“What took you so long to pick it up?” I did not believe the hype. Before The Windup Girl, my exposure to Bacigalupi’s work was through two short stories: “The People of Sand and Slag”–which seemed to pop-up everywhere 1 for a while; and then “Yellow Card Man”–which was in the same milieu as this […]
In many ways, I’ve started to come to believe that you can’t go wrong with a John Joseph Adams’ collection. Wastelands was incredible, The Living Dead was great, and Federations…? Also very very good. The “dust jacket description” of this anthology pretty much sums it up… It collects a few different modern takes on the […]
SCENE: Samuel R. Delany, sitting at his writing desk, surrounded by books (some on shelves, but most piled on the floor), circa 1973; a man walks into the room. – Delany and the man stare at each other. They both stroke their beards. Delany: “Who are you?” The Man: “Don’t you know? They sent me.” […]
Arranged chronologically from 1955 through 2001, Dozois’ anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, is a tightly-themed collection of science fiction shorts. It’s a good overview of the terraforming subject’s treatment within the genre but the anthology seems to lack any stand-out stories – there are no great masterpieces in here. Which is not to say […]
Eclipse 1 is a good-not-great anthology of speculative (née “science”) fiction and fantasy (rather: “new weird”) short stories edited by Jonathan Strahan. My “good-not-great” may be stemming from my disappointment that there was more “new weird”/fantasy than there was science fiction 1 but there were still quite a few “big wins” in the pile that […]
The “classic” sci-fi time waster is not just restricted to colonizing distant suns and/or flying around blowing up shit. No. Sometimes it involves flying to distant suns that are already colonized, geting out of your spaceship and then blowing up shit. And after all, isn’t that — the epic space opera, anchored on some Byzantine galaxy-spanning empire […]
In the previous two installments of this series, we discussed two “classic” science fiction games from the PC world: Sierra On-Line’s Outpost and Microprose’s Lightspeed. A theme common to both of those games is a sense of isolation — you’re cut off from the rest of humankind and you’ll have to live by your wits […]
In the first post of this series, I gave a quick introduction to the point of those reminiscent rambling. I’m waxing nostalgic about some older PC science fiction games that I used to play and giving a little thought to what they might be like if they were made more recently. In the last installment, […]
A little while ago, during the drive home from Maine, I was struck by some odd reminiscence for a few classic (nee “old”) science fiction games I used to play on the computer. By classic, I don’t necessarily mean that they were best sellers 1 or even particularly good games 2. No, by “classic”, I […]
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 […]