, and the remaining children discover that they are now trapped by a mysterious barrier that has a ...

Published by Penguin Books/Michael Joseph: Middlesex, England, 1986 (1954). First published 1951. A classic title by a classic sci-fi author, The Day of the Triffids is one of those books that I know the premise of - to a degree - but am not entirely sure whether I have read it before. I thought I had, but there was a lot I didn't remember.  To my knowledge, the premise was 'a world where everyone goes blind and killer plants (triffids) roam around preying on the blind humans.' That is true, but a surprisingly large amount of the runtime doesn't focus on the titular triffids at all - or if it does, they are more in the background. This seems to be largely because Wyndham has resisted the urge to 'over-humanize' the plants; they are not 'plotting' against people, they are simply taking the most of the opportunity presented by the blinding of humanity in order to do what they do best. Although they are shown to 'communicate' to some degree and gath...

Published by Tui/HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Ltd: Auckland, NZ, 1994. Book 2 in 'The Solar Colonies.' Preceded by 'Doomfire on Venus.' Followed by ' Shadow of Phobos. ' A slightly obscure series from the '90s, the 'Solar Colonies' takes place in the "distant future" of (in this case) 2044, in which Earth has colonized Mars and the asteroids with genetically altered humans, tinted to have green, blue or red skin (depending on their home area). This immediately allows the series to explore issues of racism in a different context, at least in books 2 and 3 (which I have owned since I was young) - I haven't read book 1. In this book, cadet Dexter (from Earth) has encountered some strange apparitions while remote mining on Triton (driving Android-like 'Copies' using a mental link from an orbit near Mars) on Triton. These apparitions resemble historical figures from Earth, although to begin with Dex doesn't recognise th...

Published by Gollancz/Hachette UK: London, UK, 2018. Book 1 of the 'Skyward' series. Followed by 'Starsight.' This is the first Sci-Fi (as opposed to Fantasy) book by Brandon Sanderson that I have read, and it is a good read. It is also much more in the YA vein of literature, with a quick-fire pace and easy chapters to get through (not that Sanderson is usually tricky to get through - I just am used to his 'denser' fantasy series'). Spensa 'Spin' Nightshade is the daughter of a disgraced former pilot who was shot down and killed for cowardice during the Battle of Alta. Spensa, who doesn't believe that her father was a coward, seeks to become a pilot in order to regain her family honour - as well as to satisfy her warrior-urges and desire to seek revenge against the Krell (alien invaders). She is pressured not to join by Admiral Ironsides (the primary antagonist of this book), who believes that Spensa will follow in her father's footsteps, but...

Published by Bantam Books: New York, 1996 (1995). This is the first ever 'Expanded Universe' Star Wars novel I've ever read, and is part of what is now considered the 'Legends' universe (aka, all of this was considered Star Wars canon until Disney took over Lucasfilm and decided to reboot everything). This makes Children of the Jedi an interesting read. It is apparent while reading that many of the characters referenced have turned up in other novels previously (novels I have not read). It is apparent that characters we know from the movies, such as Luke, Leia and Han, have also had numerous other adventures that likely feature in other novels I have not read. And yet I also know that according to current 'canon' none of these stories actually happened (I know, I know, all of this is fiction and none of this happened, but its still confusing...). So... its like reading some sort of complicated fan-fiction. It's also a very weird novel. Luke gets trapped ...

Published by Huia Publishers: Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2018. This is a new book in the English department, another by an up-and-coming new Maori author, and whoo boy it ramps up quickly! At the end of the first chapter a bus full of highschool students crashes in the New Zealand bush. Most die. A few chapters later one student needs his leg operated on by another student. A few chapters later another student turns murderous. Somewhere in the midst of all this the survivors begin getting nose-bleeds and seeing visions. Eventually a spaceship and a sinister corporation are introduced. It's so much and it all just keeps escalating! The book is a page-turner, helped by the amount of plot and the very short chapters (the shortest chapter is made up of a single line of text), and I can imagine students really enjoying it for its realistic New Zealand teens (well, before they turn murderous), its fast pace, and even its occasional romantic subplots (which do at times get a bit mo...

Published in an omnibus audiobook edition 'First Command Box Set: Spacers, Books 1-6' by Audible, 03-08-2022. Contains: ' First Command '; 'Free Space'; 'Wartorn Cluster'; 'Empire Space'; 'The Fall'; 'Thatcher's Gambit'. Narrated by Mark Boyett. First published 2019. I had an Audible credit sitting there and had no idea what to get. In the end, I decided to go for quantity, purchasing this 'box set' of six audiobooks for the price of one. I had fairly low expectations for the series, and as long as you do that I can tell you that this first book at least meets those expectations. Our protagonist, Tad Thatcher, has just been given command of his first spaceship, the New Jersey, and is sent to the far side of the galaxy through a wormhole to fight pirates for a private security firm. After some time there, the wormhole collapses, and now Thatcher is stranded far from home and his pregnant wife. Thatcher is the sort of pr...

Published by Orbit Books: London, England, 2017. A strange science-fiction book, in that it is a simple storyline, but with a strange amount of complex world-building for a 'stand alone' novel. Apparently this is because Provenance is set in the same universe as author Ann Leckie's previous trilogy, but as a reader fresh to Leckie's world, I found it a little confusing. Not only are there numerous political factions and treaties being signed between groups that the reader never actually encounters in the book, but Leckie also includes a third gender into her world without explaining fully how the whole thing works. This is particularly disorienting when the third gender is referred to as 'e' (as opposed to 'he' or 'she') or 'eir' (as opposed to 'their') with no warning - I honestly thought the book was just poorly edited for quite some time.  As for the storyline itself, we follow Ingray Aughskold, the adopted daughter of Netano A...