Lucas Stoffel

Klara and the Sun Book Review: Kazuo Ishiguro has spent his career writing about people who don't fully understand their own lives — the butler in The Remains of the Day, the clones in Never Let Me Go — and with Klara and the Sun, he does it again with an artificial intelligence so gentle and so earnest that she becomes the most human character in the book.

Project Hail Mary Book Review: If you loved The Martian, buckle up, because Andy Weir didn't just write a follow-up — he evolved. Project Hail Mary drops you into the disoriented mind of Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher who wakes up on a spaceship with atrophied muscles, two very dead crewmates, and absolutely no memory of why he's hurtling through space. Turns out, the sun is dimming. An alien microorganism is feeding on its energy, and Earth has maybe a generat

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Book Review: The Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent, a thoroughly ordinary Englishman who was having a thoroughly terrible Thursday, escapes because his best friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — a sort of electronic encyclopedia for budget travelers. From that point on, absolutely nothing makes sense, and absolutely everything is hilarious.

Remarkably Bright Creatures Book Review: Here's the pitch, and I need you to stay with me: a lonely seventy-something widow named Tova works the night shift mopping floors at an aquarium. During those shifts, she develops a relationship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus in one of the tanks. Marcellus is old, he's dying, and he's smarter than almost every human who walks past his enclosure. He also knows the answer to a mystery that has haunted Tova for thirty years...

The Amber Spyglass is the book where Philip Pullman finished building his cathedral and then knocked it down. This is a children's novel about the death of God, the liberation of the dead, the nature of consciousness, and two children who fall in love and must be separated forever. It should collapse under the weight of its own ambition. It doesn't. It soars.

The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, and everything changes. Where The Golden Compass was Lyra's book — fierce, adventurous, set in a single extraordinary world — The Subtle Knife is about the spaces between worlds, and the boy who can cut through them. Book Review.

Philip Pullman wrote a children's book where the villains are the Church, the weapon is truth, and the hero is an eleven-year-old girl who lies better than anyone in literature. The Golden Compass is the most subversive, most ambitious, and most beautifully written fantasy novel for young readers ever published, and I will fight about this.

John Scalzi's Lock In is a murder mystery set in a world where millions are locked in their bodies. Smart, fast, and deeply thoughtful about disability. Four stars. Book Review.

Leviathan Wakes launches The Expanse with space opera, noir detective fiction, and alien body horror. The best space opera of the century. Five stars. Book Review.

"The Night Circus" Book Review: I have read a lot of books. Hundreds of books. And if you asked me to pick one — one book, one world I could live inside forever — it would be this one without hesitation. The Night Circus is my favorite book, and I am not being hyperbolic. I mean it in the way that some people mean it when they talk about a song that changed their life or a place they visited that rearranged something in their brain. This book rearranged me.

Ready Player One is literary junk food, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Ernest Cline wrote a book that is basically a love letter to every video game, movie, TV show, and song from the 1980s, wrapped it inside a dystopian treasure hunt, and somehow made it work as a genuine page-turner. It should not be this fun. It is this fun.

"Ready Player Two" Book Review: Let's be honest about what Ready Player Two is and what it isn't. It isn't the book that's going to convert anyone who didn't like Ready Player One. If you found the first book's wall-to-wall nostalgia grating, this one doubles down. But if you're someone who grinned your way through the first treasure hunt, who loves the OASIS, who geeks out over pop culture Easter eggs — yeah, you're going to have a good time here.

The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage) is a prequel. Lyra is a baby, placed in the care of the nuns at Godstow Priory. Malcolm Polstead is eleven, the son of innkeepers, curious and brave and utterly ordinary in the way that Pullman's best characters are ordinary — which is to say, not at all. Malcolm's daemon Asta hasn't settled yet. He works at the inn, spies on the scholars who drink there, and becomes increasingly aware that the Magisterium's Consistorial Court of Discipline

If The Martian was Andy Weir proving he could make science entertaining, Artemis is Weir proving he could build a whole city and then blow parts of it up. It's not as tight as The Martian. The protagonist isn't as universally lovable as Mark Watney. But it's a blast, and the lunar city of Artemis is one of the most well-engineered pieces of science fiction worldbuilding in recent years. Book Review

Magical children, a grumpy bureaucrat finding love, and a six-year-old Antichrist named Lucy who collects buttons and just wants people to like him. That's The House in the Cerulean Sea, and I'm not even slightly embarrassed by how much I loved it. TJ Klune — who won the Alex Award for this novel — writes the kind of fantasy that feels less like escapism and more like therapy.

If you've seen anyone screaming about Jacks the Prince of Hearts on BookTok or bookish Twitter, this is where the damage starts. Once Upon a Broken Heart is the first book in Stephanie Garber's series that leads to The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, and it's the doorway into one of the most addictive romantasy ships in recent memory. Evangeline Fox is desperate. The love of her life is about to marry someone else, and in her desperation she does the one t

Book two of the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, and the tension between Evangeline Fox and Jacks the Prince of Hearts just keeps building until you want to physically shake the book and scream at both of them. Evangeline is trying to break a curse — one of several that keep stacking up in this series like the worst kind of fairy-tale compound interest — while Jacks is doing that infuriating thing where an immortal Fate who has murdered people with a kiss tries very hard to p

Let me tell you something about Stephanie Garber: she understands that the best fairy tales are the ones where love might actually kill you. Not metaphorically. Not in a "love hurts" pop song kind of way. In a "the person you're falling for might literally be cursed to destroy you" kind of way. A Curse for True Love is the finale of the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, and it delivers on that promise with theatrical flair. If you haven't read the first two books, stop here

If The Dark Forest made you feel small, Death's End makes you feel like a rounding error in the math of the cosmos. This is the book where Cixin Liu stops holding back. Time jumps spanning millions of years. Dimensional warfare that makes conventional military sci-fi look like a pillow fight. The actual, literal end of the universe. Not metaphorical. Not symbolic. The universe ends, and Liu writes it.

The Three-Body Problem was the setup. Strange, cerebral, occasionally frustrating in its scientific density. It introduced the problem. The Dark Forest is where Cixin Liu tells you the answer, and the answer is worse than anything you imagined. I am not going to spoil the dark forest theory. I refuse. The moment it clicks is one of the great reading experiences in science fiction, and you deserve to arrive at it the way Liu intended — slowly, then all at once.