Reviews, Top N lists, and other sundry literary stuff.
After reading The Algebraist, I was going to swear off Iain M. Banks for the rest of ’08. But, Ginnie recommended it so highly that I felt it was worth bumping up the list. On the GoodReads.com scale, Look to Windward gets: ★★★ 1 For those nit-picking over the rating: it was close to 4-stars […]
Perhaps it is unfair to George Saunders to review Civil War Land in Bad Decline when Pastoralia was the book that introduced me to him. But that is the order in which they were read and so that is the order in which I evaluate them. That being said, I suspect I may have been […]
In Gun, with Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem gives us science fiction’s worthy successor to Raymond Chandler. Though this is the easy take-home message from nearly every quoted newspaper columnist, book jacket blurb, and miscellaneous reviewer — they also all happen to be right. Even a cursory familiarity with Chandler’s pulp noir will ring through with […]
When You Are Engulfed in Flames is a solid ★★★★ 1 and damn near close to ★★★★★ that we’ll settle for ★★★★½. But then again, I’m a serious Sedaris fiend. Granted, if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you were curious what I thought of the collection. By now, you (dear reader) have already made […]
Imagine for a moment that you go into the up-scale liquor store around the block that is celebrated city-wide for its fabulous wine selection. You’re a bit of a novice when it comes to wine and are a little embarrassed to be here because your wallet is that ballistic nylon stuff and not something truly […]
Mentioned here previously, 365 Tomorrows has become a favorite daily stop on my internet rounds for a little fiction. Since it’s flash fiction that they have there, it’s good for a quick dose of something new. Roughly 600 words and you’ve gotten yourself a refreshing fix of scifi. Admittedly, it can be hit or miss. […]
A fun, rather endearing little novel by Austin Grossman (this is his first), Soon I Will be Invincible offers us a “generic” superhero milieu that does as much to honor its comic book forebears as it does to satirize them. Grossman gives us a real loser of an evil genius (Doctor Impossible, who suffers from “malign hypercognition disorder”) that […]
As with many “Year’s Best” type anthologies (regardless of genre), it is difficult to evaluate Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection as if it were a whole. Unlike a themed collection (e.g., Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse), you cannot easily ask how each story is helping to advance or otherwise round-out […]
How can you expect a happy end in a book where Hitler still reigns? Though a bit slower to start than I expected, Farthing was (overall) an outstanding allegory on fascism disguised as an alternate history novel disguised as a murder mystery. By the time you’re about one-quarter to one-third of the way through it, […]
Quote: …I think I’d probably tell you that it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us. There is an odd surface tension here; some readers may approach Idoru from the wrong bias, through […]