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 [...]
Peoplehood II: Alliteration
Anglicization does strange things to non-English alphabets. My father’s family name (in the Ukraine) was “Shtechter”, probably with a hard “ch” in the middle (like Bach), but it turned into both “Stern” and “Shtier” when the two halves of the family arrived on Ellis Island. Hailing from a rural town – a “mudhole”, in the [...]
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 [...]
Music Discovery and Distribution
I’ve had a number of conversations over the past few weeks with established and emergent talent in the music management business. Most of them started with thinking about how people discover new bands or new types of music, and how those processes relate to the more abstract notions of brand. All of this was made [...]
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 [...]
Songs Through Darwin’s Radio
What do deception, love, redemption, mutation and perhaps a bit of science fiction have in common? It’s either Coheed and Cambria’s Year of the Black Rainbow or Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Children, or both. What if evolution breeds xenophobia, and subsequently fear and hate? What if evolution is forced, and therefore somewhat dangerous, grounding the fear? [...]
Cory Doctorow’s “Makers”
Cory Doctorow was kind enough to give me an advanced reader’s copy of his upcoming book Makers, which I read in about three sittings. Granted, I’m a Cory fanboy, and I devour his writings like Pop-Tarts (often simultaneously), but this one is, in my slightly biased opinion, his best yet. It’s a love story set [...]
Eight Days, Eight Nights in Outline Form
The more I blog and mention “the book,” the more questions I get about it. So here’s a summary of the book, in outline form, based on current course and speed. This is completely serious, including my sidebar comments about content and tone. Your mileage may vary, the actual contents may appear smaller than described, [...]
Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem”
Finished Neal Stephenson’s latest multi-pound work Anathem over the holiday break, and I’m still mulling over bits and pieces. It was that good. My enjoyment of all 900+ pages of the book was enhanced by having read Danny Hillis’ Clock of the Long Now and Cory Doctorow’s The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange [...]
New Year’s Optimism
In any market environment, you have to be careful not to take current events and extrapolate ad infinitum, assuming that nothing else will change. I distinctly remember being in a meeting of a university student organization with its board, hearing one of the senior board members say “We can safely assume we’ll make no less [...]