I picked up some new headphones recently, a pair of Skullcandy INK’D earbuds after reading some great reviews and getting some great feedback from some folks I know. My review: ★★★☆☆ …moderately satisfied. The seem like a “good enough” value (speaking to the quality-to-price ratio, here). PROS: The most comfortable in-ear headphones I’ve ever tried (and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A tightly themed, well executed collection: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse captures our apocalypse fears and fantasies equally well and sometimes even simultaneously. Adams wisely chooses Stephen King’s “The End of the Whole Mess” as an opener and moves into all manner of exciting territory from there. Wastelands is the expected mix of strong (and […]