The Legend of Ellie Quin by Alex Scarrow

Its impetus is to test the intelligence of the foremost native species on a planet and, if the species is found wanting, wipe the planet clean for its own colonization. The spore, as it liquifies people and gathers itself into more complex forms, is pretty squicky. Thrills should be part of childhood and Spore delivers. As reputation dictates, kids don’t hide behind the couch while watching Doctor Who for no reason. One of my favorite aspects of Doctor Who is that, while it purports to be science fiction and is commonly fantasy, it’s also quite often horror. While Spore is part of the 50th Anniversary collection of short works written presumably for young people, its characters are adults and it pulls no punches. Sure, both are science fiction of a sort, but one is Doctor Who and the other invokes Lovecraft. I wouldn’t have suspected that a short novella for young people and longer, darker novella meant for an adult audience had much in common. Lovecraft and Carl Sagan, Whom the Gods Would Destroy looks to the night skies as the source of our greatest wonder, and finds them swarming with our worst fears.

Like a collision of galaxies between H.P. The more the world expands to admit the possibilities of a universe stranger than even Damien has imagined, the greater is his urgency to resist being reclaimed by a past that never seemed to want him…until now. Until his brother turns up after 13 years, to make amends and seek his expertise on a discovery that may not be of this Earth. Now an astronomy graduate student in Seattle, Damien is happy with his place as a speck in a cosmos vast beyond comprehension. Yet his earliest, fragmentary memory of them was so nightmarish, their lives were something he ran from as soon as he could.

His mother and brother shared an unfathomable bond that left him excluded from their lives. “Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from godhood.”įor Damien, growing up was all about being an outsider in his own home. When the Eighth Doctor arrives, he realises this latest threat to humanity is horrifyingly familiar – it is a virus which almost annihilated his entire race, the Time Lords…Įleven Doctors, eleven months, eleven stories: a year-long celebration of Doctor Who! The most exciting names in children’s fiction each create their own unique adventure about the time-travelling Time Lord.(via Goodreads) Whom the Gods Would Destroy by Brian Hodge In a small town in the Nevada desert, an alien pathogen has reduced the entire population to a seething mass of black slime. ( Whom the Gods Would Destroy was provided to me by DarkFuse via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)ĭual review for these two novellas.

The Legend of Ellie Quin by Alex Scarrow