Disclaimer: I received this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I believe many people are familiar with the meme (courtesy of South Park) that more or less goes: Step One ??? Profit! Well, the minds behind Consilience/Positron in this book have adopted that mantra as a lifestyle and business model. The proposal is this: crime is bad, and in a recession — particularly an extended one as has befallen the world — crime rises, and the jails become overpopulated and create an […]
“Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.”
Writing 52+ reviews is hard. Writing 52+ reviews is harder when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation, and not reviews. Oops! Well, anyway, here we are. The Gone-Away World is a very strange book. It’s also a very good book, but it’s a good book that took me awhile to get into and appreciate. Harkaway’s prose is witty and often nonsensical, filled with non-sequiturs and descriptions that seem to mean absolutely nothing, and yet somehow conjure a well-staged — if surrealistic — scene, and […]
The future is ADVENTURE! Ready, Steady, GO!
Target: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One Profile: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Pop Culture, Adventure! Ready Player One is one of those books that’s been sitting on the shelves at Barnes and Nobel taunting me with nearly universal acclaim for longer than I care to think about. Not only that, but it falls clearly into my ‘near future, speculative fiction’ bailiwick and even focuses on video game culture, so I really have no excuse as to why I’m only just now adding it to my library. […]
Sticks and stones may brake your bones, but words will turn you into my meat puppet.
Target: Max Barry’s Lexicon Profile: Speculative Fiction, Thriller As I have written before, I find book recommendations to be more annoying than useful (which raises some interesting questions about why I write book reviews). There are so many variables involved in what makes any given book appealing to a given person that, without a history of literary compatibility, it is almost impossible guarantee that any two people will like the same book. Still, every so often I’ll follow up on a recommendation or a particularly good […]
Caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea…
Target: Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1) Profile: Speculative Fiction, Young Adult There is a gritty reality to Paolo Bacigalupi’s work. A grim straightforwardness that crushes the optimism older SF styles. On its own, this same honesty produces brilliantly brutal speculative fiction, like Windup Girl. But there is a necessary optimism to Young Adult literature that is at odds with Bacigalupi’s tone. Ship Breaker lives in artificial space between two styles, carving out its own literary niche, but at the same time feeling discordant and incomplete. And yet, it […]
Somewhat Spotty Storytelling
Target: Steven Brust and Skyler White’s The Incrementalists Profile: Speculative Fiction As a concept, The Incrementalists is a pretty impressive pitch. A secret society of quasi-immortal do-gooders dedicated to the slow improvement of mankind suddenly threatened by one of their own sounds like a great, high concept blockbuster. But The Incrementalists can’t seem to decide if it’s supposed to be more like ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ or ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ and flounders unpleasantly somewhere between the two. There are a lot of good ideas here, but the novel […]