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.
Imagine that there are thousands of worlds in many different realities, and every time a person dies they wake up as themselves to live a new life, but on a different world. This is repeated over and over until the person eventually wakes in the City Unspoken, the only place where True Death can be
The Night Circus is the debut book by Erin Morgenstern; at this point it’s also the only book by Erin Morgenstern. She has some poetry and several smaller essays on her website, but for now this is her only novel. And while I’d like to see another book by this author, at this point I can’t
The Blood Guard by Carter Roy wasn’t anything like what I’d expected. The main character Ronan may be a teenager who’s stumbled across a world of swords and sorcery and automatic weapons, but this is not one of those stories where he turns out to be some kind of “chosen one” or demigod. Not even
What had once been rafters holding up a roof were now floor joists in Palmer’s house. Someone else’s house stood below theirs, long abandoned and unclaimed. Soon, his own home would be someone’s basement and this a sand-filled cellar. And so it went, sand piling up to the heavens and homes sinking toward hell. My