Review: “Life on Mars: The New Frontier”
Unrelated to the TV series, other books with similar titles or even the Governator in Total Recall, Jonathan Strahan’s collection of short stories is a superb glimpse into what life might be like on the red planet. What sets it apart is that all of the stories are related through the eyes of its intended [...]
Review: Bill Bruford, The Autobiography
I’ve finished Bill Bruford’s obviously titled autobiography, and I’m almost relieved I made it to the end. Bruford is an accomplished, amazing, creative and adventuresome drummer. The names dropped in his book range from the obvious (Yes, King Crimson) to the obscure (Pierre Moerlen) to the overlooked (Allan Holdsworth). While I learned that Bruford’s drum [...]
Love Bits and the “Bordertown” Anthology
Buy Welcome to Bordertown, a sci-fi anthology edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, containing stories by Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman, among others. It passes my entirely non-scientific test for a good anthology: if the first story gets me scratching my head, and it’s not by one of the authors that attracted me to [...]
John Scalzi’s “Fuzzy Nation”
John Scalzi is definitely one of my favorite sci-fi authors. While I enjoy books that leaving me thinking, head-scratching, pondering serious questions and sometimes collapsing all of those mental states around a quantum mechanics problem centered in the harder sci-fi, Scalzi’s books are uniquely hopeful. I wouldn’t go so far as to call his writing [...]
MoCCA Fest From The Other Side
I attended my fifth consecutive MoCCA Festival this weekend, but my first as an exhibitor. Erik and I spun up Amphibimen Comics this summer as a “let’s see what happens” venture, hoping that we’d have enough content and ideas to exhibit at MoCCA nine months later. It came down to the last twelve hours, but [...]
Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Ant King and Other Stories”
Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories is flat-out weird. And this comes from a reader who has a very high dynamic range for values of “weird.” However, the magnitude of the weird vector also indicates its value to you a a reader. Buy it, digest it, ponder it. Strange and varied as the [...]
Unboxing Cory Doctorow’s “With A Little Help”
I have just experienced the anticipation, excitement and fascination equivalence of a few Christmas mornings, a major birthday, and discovering the VIctoria’s Secret catalog, all rolled into one. If you’ve never believed “book lingerie” could be used in a sentence, read on about my experience unboxing a hand-bound, hand-finished copy of Cory Doctorow’s With A [...]
What I Learned From George
In the preface of a book, I acknowledged a former customer named George who became a mentor and friend. He was a truly outstanding person who died of cancer just shy of his 50th birthday. One of his close family members found that preface and asked me how George and I met. I provided the [...]
Machine of Popularity
[Thanks to Jeph Jacques for this pointer. And read his comic, he's as insightful as he is funny] Quick summary: An independently published collection of short stories called Machine of Death is attempting to be an Amazon best-selling by clumping purchases into one day (that would be today, October 26). You can follow along on [...]
Scalzi/Wheaton Book Of Awesomeness
One of my summer projects was to spend more time writing, and I used a variety of writing contests (Erika Napoletano, ESPN/Stymie and Scalzi/Wheaton) to force action on that thought. I think I had the most fun working on the Scalzi/Wheaton fanfic contest, mostly because it was the first time I’d written science fiction, fan [...]