I am beginning to feel that the algorithms are indeed writing fiction and making art. This novel, A House Between Earth and the Moon, by Rebecca Scherm, was enjoyable to read for awhile, until it starting feeling like a paint by numbers… like as if an algorithm itself had written it. It had all the plot elements and good writing of fiction, but it struck me as missing something. I still cannot pinpoint why I ended up being disappointed in it. Maybe it ended up being “too small”? Normally that is a virtue, but in sci-fi the reader is primed for the novel to go big. Why read sci-fi if it is just a domestic drama about adolescence, conformity, compromise, corporate control, etc? I can just watch Terrence Malik for that “feeling” if I need a fix… No slight to put Scherm in the same company as Richard Powers’ The Overstory, to which I had the same reaction. (Plot: Corporate-controlled space station where researchers are trying to develop fast-growing beneficial algae while climate-changed Earth is falling into disorder and disaster.)