On the nightstand

was trapped. Lunch had fallen through (nothing else planned) and the doctor’s office called and said they could reschedule for today (always a wait there). Didn’t have my book. Didn’t have my tinytop. I’d have a couple of hours to kill and nothing to kill it with. I was entertainically unarmed. Thank you, Project Gutenberg. Hopped in and opened up Amazing or Astounding or something, downloaded it to my work computer, then stripped out a thirty page story. This I dumped into word, reformatted it and printed it into fifteen double-sided pages. And I was good to go. So, yeah, […]

like when scifi is realistic and sciency. It’s one thing to have space marines drop on a planet on the edge of the galaxy with technology we barely understand. It’s another when they are dropping with crude tech from maybe a hundred years in the future, down onto Mars, that planet next door over. Like The Martian, it takes place mostly on Mars, everything is screwed up (do Marines ever drop and it goes well?). But unlike all those other books you’ve read, likely with scary bugs or elvin forest creatures, this one is about all sorts of crazy situations. […]

veryone has a dream pet. And regardless of if it’s got fur, fins, scales or lots of creepy legs, it’s gotta have one thing: loyalty. Teddy finds a half-drowned mongoose out near a stream and proposes a funeral for it, but his mother (happily) suggests they dry it and feed it. Given that they have only just arrived in India from England and moved into a recently empty bungalow, this proves to be a good idea given the fact that there as a couple of cobras living in a hole in the garden, and thirty-plus eggs warming up to hatch […]

he Historian is a strange little (actually, quite big) novel, one that wanders through many voices (in the form of a father’s letters, a mother’s postcards, old love letters, even doomed scrawlings secured in a crypt) to eventually get around to telling a story horrifying in nature and long in telling. Look, don’t get me wrong – it’s a good read but it’s long in the effort. If you think you’re going to know what’s happening any time soon, you’ve another thing coming. Without giving too much away, we begin the story with the unnamed daughter of a gun-for-hire (it […]

o this isn’t your Disneyland version of The Jungle Book. It starts a couple of degrees off. In the film, young Mowgli is orphaned in what looks like a high-speed canoe crash. Bagheera the panther takes pity on the young creature and dumps him with a wolf pack. And that’s what makes him a wild boy. In the book, Shere Khan (who doesn’t show up until the final reel in the flick) is a lame tiger who is not urbanely deadly, but rather a limping posturing loser. When he attacks Mowgli’s woodcutter parents, he accidently leaps into the fire. The […]

wasn’t sure what to make of this at first (an omelette?). Loaned to me after a book chat between adjacent modeling projects at the train club, I looked into this English satiricalists with a slight unease. Humor works differently. I can only point back to War of the Worlds: Plus Blood and Guts and Zombies to illustrate where it doesn’t for certain people. The Big Over Easy follows Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division (see, what are you thinking, right now?). He’s a not-so-successful copper, having just seen his long case against the three pigs for the […]

t’s unfair to contrast Jack Williamson’s Beachhead against the phenomenal The Martian. Yes, they both involve the abandonment of one or more people against a two-year mission window, a desperate effort of survival. And Mark Watney is more of a likable wisecracker than the driven Texan billionaires’ son, Sam Houston Kellingan (who spends much of the book feeling bad about not getting one of the women sharing his mission, abandoning another woman in Texas (with child, it would seem) and ignoring another mission chum, a sweet puppydog. And then there are father issues, mother issues, brother issues. No wonder he […]

e’d watched the first few episodes of the miniseries lifted from this book and petered out – just didn’t hold us. And then a person I know at work borrowed a copy of this book and tried to get through it, only to die on the white burning pages about halfway through. And when I’d agreed to read it, and when it was handed to me (with both hands, all 782 pages of it (why do people loan me such massive books?)), I knew I had my work cut out for me. But, actually, not bad. Jonathan Strange & Mr. […]

o, what do you do when you have an hour for lunch, no computer and no book? Well, there is always a work laptop and Project Gutenberg. This time I found a nifty short story, Tanks, written in first issue of Astounding Tales (Vol 1, Number 1, January 1930, a new decade, new magazine, a new future – so optimistic). Anyway, I always enjoy stories like this, ones where author attempts future combat based on what they know (from World War One) and what they can guess (from the current day). And while Tanks was a bit off, it was […]

‘ve mentioned in a Dog Ear column how I found, then lost, then refound this book. Really, it is a thing of charm I discovered in my recent trip to India, a scifi novel written by the very popular Ashok Banker, an Indian author of impressive credentials. Unfortunately, it’s the first book of a series – which he never completed. And dammit, I really was grooving in it until the end. Maybe, like King’s Dark Tower series, it will find a conclusion. Anyway. Gods of War is a stunning tale. A strange artifact enters Earth’s orbit. Before we can even […]