If you liked the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I suspect you’ll like Year Zero, too. Robert Reid’s satirical look at what happens when aliens realize they have violated American copyright laws will have you smiling and chuckling from the moment two oddly dressed people (a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun) appear in Nick Carter’s […]
Review | The Wind Whales of Ishmael by Philip Jose Farmer
2013-04-26 · by ·
Even if you’ve never read it, almost every reader know the story of Moby-Dick. Opening with “Call me Ishmael[,]” Hermann Melville‘s novel is the tale of the white whale and obsessed Captain Ahab’s quest to kill it, a hunt that does not end well for anyone. Only Ishmael, the narrator, survives to put the story […]
Review | The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin
2013-04-24 · by ·
Brilliant industrialist Justin Cord awakes from a 300-year cryonic suspension into a world that has accepted an extreme form of market capitalism. It is a world in which humans themselves are incorporated, their stock traded in markets, and where most people no longer own a majority share of themselves. In this world of the free […]
Review | The Price of Politics by Bob Woodward
2013-04-18 · by ·
AND NOW: something completely different than our typical posts of late on time travel, different worlds, and wizards. Politics. (And just like that we loose half our readers…or more). Just a short while ago, the US of A was in the throws of yet another manufactured crisis–the sequester! A long word with a very simple […]
Review | Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen
2013-04-17 · by ·
I can’t help but feel fortunate each time I open my front door to find the tell-tale rectangular shaped package that promises to contain a book. It’s a promise of a new story, a new adventure, and I look forward to opening the book and diving in. Last month, I found one such package containing […]
Review | Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell
2013-04-15 · by ·
Good science fiction does two things well: first, it blows your mind. And second, it’s less about the science than it is about the story, about the characters, and the conflict. In other words, it’s good literature that just happens to have a scientific element…even if loosely. Sean Ferrell’s Man in the Empty Suit accomplishes […]
Review | Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
2013-04-13 · by ·
Few novels I have read recently have made me stop and think, reexamine my world, quite the same way that Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother does. Although published five years back when the politics of the Bush Administration and the post-9/11 expansion of government surveillance were still fresh in our minds, I found the novel fresh and […]
Review | The Emoticon Generation by Guy Hasson
2013-04-08 · by ·
Unless you want to be entertained, intrigued, and possibly disturbed, do not read this book. On the other hand, if you enjoy thought provoking short fiction, then download a copy of Guy Hasson’s The Emoticon Generation today. A collection of short stories that seem to focus on human nature when technology allows us to play with the rules […]
Review | The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2013-04-05 · by ·
In the author’s note to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee notes that “Cancer is not one disease, but many diseases.” It anticipates Mukherjee’s history, a look at cancer starting in the ages and proceeding forward to the modern day. It’s a 4,000 year history, and Mukherjee tells it well. The […]
Review | Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
2013-04-04 · by ·
David Graeber is an anthropologist and anarchist, an early member of the Occupy Wall Stree movement. He’s so “out there” that even Yale decided not to renew his contract as an assistant professor in 2005. If he’s too liberal for Yale, then…well, you know. Probably too liberal for me, too, right? Or maybe not. If just […]
