Setting up a mystery is easy, you just present an amount of threads, leaving it to the reader to guess the pattern before, in the end, all the threads are woven neatly together. But this weaving is, of course, the hard part, because the reader has followed all the threads with you and guessed at so many more patterns than the actual book can hold. Mr. penumbra’s 24 hour bookstore was a book with plenty of interesting threads; an old bookstore, mysterious google-stuff, new tech, […]
It’s all over and I’m standin’ pretty
I enjoy post apocalypse fiction. There is something about the society and all its excesses breaking down and mankind being stripped to its bare essentials that appeals to me as a literary trope. The means in which the world ends is simply a MacGuffin, the device that propels the story forward and tells us what happens to mankind when it has to focus solely on survival. The Passage is similar in that regard, though the concept of a viral vampire apocalypse is intriguing. In […]
“I’m just like my country. I’m young and scrappy and hungry.”
HALF CANNONBALL!! I don’t usually finish a book and then immediately pick up the sequel. Now usually that’s because I don’t yet own the sequel but also I tend to want a change of pace genre-wise. But in the case of The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen, I had to know what happened next. Fortunately, I had the first two books in the series already on my kindle (and I’m currently kicking myself for not picking up the third when I had […]
“Believing the strangest things. Loving the Alien”
Octavia Butler is a name that pops up frequently in searches for sci fi writers who aren’t white and male. Naturally when the first book in the Xenogenesis Trilogy popped up on Kindle for sale, I grabbed it up. While Dawn contains many of the same ingredients as a lot of sci fi classics (alien races, the destruction of humanity) the finished product is very different. Lilith Iyapo has lost everything. Shortly after her husband and son are killed in a car accident, humanity destroys […]
Not Firefly
This seems to be a divisive book and I can see why. I had two problems with it: one was a matter of taste, the other was a tension and storytelling problem. The book features a motley crew manning a spaceship. This is where the Firefly comparisons come in, and people that enjoy it seem to see the connection beyond that. And this is where the taste issue comes up, I love Firefly and its brand of humor and quirk. I did not think this […]
A sci fi master’s earlier work
The best way to describe Harlan Ellison’s prose would be “lyrical.” This short collection of stories varies from from a hopeless, post-apocalyptic landscape to the a contemporary California in an emotional spiral after his divorce. Just describing the plot likely won’t hook you. It’s Ellison’s words that do all the heavy lifting in his stories. This collection of stories was published in the late 1960s and Ellison’s views on women tend to reflect this. But this shouldn’t let it deter you from reading one […]
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