Tag Archives: Science_fiction

Crater Lake (Book of the Week: Lockdown edition)

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Crater Lake by Jennifer Killick

Book of the Week: 28 June 2020

Cover design by anneglenndesign

Lance’s year group are looking forward to their trip to the new and innovative activity centre, Crater Lake. If it wasn’t for bullying Head Boy, Trent, and Assistant Head, Miss Hoche, who Lance thinks has it in for him, everything would be perfect. He has the company of his best friend, Chets, along with the angelic-looking Katja, and week of activities to look forward to.

Things start to go pear-shaped when the coach they are travelling on lurches to avoid an injured man with red, swollen eyes and clothes ‘that look like they’ve been lawn-mowered’. The driver waits for medical attention to arrive whilst everyone walks the rest of the way to the activity centre. When they get there they see a black lake set in an enormous crater, a building that looks like a prison and find everywhere strangely under-staffed. Lance thinks it looks like ‘the perfect location for a Goosebumps book’. Once they have been served only soup for dinner and watched a film about the life cycle of the wasp, Crater Lake doesn’t feel so inviting.

If you like your horror with plenty of humour, and enjoyed Undead by Kirsty McKay, then try Crater Lake.

Armada

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Armada by Ernest Cline

Book of the Week: 22 November 2015

Armada

“I was staring out of the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer.”

Until this moment, Zachary Ulysses Lightman has led an uneventful existence living with his mother, going to school, working part-time in a gaming outlet and playing hour-after-hour of online games. The sighting of a UFO heralds the news that Earth is being invaded by Europans set on destroying us all. Luckily, the government and military have set up the Earth Defence Alliance and have been training us all in the art of warfare by getting us to play video games and earmarking the most talented so they can recruit them in time of need. At last Zach and his friends, Diehl and Cruz, feel that their hours of online gaming will turn out to be training in an essential and important skill. If this sounds rather like the plot of ‘Ender’s Game’ by Orson Scott Card or the film ‘The Last Starfighter’ you would be right. Ernest Cline is well-aware of the similarities and mentions them more than once. The whole book is packed with references to books, films, games and pop-culture. The explanation for this is that Zach took on many of his father’s interests when he died, but it can slow down the reading if you need to keep stopping to find out what everything means. Alternatively, you could ignore most of them and concentrate on the action.

The book is not as strong as his previous work, the fantastically entertaining ‘Ready Player One’ – a previous Book of the Week which you can read about here but the film rights have already been bought and there are good action sequences.

Like ‘Ready Player One’, ‘Armada’ is an adult book and suitable for older readers.

Book of the Week extra

Song for Ella Grey

Next, a very different book: ‘A Song for Ella Grey’ by David Almond which won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize a few days ago. It is a retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice set in modern-day Tyneside and told in beautiful and poetic language. Read more about it here

Echo Boy

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Echo Boy by Matt Haig

Book of the Week: 28 June 2015

Echo Boy

Many books tell a story using two different characters as narrators but how many of them describe the action from the point of view of a robot? The Echo boy of the title is called Daniel, an Enhanced Computerised Humanoid Organism. He is employed by Alex Castle, the hugely rich and powerful owner of Castle Industries, a kind of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates character, who takes in his niece Audrey after the death of her parents. Audrey has a deep fear of Echos, with good reason because her parents were murdered by a rogue humanoid called Alissa who worked for her family. Her father had been a well-known campaigner against society’s over-reliance on technology and artificial intelligence. He encouraged Audrey to read old books and wanted her to be taught by humans rather than androids. This was no easy task because the future where the book is set is one devastated by climate change and shortages. Technology seems to be the only tool that will provide a comfortable life. Following her parents’ deaths Audrey goes to live with her uncle, his brattish son Iago and a house-full of Echoes, but she never feels at ease. Is Uncle Alex as well-meaning as he appears and why does she feel there is something strange and compelling about one of the Echoes?

Echo Boy is a thoughtful look at what it means to be human as well as being a gripping science fiction thriller.

The War of the Worlds

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The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Book of the Week: 7 June 2015

The War of the Worlds

” No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s … Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

You may have heard about the famous 1938 radio broadcast of this story by Orson Welles, when some listeners believed that what they were hearing was a news item announcing the arrival of Martians. You may have seen the 2005 Stephen Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise, or have listened to Jeff Wayne’s musical version from 1978. But have you read the original book? It first appeared as a magazine serial in 1897 and has never been out of print since. It tells the story of an invasion of Earth by Martians from the point of view of an un-named journalist and is a classic science fiction story of suspense and horror.