In The New Moon’s Arms

After all this space opera and time travel and scifi, I was ready to read something truly human as I cracked open In the New Moon’s Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson. The book opens with the funeral of Calamity’s father, and Calamity is trying to hide her laughter over Mrs. Winter losing her drawers. Calamity herself [...]

The Accidental Time Machine

If you’d like a taste of The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman, it’s worth listening to this interview from November 2006. He gives a great reading from the first chapters, in which Matt Fuller, lab assistant and sometime grad student at MIT, stumbles on a calibrator that’s taking tiny little jumps into the future. [...]

Merchants’ War

Miriam Beckstein, intrepid high-tech journalist, discovers she is really a lost daughter of a clan that can travel between worlds. And she is not pleased. Before I go on, make sure you’ve read the previous books in Charles Stross’s Merchant Prince series: The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, Clan Corporate, and the latest book Merchants’ [...]

Halting State

When an army of Orcs rob a bank, you’re know you’re in for a good time. So who thinks it’s worthwhile to raid the central bank of the gameworld Avalon Four? Sue, an Edinburgh cop, Elaine, a forensic auditor, and Jack, a gaming programmer, are called together to find out. Throw in corporate backstabbing, terror [...]

Reading by listening

One way I like to read is by using my computer as the world’s most expensive radio, and listening to podcasts. A lot of podcasts are ways to listen to radio programs on your own time, and Chapter a Day has been around practically since the start of radio. Like it says, they pick [...]

Learning the World

Learning the World, by Ken McLeod, seems like an appropriate place to start a blog, since the book opens with an entry of the biolog of Atomic Discourse Gale, as she tells how she climbs to the summit of her world and meets Constantine the Oldest Man.
This book is such fun! I was totally charmed [...]