Like writing a sequel to Casa Blanca or Moby Dick, Stephen King does the unthinkable and writes a sequel to The Shining. The Shining, of course, is one of King’s mixed blessings. Like all writers he was pretty excited that his book was going to be made into a movie, and pretty much horror stricken with what Stanley Kubrick did to his story. It doesn’t help that many people consider Kubrick’s Shining a masterpiece, an opinion not shared by King. In his Author’s Notes he tells us that this is a sequel to his book, not a sequel to Stanley…
Category: book review
Terminal World
In the future something has gone terribly wrong. The earth is divided into Zones and each Zone restricts the use of different technologies. The result is towns with that can only use horse power or steam power and any higher tech looses it’s ability to function once it has been to a lower level Zone. We start out in a place called Spearpoint, which seems to have more than it’s share of Zones to go around. At the bottom of Spearpoint is Horsetown and at the top are the Celestial Levels where magic like super technology still works. The people…
The Caves of Steel
In the far future, where everyone eats yeast, robots are taking jobs from humans, and the earth is massively over crowded by a population of 8 billion, someone important is murdered and our hero is called upon to investigate. A police detective Asimov clearly wanted to be played by Humphrey Bogart is forced to take on a robot as his partner while they investigate the murder of a robotics engineer. One thing leads to another as they follow clues, are fooled by red herrings, and finally reveal the identity of the murderer-all in standard murder mystery fashion. The murder mystery…
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
“They look like rabbits, but if you call them smeerps, that makes it science fiction.” The Issue at Hand, James Blish. On the one hand, Anathem is an amazing book filled with deep thoughts and a tightly crafted universe. On the other hand, it reads like Neal Stephenson sat down with a Mathematics History book and made up new names for all the great theories-and how hard would that be? Anathem is a great book to listen to, leaving the problem of dozens of unfamiliar words to the Audiobook Reader. Neal does a good job of slowly introducing all of these words…
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
We open up with six year old Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggins having a tough day at school. He’s getting his monitor removed, he’s teased for being a Third, and he nearly beats another kid to death. Once home he is threatened with death from his older brother and seems to have a little too much affection for his sister. He’s worried that he has washed out of his military training, but it’s all good, these are just more tests for him to pass. Right off the bat I’m a bit confused by one of the core systems in place in Ender’s…
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
I read Connie Willis’s Bellwether when it came out in 1997 and was pretty impressed with it, but not impressed enough to look for any more of her books. The time limits of life make it difficult to read every book I might like. Not too long ago I found a list of the Top 100 SciFi books, Doomsday Book was on the list. Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction in 1992. A few spoilers within. Connie Willis is an interesting writer with a great style and the ability to breath life into her…
Cooked by Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is a great writer who has a few interesting ideas about food and how it has changed over the past hundred years or so. He’s not a big fan of the Industrial Revolution, Processed Foodstuffs, and the general fall and decline of the quality of life that comes from eating fake food. In Cooked Michael talks about the changes in the way we prepare-or more precisely how we don’t prepare-our food. He starts off by breaking up his topic into the traditional methods of food cooking-Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it…
The Last Dark by Stephen R Donaldson
And so it ends. The Last Dark was good. Vastly better than the last few books. Covenant and Linden return to figures of power and more closely resemble their former selves. The mishmash supporting cast has a few people step forward and stand out from the crowd. Great powers come to a head. And while the Creator remains missing in action, The Despiser returns for a nice cameo appearance. There are still long passages chronicling impossible battles between god like enemies and heroes. Still a lot of noise that signifies nothing. But hey, it’s a novel, so wrapping up a…
I Wear The Black Hat
What is bad and what is good? This is a question I have been thinking about since the end of Breaking Bad. Chuck Klosterman takes a mostly light-hearted look at Bad Guys. Near the start of the I Wear The Black Hat, Chuck identifies the single most evil act a person can do to be seen as Evil-tie a woman to a railroad track. Yes, he sees Snidely Whiplash as the poster-child for villains. After all, his name is Snidely. I’d never heard of Chuck before picking up I Wear The Black Hat, but I get the feeling we are kindred…
The Ocean at The End of the Lane
A story about a little boy and a number of supernatural women who make his life very interesting for a few days when he is seven years old. The nature of these women, and of reality itself, is never fully explained. When our young hero asks about such things he is told that he doesn’t need to know about them and he wouldn’t understand anyway. The Ocean at The End of the Lane brings to mind The Night Circus and Neverwhere in that hidden just below the world we know and think we understand is a vaster and much more…