SciFan Magazine, Dayne Edmondson, Richard M. Mulder, and Patrick Hodges, Editors (2017) This anthology is a little different than most. Not only does it include science fiction and fantasy short stories, but it also contains excerpts from new science fiction and fantasy novels. It’s an interesting way to read a bit of a novel and see if you like it or not. Clever. I’ve marked the excerpts with an asterisk. Across the St. Lawrence: A Tale of the Pendragon Empire by Teel James Glenn – […]
He Had Me Right Up Until the Sasquatch Started Singing
In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford (1972) I want to like Mr. Benford’s books. I really do. He’s one of the SF Masters, up there with Asimov, Clarke, and Norton, and he’s a scientist, too. But each time I try to delve into one of his hard SF books, he goes off onto a tangent (in this case, a metaphysical one). I guess it worked for Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 when the science got so dense that we saw God, but this book […]
One for the fans (but probably not the rest of us)
/me sighs… wonders how to do this without sounding grumpy… I’ve always been a Star Wars fan: I remember my parents taking us to the drive-in to see the original on a double feature with Damnation Alley and have seen all of the films multiple times; I remember that the first Star Wars figure I got was R2-D2, and that I collected every Kenner figure and all the mail-in redemptions all the way through the end of Return of the Jedi; I own several of […]
More timey-wimey from Birmo (you need to read this book)
Full disclosure: I’m already a fan of John Birmingham, and I talk to him occasionally on Twitter; so I read A Girl in Time with some preconceptions, and more than a little positive spin on my bias. Birmo is a big fan of manipulating both time and history in his recent fiction; his very excellent Axis of Time series (three full-length novels and three novellas) plays hard and fast with 21st Century military forces being inadvertently sent back to WWII and the massive fallout from […]