As a skinny geek in the eighties I earned a derision as potent as leper; faggot. Those were different times; geeks are cool now. They have TV shows, conventions, and those old crutches of comics and science fiction are billion-dollar businesses. Being a coder is common now. In fact, if you can't code, you risk ostracization, left behind, forgotten. Those who will find hope from despair in the pages of Lord Foul's Bane are of a different generation today, but no less fearful than I was thirty years ago.

Reviews of Children of Time put it in the hard SF genre. I am not a fan of hard SF. I find it boring. The endless speculation of characters turns into pages of exposition to support the fanciful ideas of the author. Clouded story arcs vanish beneath the weight.

I gave Children of Time four stars on Goodreads and can recommend it to both hard SF fans and fans of fiction looking for well-developed eight-legged characters. The human characters, the science of space travel, and eternal life through a hibernation pod—not so much. Read this one for the spiders.

Here is another book I would have skimmed over or missed because the story is told with first-person narration. Lucky for me, Audible was giving it away as part of their Twentieth Anniversary Celebration.

By lucky, I mean lucky-ish. By the end of the fourth or fifth chapter I knew how the story would end. It might have gone differently, I might have been kept in suspense, but once again a good author hoisted her story on its petard with the first-person narrative style.

I know, I bitch about this all the time. I promise, when I write a review about The Handmaid's Tale, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I will praise their expert use of the first-person, until then we have tropes, cliché’s, and The Good Girl.