I have to admit that I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, or any of the sequels, or the Twilight books that apparently inspired E.L. James to write the Fifty Shades fanfiction series in the first place. Not taking a stand against them or anything, they’re just not my thing. There’s been a lot of
I picked up this one thinking that it was going to be one of those adapted-classics-with-a-twist, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Android Karenina. It isn’t. In 1958, the submarine Plongeur had just begun its maiden voyage when the ballast tanks, steering, and engine all experienced catastrophic failure at the same time. The vessel
I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing
I’ve decided that, as a fan of the steampunk genre, it’s a shame and a crime that I haven’t read more Jules Verne. As a fan of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, not reading the original tale of Captain Nemo is just unacceptable. A classic science fiction story along the lines of Journey To The Center of the
Phil and Kaja Foglio’s gaslamp fantasy series Girl Genius is set in a world of automatons and dirigibles, tyrants and heroes, and stories of the famous adventurers, The Heterodyne Boys. It’s a world where a small portion of the population are Sparks, geniuses born with the ability to invent death rays and revenants and robots capable of leveling cities, but
John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey’s The Apocalypse Triptych is a trilogy of short-story collections, each one set at a different stage of the end of the world. In the second book in the series, The End is Now, we take you to Doomsday already in progress. Twenty stories telling all the different ways that everything is coming
The legend of Prester John is one of the first documented cases of a hoax going viral. In 1165 a letter was discovered, supposedly sent to the Byzantine Emperor from a mysterious king in the far east, telling of a Christian land filled with riches and monsters. The letter inspired stories and explorations and crusades for four
…something happened… A lot of Stephen King’s older works revolve around younger (or at least simpler) themes: little boy versus the haunted hotel, aliens from outer space, teenagers fighting a demon-possessed car. His more recent books seem to be taking a gloomier tone, and involve a
Happy New Year, book readers! As you probably already know, there’s not nearly enough time to read all the amazing books that came out last year. Between the two of us, though, we tried to get as big a sampling as we could. Here’s each of our picks for our three favorite science-fiction/fantasy books of