My name is Marcus Townsend. For the past six years I have worked the overnight shift as a security guard at an office park, which means I sit at a desk in a lobby from eleven at night until seven in the morning, walk the building every two hours, and watch nothing happen. A man can only look at four monitors of empty hallway for so long. So about four years ago I started bringing a book, and I have not stopped.

The rule I set myself is one novel a week, and I have mostly kept to it. That comes to around fifty books a year, and most of them are science fiction, because that is what I like and because a used SF paperback costs about a dollar. This page is where I write them up. I am not a critic and I did not go to college for this. I just read a lot, slowly, in a quiet building, and I try to say honestly what I thought.

The reviews are in no particular order. The reading log for 1999 is at the bottom, along with a note about the swap shelf at the guard station, which is how I get half of what I read.

Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
Rating: Five cups.
Young Paul Atreides moves with his noble family to the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the spice that the whole galactic empire runs on. His family is betrayed, he ends up among the Fremen, the desert people, and the book follows him becoming something between a leader and a prophet. There are giant sandworms. There is a lot of politics, religion, ecology and plotting, and it takes a while to get going, but once you are in it you are in it. This is the one that made me start this page. I have read it twice now on the shift and I noticed more the second time, which is the sign of a real book. Do not skip the appendices. Won the Hugo and the very first Nebula award for a novel, and it earned them.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951; the stories are from the 1940s)
Rating: Four cups.
A mathematician named Hari Seldon works out a science he calls psychohistory, which predicts the behavior of huge numbers of people the way you can predict a gas but not one molecule. He sees that the Galactic Empire is going to fall and thirty thousand years of barbarism will follow, and he sets up a colony at the edge of the galaxy, the Foundation, to shorten that to one thousand. The book then jumps ahead decades at a time as the Foundation runs into one crisis after another. Almost no action, all talk, and I could not put it down. The characters are thin; the ideas are enormous. I went straight on to Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation, which are on the log below.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
Rating: Five cups.
An envoy named Genly Ai is sent alone to a planet called Winter (Gethen) to invite it into a loose alliance of worlds. The people there have no fixed sex; most of the time they are neither, and once a month they become male or female, and not always the same one. Genly, who is an ordinary man, keeps misunderstanding everybody. The second half is a long trek across a glacier with a disgraced politician named Estraven, and it is the best thing in the book. This is not a book about spaceships. It is about how hard it is to trust somebody who is not like you. I think about it a lot on the 3 a.m. walk-through. Hugo and Nebula, deservedly.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)
Rating: Four cups.
Earth has fought two wars against an insect-like alien race and is getting ready for the third. Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, age six, is taken to Battle School in orbit where gifted kids are trained as commanders by playing war games in zero gravity. He is very good, the adults push him harder and harder, and the ending turns the whole thing over. I read this one in two nights. The battle-room scenes are as good as anything I have read for pure clarity. Some of the stuff with his brother and sister back on Earth I could have done without. Won both awards. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, is a completely different kind of book, slower and sadder, and I liked it too.

Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
Rating: Three cups.
Case is a washed-up computer cowboy who used to jack his nervous system straight into the world's computer networks until an employer he cheated burned out his ability to do it. A mysterious man named Armitage offers to fix him in exchange for a job, and he ends up working with a mirror-eyed street samurai named Molly on a heist that turns out to be about an artificial intelligence trying to become something more. The first sentence is famous and the whole book reads like that: fast, dense, a little cold. I had to read the first fifty pages twice to figure out what was going on. Once I did, I admired it more than I loved it. It won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award, all three, which I don't think had happened before. I can see why. I just did not care about anybody in it.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974)
Rating: Five cups.
William Mandella is drafted into an elite army to fight an alien race called the Taurans. Because of the way the ships travel, every time he comes home from a campaign, decades or centuries have passed on Earth, and every time the Earth he comes back to is stranger. The war goes on for over a thousand years. Haldeman was a soldier in Vietnam and this is plainly a book about coming home from a war to a country that has moved on without you. It is short, funny in a bitter way, and the last twenty pages hit me hard. This is the book I hand to people who say they don't read science fiction.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)
Rating: Four cups.
The hero is actually named Hiro Protagonist. He delivers pizza for the Mafia in a future America that has fallen apart into franchises and gated "burbclaves," and in his spare time he is a swordsman and hacker in the Metaverse, a world inside the computer networks that people walk around in with goggles. A new drug-slash-computer-virus called Snow Crash is scrambling people's brains, and the trail leads back through ancient Sumerian myth. Also there is a fifteen-year-old skateboard courier named Y.T. who steals every scene she is in. This book is a mess and I mean that with affection. It is very funny, it has more ideas per page than anything on this list, and it does not so much end as stop. Stephenson has a new one out this year called Cryptonomicon that is about three inches thick. It is on the shelf.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
Rating: Five cups.
Centuries after a nuclear war, a small order of monks in the desert of the American Southwest keeps alive the scraps of scientific knowledge that survived, copying and recopying documents they mostly do not understand, including a blueprint and a grocery list left by their founder, an engineer named Leibowitz. The book is in three parts, each set hundreds of years after the last, as civilization slowly climbs back up. You can probably guess where it is heading. This is the quietest and saddest book here and it is also, in places, very funny. It won the Hugo in 1961. I read it in a week in March when the building's heat was out and it felt right.

More reviews go up as I get to them. The 1999 log below shows what I've read; if you want my opinion on one that isn't written up yet, e-mail me and I'll move it up the list.

One a week, starting the first week of January. Weeks I missed are marked. Cups are out of five.

• Leave one if you take one. Nobody checks. Everybody does it anyway.
• No hardcovers. The shelf isn't deep enough.
• Write your initials and a cup rating inside the front cover if you want. Some of the best arguments I've had at 5 a.m. started that way.
• Don't leave anything you'd be embarrassed for your mother to find. (Somebody did. It went in the trash.)