Target: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One Profile: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Pop Culture, Adventure! Ready Player One is one of those books that’s been sitting on the shelves at Barnes and Nobel taunting me with nearly universal acclaim for longer than I care to think about. Not only that, but it falls clearly into my ‘near future, speculative fiction’ bailiwick and even focuses on video game culture, so I really have no excuse as to why I’m only just now adding it to my library. […]
Sticks and stones may brake your bones, but words will turn you into my meat puppet.
Target: Max Barry’s Lexicon Profile: Speculative Fiction, Thriller As I have written before, I find book recommendations to be more annoying than useful (which raises some interesting questions about why I write book reviews). There are so many variables involved in what makes any given book appealing to a given person that, without a history of literary compatibility, it is almost impossible guarantee that any two people will like the same book. Still, every so often I’ll follow up on a recommendation or a particularly good […]
Caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea…
Target: Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1) Profile: Speculative Fiction, Young Adult There is a gritty reality to Paolo Bacigalupi’s work. A grim straightforwardness that crushes the optimism older SF styles. On its own, this same honesty produces brilliantly brutal speculative fiction, like Windup Girl. But there is a necessary optimism to Young Adult literature that is at odds with Bacigalupi’s tone. Ship Breaker lives in artificial space between two styles, carving out its own literary niche, but at the same time feeling discordant and incomplete. And yet, it […]
Somewhat Spotty Storytelling
Target: Steven Brust and Skyler White’s The Incrementalists Profile: Speculative Fiction As a concept, The Incrementalists is a pretty impressive pitch. A secret society of quasi-immortal do-gooders dedicated to the slow improvement of mankind suddenly threatened by one of their own sounds like a great, high concept blockbuster. But The Incrementalists can’t seem to decide if it’s supposed to be more like ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ or ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ and flounders unpleasantly somewhere between the two. There are a lot of good ideas here, but the novel […]
All in one, one in all. New convenient packaging!
First of all, if you like science fiction at all, this is THE BOOK you should be reading right now. Just stop what you’re doing and go buy it, or reserve it at the library. It’s important you get in on this now before everybody loves it and then the inevitable contrarians pop up to tell everyone how much they dislike it and how everyone who likes it is probably dumb and/or reading it wrong and really it means THIS and HOW DARE YOU. And if […]
You got some zombie in my superhero novel…
Target: Peter Clines’ EX-Heroes (EX-Heroes #1) Profile: Superhero Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Zombie Apocalypse EX-Heroes falls very clearly in my reading category of ‘book candy.’ It’s light, entertaining, but lacking many qualities of actual literary goodness. Well, actually the concept is executed rather well and Clines manages to tell a pretty compelling story within his somewhat limited framework, so maybe the novel isn’t all that lacking. But at the end of the day, there’s very little here that hasn’t been explored before. Points for novelty notwithstanding. The book bills […]