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 […]
Via Ecstatic Days, a formula for creating your literary name: (1) Use the first name of your favorite writer as your first name. (2) Use the name of your first pet as your middle name or for your middle initial (if your pet had a separate last name…you’re a freak). (3) Use the first or […]
First and foremost: an uncritical read of this book will leave you feeling cynical and a bit cheated. It ranks up there with E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene 1. It would be very easy to find yourself getting defensive about the material presented in here; especially if you believe humans to be some special […]
Back in June, I posted about my foray into GoodReads. At the time, I simply posted some “short versions of immediate impressions”. I was convinced that my time with GoodReads would be short, that I would quickly grow frustrated with it and move on. In part, I formed this opinion because I dove into it […]
If asked to write the foreword to some 20th anniversary commemorative edition, I would say that Max Barry‘s Jennifer Government is like a bottle of Diet Neal Stephenson served with a twist of Christopher Moore (or perhaps a dash of Tom Robbins?) There is something uncannily similar between Snow Crash and Jennifer Government: in the comic […]
I have been a fan of Iain Banks‘ fiction for a few years now. Ever since reading The Wasp Factory, I have been among those that counted him among the ranks of interesting, inventive, and perhaps even important living novelists. Prior to The Algebraist , I had not read any of Banks’ science fiction. It […]
I would suggest, dear reader, that when considering Consider the Lobster , that you consider it in the same light as David Foster Wallace’s collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 1. Use that book as your frame of reference for style and content and you can place this collection firmly into the […]
Where to begin? I would be willing to say that Max Brooks has given us a “new classic” of zombie literature in World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. The novel is well-structured, is well-paced, and seems so … plausible. And when I say “plausible”, I mean the Brooks has tried to […]