On the nightstand

ith all the miles beneath my wheels and all the audio books I’ve listened to, it’s kinda funny to have this one which I knocked off in an afternoon. The Coming of the Martains is a good audio dramatization (meaning they aren’t reading, they are acting) of my all-time favorite book, The War of the Worlds. There is a lot going on here, and I was interested to figure how they would do this production. After all, reading aloud how the narrator’s dog cart topples over as the Martian’s tripod steps over it is one thing, but to actually pull […]

kay, I’ve got an audio book and a paper one both half-done for this weekend. My niece hasn’t come through on her promise to submit a review. I’ve got nothing. A little poking around the net found a reference to one of the thirty greatest scifi shorts, a piece called Fondly Fahrenheit. Kinky. So I found it HERE (sorry about the format, but it will print okay and it isn’t that many pages). And I read it. And I loved it. First off, this piece was pretty raw for 1954 (when it was first published). I can see why people […]

’ve got a friend in a hospital sixty miles off whom I visit three times a week. This is an extra 300 miles a week in the car, or five hours going putt-putt-putt. There was a serious concern that, following a long day at work, I might fall asleep at 80mph on the lonely swamp-crossing highway, go into the brush, get eaten by alligators and never be seen again. Listened to music CDs and actually drifted off the road one night. This wasn’t working. Next trip out, I stopped at the local library and fingered through their audio books collection. […]

ith apologies to my best friend (a Liberaltarian) who gave me this book, I simply couldn’t finish it. I finish almost every book I start. I make a specific effort to do so. But this one, I could not. Let me go over the idea of the novel first, and then I close with my personal pain point about it. So, Powers of the Earth is a tale of a lunar colony founded by those fleeing the slow system’s failure of Earth. Everything is quite touchy-feelie back at home, with the military forced to accept handicap soldiers, with CEOs put […]

oo boy. Okay, so Gyo means “fish” in Japanese, and not “a dreamlike nightmare that gets worse and worse until you are screaming to awake”. Which was my first guess. Gyo is a manga (a Japanese graphic novel) produced by a macabre-spewing author/artist named Junji Ito. My wife gave it to me for Christmas, a little thing she thought I’d like. So let me put it this way – I found it disturbing. Sickening. Crazy. Bleak. Strange. And just goddamn weird. It was also pretty good (from a horror viewpoint). I’m not going to spoil too much. At the start, […]

reasure Island, one of my favorites. Anyone who reads that is in the little club that knows that Long John Silver is not a fearsome blood-soaked pirate, no. He’s a manipulator and odds-player, changing sides as needed and playing his cards clever. And at the end of that story, he’s sprung by Ben Gunn, the cheese-drooling castaway, and apparently sails off to freedom, wealth and anonymity. And good for him. Dead Man’s Chest is a sequel to this tale of pirates and buried treasure. We meet Captain John Paul Jones (of later naval valor, so we think), on the run […]

nother installment of my up-in-the-favorites scifi series, the crazy-interesting books by a writer team carrying the pseudo name of James S. A. Corey, and what you can view as Season 2 of the Expanse on some of your streaming services. You’ll remember that in our last review, James, Naomi, Amos and Alex had discovered that there was an alien molecule that was being dicked with by a soulless corporation – their thought: hey, we can really save on space suits if we could alter humans by changing their bodies, down to their DNA, to make them into whatever we want […]

eil DeGrasse Tyson is a science popularist, rather like Bill Nye and Carl Sagan. He brings science down to the level where normal nabobs (such as your humble reviewer, with his small backyard scope) can understand. And he does a good job at it. His book on general astrophysics was very good. Starting with the complete history of the universe (at least for its critical first day or so) was quite fascinating. Moving out to the scale of the universe, how scientists calculate things, how we basically know what we know, was quite revealing. It got me to realize just […]

kay, backstory – while visiting Japan, I saw a movie poster with a shot of a cat that looked exactly like my late Mookie. Stunned me. Looking further into it, I discovered the book the movie was based on, The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Part of me will continue my search for the flick. But part of me will finish the review of the wonderful book it uncovered. The novel follows a strange and interesting journey of Nana the cat and his companion (not owner – it’s not that sort of relationship) Satoru the human. Satoru, it seems, had found Nana […]

f you’ve seen The Expanse on the Sci-Fi network then you’ve seen this book (the first in a series of seven or eight). It’s set in the solar system a century or so forward from ours. Earth is a UN dominated world, Mars bold and fascist. And the belt, it’s free-wheeling yet controlled by the inner worlds (and falling more and more under the sway of the OPA (Outer Planet Alliance)). So, yes, this is a universe set for conflict and action. Into this backdrop we find four people, late crewmembers of the ice rigger Canterbury (destroyed as part of […]