The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel
If I had to write the logline of this book, I would say it’s like Robert Coover writing Blade Runner. Our narrator is a body scout, whose job is to look for potential talent for a cyborg baseball league. It’s cyborg in the sense of of body modification run amok. He can’t play himself because of certain bans, but he’s still in the biz. He’s on a call when he finds out that one of the stars of the league has been found dead, seemingly […]
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
This is the premier collection of Borges fiction and nonfiction that was published early in the US. You’re obviously served better by his collection fiction and his collected nonfiction, but as an entry point this one is great. His nonfiction offers up a lot that his fiction doesn’t, namely who and what to read. His fiction obviously opens up a world of strange and curious stories, that are ofte not even narratives. Some various reactions: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – a long and meandering story […]
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler
Imago by Octavia Butler
Dawn I hope no one ever comes for Octavia Butler. She’s so good at exploring issues related to gender, our bodies, consent, sexuality, and our brains and demonstrating horror and disgust without getting didactic about it. A novel about significant and existentially nightmarish changes to our genes, coupled with a total helplessness to do anything about it except acquiesce is something else. In this novel, Lilith awakes in some kind of captivity. A frustrating wait as she gets used to her new situation reveals that […]
The First World War: An Illustrated History by AJP Taylor
This is a little history of WWI that I recently got a book fair. It was published by Penguin in the 1960s and is looking back at WWI some fifty years out. It gives up the game a little in the first chapter when it describes the war as basically one battle (the first battle of the Marne) followed by four years of stalemate. Whenever I read about WWI I am completely bereft to explain much of anything that happened, other than a series of […]
Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers
Like all novels, this one is about the representation of reality. But not like all novels, this one takes that question head on. This is another of Richard Powers’s novel where the main narrative is interpolated by a secondary narrative with mostly thematic connections to the story. The novel is about the creation of a simulated space called the “Cavern” in which users are surrounded by elaborately LCD screen, wear augmented eyewear, haptic gloves, and other features and in habit vividly drawn and rendered rooms. […]
Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny
It probably doesn’t bode well for my enjoyment of the rest of this series to be earnestly relieved that this fifth book marks the end of the first phase of the series. I possess all the others, which generally means that I will stick it out, or at least have a hard time removing it from my to read pile, but alas. This fifth book does tie a bow on the Corwin section of the series, with the closing of his pursuit of throne of […]