One of the hallmarks of post apocalypse stories is that things go from bad to worse on a very regular basis. But most of them start off in the fairly familiar, fairly common world and something goes terribly wrong-zombies, atomic war, pandemic plague, EMP, or just some mysterious something that puts an end to life as we know it. But rarely have I seen a mysterious something else quite as odd as the one used in Total Oblivion-More or Less. The Earth finds itself over run by hordes of barbarian Scythians and people from something like the Roman Empire. But…
Category: book review
The Woman Who Fell From The Sky
“Boy, those French: They have a different word for everything!” ~Steve Martin The Woman Who Fell From The Sky is the story of an amoral American home wrecker who moves to Yemen for a year to be the Editor of an English language newspaper. Ok, the homewrecking bit comes late in the story, but it cast it’s shadow over the entire book for me. Jennifer Steil encounters reporters who don’t read or write very good English, a culture where women are treated as third or fourth class citizens, and the fondness of everyone in Yemen for Qat-the mood altering drug…
The Man In The High Castle
Philip K Dick was a prolific writer of short stories and novels, and he continues to supply a steady source of material for people who make movies. The Adjustment Bureau was based on a Philip K Dick short story. I first read The Man In The High Castle in about 1982 while I was working my way through of a number of the best SciFi books ever written. I was heavily into Asimov, Heinlein, Lem, and a number of other great writers of science fiction who had found their way onto Best Sci Fi Lists of one kind or another. …
NNNNN by Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner will always be Alan Brady to me, the man who made Robert Petrie’s life so difficult on the Dick Van Dyke Show. The fact that Carl Reiner’s glory days were about fifty years before he wrote NNNNN gives hope to all of us poor schmucks who still want to be novelists one of these days. NNNNN is possibly the worst title ever given to a book, though Carl seems to think it ranks up their with M. To me it was too much like a Marx Brothers routine, you left out an N-and the most important one, too!…
Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod
Figure out what your gift is, and give it to people on a regular basis. ~Hugh MacLeod. Blogging has given us a world full of people who have a lot of mostly nothing to say and a strong desire to say it. Successful bloggers are the ones that stick with it, get an audience, and keep giving that audience whatever it is that they liked in the first place. This is a good deal harder than it sounds-as the countless failed blogs littering the internet can attest to. Even if you happen to have the chutzpah to keep blogging every…
The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten
I’ve been a fan of Prairie Home Companion for about twenty years. The show is a nice mixture of the silly, the maudlin, and downright brilliant. But I have never been able to sit down and read one of Garrison Keillor’s novels about Lake Wobegon-where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are all above average. So I was a bit surprised when I saw a book, which on first glace-and many subsequent glaces- appeared to be a zombie story set in Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor. It was not overly surprised by this book,…
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle Michal Dibdin has done an excellent job of invoking the feel and tone of a Holmesian story. The snide and condensing way that Holmes treats everyone he meets. The kindness and slight dimwittedness of Watson. The grudging respect of Detective Lestrade. And the many small ways in which Sherlock Holmes shows himself to be of a superior mind. There is the common enough ploy of having a lost manuscript surface in which one more tale of the Great Detective comes to light. …
Shop Class as Soulcraft
The story of a philosopher who seems a bit surprised that there are so few job openings at the Big Philosophy Companies and ends up becoming an electrician instead. After discovering that being an electrician is not really his calling, he moves on to being a motor cycle mechanic. But he never gives up his college training of being a philosopher. Matthew B Crawford fills all of his anecdotes with small asides of the great thinkers and uses as dry and technical a writing style as any college textbook. Shop class is mentioned only in passing and I don’t…
The Inner Circle
T. C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle is the story of Professor Kinsey and his obsession with all things sexual. In the book we find that Prok, as Kinsey is known to his associates, is a pansexual pervert who loves all manner of deviant behavior. Part and parcel of his personal philosophy, of course, is that there is no such thing as perversion or deviant behavior-all human animals want all manner of sexual contact. The story is told from the perspective of John Milk, one of Prok’s many students/sex partners/researchers. Prok has sex with anything that moves, and so to, does…
52 Loaves by William Alexander
The story of one man’s obsession to bake the perfect loaf of bread. Our hero ate a bit of bread at a fancy New York restaurant and was transported by it. He asked what it was called, and the waiter told him it was Peasant Bread. He then decided to bake his own Peasant Bread. The logical thing, call up the restaurant and ask if you can have their recipe, or Google peasant bread and see what kinds of recipes pop up, take a back seat to irrational exuberance. Over the course of 52 weeks, William Alexander decided to bake…