Tag: science fiction

#REVIEW: There Is No Antimemetics Division, by QNTM

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I liked this book so much, I’m willing to forgive the author for wanting me to call him QNTM. I don’t know why, but I have a weird visceral reaction to authors using their Internet handles on their books. It’s made even weirder when you remember that “Luther Siler” is a pen name. I don’t know a single thing about QNTM other than that he wrote this book (and, I guess, that he’s a he, judging from his author picture) but if he’s going to keep writing books this good I’ll call him whatever the hell he wants.

This is one of the most original books I’ve ever read. I can imagine China Miéville writing something like it, which is not to say that Miéville has written anything like it yet. I’m not sure who or what else to compare it to. This is going to be a fairly short review, first because I don’t want to indulge in any spoilers, and second because beyond describing the premise, I’m really not sure how the hell to talk about this book. So I’m going to give you the basics, and I’m already telling you you need to read this if you’ve ever enjoyed science fiction that was smarter than you were, and that is going to have to be enough.

The main character of the book is Marie Quinn, who is in charge of the Antimemetics Division of something called the Unknown Organization. Her division is responsible for tracking, categorizing and occasionally keeping captive entities and objects that have the property of erasing themselves from memory. That’s what an antimeme is; it’s something that you view or interact with or occasionally get messily killed by and the very moment you’re not interacting with it you forget it exists. Some can erase specific kinds of memories (the book is generally not funny, but one entity that feeds on the very specific memory of knowing how to ride a bike has a fe pages dedicated to it) and some have the capability of also erasing notes, videos and recordings that reference their existence as well.

So, given that, and given that the potential threat these types of entities pose to civilization should be immediately clear, let me ask you two questions:

  1. How do you fight against these things, if you forget they exist the moment you turn away from them?
  2. How the hell do you write a book about fighting against something like that?

This is a short book; at under 300 pages it can be read in a day easily, and somehow, despite the complexity of the premise, it’s impressively clearly written. You would think this would be a mess to read, and in a lesser author’s hands, it would be; I certainly couldn’t have written this book. I almost read it twice in a row, and there’s a very good chance I’m going to read it again before the month is up. It’s an incredible achievement, both as a story and as a piece of craft. I know I’ve been super positive in my reviews lately (and I have read some amazing books in 2026) but once again I need to tell you that you absolutely have to read this one. Go grab it, right now, before you forget.

On SKYLIGHTS, the Challenger, and my books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.

Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.

I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.

And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.

I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.

I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.

#REVIEW: The Radiant Dark, by Alexandra Oliva

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have reached a point where I am getting a truly absurd number of books every month through book box services of one stripe or another, and every time I think I’m going to get my shit together and cull one or two of them, I discover a book like The Radiant Dark, which was not on my radar in any way before it showed up and caught my interest via, in this case, my Aardvark box. Alexandra Oliva has written a couple of other books before this, but she’s new to me, and anything that can consistently feed me new authors that I like is going to continue to get my attention and my money.

The Radiant Dark is part alternate history, part science fiction, and part family saga; it starts in 1980, and at first I thought I had managed to pick up what feels like the third or fourth book in the last month or so featuring a struggling young mother with a baby and a useless husband. And, well, it is that, for a little while, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Very early in, President Carter announces that a signal emanating from a specific region of outer space has been conclusively proven to have intelligent alien origins, from an unknown exoplanet approximately eleven light-years away. And because of the distances involved, any message that gets sent back is going to take eleven years for the aliens to receive, and 22 years minimum for Earth to receive any sort of response. The book isn’t solely concerned with the communications, of course, but there have to be time skips to keep it from being a thousand pages long. Oliva also has a defter hand with her characters than you might think at the beginning of the book, and the relationship between Carol, her son Michael, and her daughter Rosanna (called Ro for most of the book) is the emotional center of the book. Carol’s husband quickly becomes her ex-husband, but he’s a complex character in his own right, and while it seems clear who the hero and who the goat is early on, it gets muddled up nicely in the fashion of most dysfunctional families pretty quickly. Ro in particular has a very strained relationship with her mother, and she will eventually become a mother on her own. I genuinely feel like even if they hadn’t had the first contact/science fiction side of this book, it would be well worth reading just because of the way it explores the family dynamics.

Ro turns out to be a world-class astronomer, and is one of the first people to decipher the second message the aliens send us, 22 years after the original beacon. She is snatched out of her Ph.D program by a world-renowned scientist who wants to use the knowledge the aliens have sent us to start looking for other potentially habitable planets and, possibly, other intelligent life– although the aliens make it clear that all they have been able to find so far is us. She presents it as a generational effort, something that she doesn’t plan to survive to see the fruits of. By the time the book ends in the 2030s, humanity has colonized the Moon and sent people to Mars, so obviously there’s some divergence from our own history, as you well might expect.

I was not expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did, and this is the rare book that I will recommend because I find the characters so compelling. I like good character work, of course, but it’s rarely at the forefront of my reasons for liking a book, especially one so suited to my interests as a first-contact science fiction novel. But I think it’s best to read this as a family saga with a side dish of sci-fi rather than the other way around; if you go into this solely as a sci-fi person, I think you’ll come out disappointed. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the aliens do show up eventually, but don’t read the book waiting for that reveal. That’s not the book Oliva wanted to write. Go in with your expectations calibrated appropriately, though, and you’ll end up with a read that I think stands a pretty good chance of showing up on my end of the year list. Check it out.

#REVIEW: Pragmata (PS5)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Ooooofffffff.

I started Pragmata a little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.

This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.

I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:

It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.

The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.

And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.

My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.

Monthly Reads: February 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

Book of the Month is Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. The John Lewis and Malcolm X books were really solid as well.

Unread Shelf: February 28, 2026

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Bought too many books this month and also didn’t read enough. The pile tomorrow is going to be the smallest in quite a while.

#REVIEW: Operation Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

In a word: skippable.

I’m genuinely tempted to make that the entire review, to be honest. This is the ninth Matt Dinniman book I’ve read, and the tenth is going to be out in March, and of the nine I’ve loved seven of them, thought the eighth (Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon) was okay, and … then there was this. I forced myself to buckle down and finish it over the course of last night and today, and to be honest I could have put it away after a hundred pages and been fine with it. It really feels like a manuscript that he had lying around and the publishing house was desperate to put something out that was trad-pubbed from the beginning, so he gave them this.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time shitting on this book, especially since it isn’t going to affect my enthusiasm for Dungeon Crawler Carl, but skippable is probably the perfect single-word review, and if I were to write a two-word review it would be half-baked. Nothing about it is particularly well thought-out, the main character is entirely indistinguishable from Carl, including his uncanny ability to come up with complicated plans on the fly, and I defy you to explain to me why the book (or the in-universe show the book is named after) is called Operation Bounce House. Everyone talks like they’re a teenager in 2020 even though the book is set hundreds of years in the future and on a planet Earth has colonized. I cannot emphasize enough how there has been no cultural change of any kind during all this time. I spent the whole book waiting for a twist where it turned out they had been on Earth the whole time and not actually in the future.

The plot: Oliver, who is Carl, is a farmer on a colony planet. The planet gets attacked by mechs being remotely piloted by, mostly, bored and wealthy teenagers on Earth who have spent lots of money to be part of a game show and may or may not realize they’re killing actual people. There’s lots of talk about how the showrunners are portraying everyone on the planet as terrorists. They fight back.

Why does this game show exist? Why are they killing people? No reason, really. Dungeon Crawler Carl earns a certain amount of “don’t think about it too hard.” This book very much does not. Nothing feels like it has been thought through.

It is not a LitRPG, by the way, even though the attackers are technically playing a game. There are no statistics or leveling up or unlocking abilities or anything of that sort; it’s more of a military sci-fi than anything else.

I have read worse books, to be sure— hell, I have read worse books in 2026— but I have no real reason to recommend that anyone else pick this up. Read Dungeon Crawler Carl, definitely. Ignore this one.

Monthly Reads: January 2026

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Aka the “This is getting ridiculous” edition, AKA Snow Days Edition.

The most ridiculous thing? I forgot to grab K.X. Song’s The Dragon Wakes with Thunder and decided not to go back for it. So that’s not all of them.

Book of the Month is Children of Ash and Elm, with a special recognition for Hekate the Witch.