Skids: We’re on some sort of Quest? Swerve: Uh-huh. We’ve got to find the 12 fragments of the Primal Key, unlock the Infinity Gate, travel sideways in time, defeat the Agents of Chaos and restore order to the Multiverse. Skids:… Swerve: Nah, I’m just messing with you. We’re actually looking for the Knights of Cybertron,
Andy Weir’s first novel, The Martian, has gotten a lot of attention lately, mostly because it’s nerve-wrackingly realistic. It’s about a man living in an environment that’s trying to kill him every second of his existence. And that’s on the good days, when his own mistakes don’t make things worse. It’s very well-written, and it’s not
Tanith Lee is something of a guilty pleasure for me. I started with her – well I guess “sinful” is a pretty good description – vampire novel “Dark Dance”, and every now and then I just have to find another one of her books for more trashy fun. A couple, like Storm Lord and Days of Grass have
In her career, Anne Rice has recreated the mythology of vampires, witches, ghosts, mummies, and whatever the main character was in Servant of the Bones. It was probably only a matter of time before she wrote a werewolf story. Rice’s books are usually categorized as horror, and there are certainly a lot of horror elements in The
Humankind first ventured into space in 1961. More than twenty years earlier C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in a trilogy of stories linking space travel, alien minds, and a war within the solar system, to Lewis’s overarching view of a benevolent God. The
In his afterwards, Stephen King points out that he almost didn’t write Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. The trouble with sequels, he points out, is that no matter how brilliant it is, there will always be someone who’ll read it and say “Nope, nope, it’s just not as good. And he’s right. You
Post-apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that have already burned. Apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that are burning. The End is Nigh is about the match. I love short story collections – eat them up like candy, actually, so expect to see me review one every few weeks – but sometimes it’s hard to find one with
The date doesn’t cause the instant recall for me that it does for my parents’ generation, but the Kennedy assassination (and an idea of how to stop it) has obviously been on Stephen King’s mind for a long while. King started researching this book back in the 1970’s, but had to put the project on
Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, is equal parts science-fiction, horror, and philosophy. It’s well-written, but I don’t think it’s for everybody. I’m pretty sure it’s not for me anyway, but I don’t think that makes it a bad book.