Around this time of year all the book publishers start talking about what you should be reading over the next couple of months. “Great Beach Books”, “Perfect Summer Reading”. No one gets very specific about the criteria though. Should the books be light and easy to read? Linked to big news stories or the latest
Scott Westerfeld is one of the kings of Young Adult books. He’s written four different series; “Midnighters”, “Peeps”, “Leviathan”, and the hugely popular 4-book saga “Uglies”. And I’ve read exactly…none of them. Yes, I know that’s a big oversight, especially since Westerfeld spent about four years at the top of my list of favorite authors. The Magazine of Fantasy
Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors. Stanislaw Lem is one of those authors who’s name has been floating around in my “must read” list for way too long. The only one of his works
I’m a big Doctor Who fan, and that’s either caused by, or the cause of, how much I enjoy time travel stories. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, I love the games that writers can play with time travel, messing around with history, jumping forward and backward (sometimes by just a few minutes) trying to keep someone from taking just the wrong action at
When it comes to comics, especially Marvel comics, I’ve usually focused on the Transformers line, with occasional forays into X-Men in the 90’s. Most of my knowledge about anything related to the Avengers comes from the recent movies (*waves madly* Hi, Mr. Hiddleston! You’re awesome!), and when I wanted to try to jump into Avengers
Attention-getting title, isn’t it? Okay, so you’ve got two best friends, Hamza and Yehat, living in the center of a vibrant black community in Edmonton, Alberta. Yehat is a mad-genius inventor and confident horndog, Hamza is an intelligent would-be writer with an unexplained talent to find things, and who’s past has nailed him in place
“Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?” “No,” he said. “I did not. But you have to keep something in mind.” “What’s that?” “That if I was the killer, I’d be saying the same thing.” It’s a locked-room mystery on a grand scale: two deliberate murders on an enormous artificial habitat so dangerous that you can
I still find it strange how a man can lose at a war and then enlist in another with his enemy. But there are no real sides in this life except the barrel of a gun and the butt of a gun, and I know where I prefer to stand. I was a little hesitant
Reading through Arthur C. Clarke’s Wikipedia page makes me think of those “The Most Interesting Man In The World” commercials. Clarke’s biography includes being lieutenant in the RAF during WWII, a scuba diver and discoverer of the sunken original Koneswaram temple off the coast of Sri Lanka, an inventor and futurist (he was one of the first