The Exchange

After putting Graham Joyce on my list of authors I’d like to read more of, I finally got around to reading another one, The Exchange. And I liked it. This could be a pattern.

The Neddiad

In The Neddiad, Neddie Wentworthstein’s father decides to move his family to Los Angeles so they can eat at the Brown Derby. This is typical of the charming absurdities that fill Daniel Pinkwater’s books. Anyway, Neddie goes on an eccentric journey by train to the Hollywood of an earlier era: bellboy ghosts and retired cowboy [...]

God: The Failed Hypothesis

I like messing around with God, or gods, or Cosmic Muffins, but that doesn’t mean I believe in any sort of god. So I was interested in seeing how God: The Failed Hypothesis, by Victor J. Stenger would apply the methods of science to the hypothesis that God exists. Like The Fabric of Reality, it [...]

Gentleman of the Road

So I’m at the library and I see a beautiful little book in the New Books. The cover has a circle of elephants, the endpapers have a map of Khazaria, the page numbers are in red ink, the chapters have witty titles, and even the font itself is a delight to the eye. Turns out [...]

Cosmic Jackpot

A good book you might wish you had read before tackling “The House Beyond Your Sky,” is Cosmic Jackpot. In clear, entertaining arguments, Paul Davies works his way through the various flavors of theories attempting to explain the “Goldilocks” problem. That is, there are a small set of critical constants that have to be within [...]

Bright of the Sky

I heard Kay Kenyon present at Readercon and liked her, so I went looking for Bright of the Sky. The book has a very cool opening, in which a quantum AI grew obssessed with evidence for another universe. I wanted to know more about the AI, but the story is really about the other universe.

softspoken

Do you go to cons only to discover that the Guest of Honor is someone you’ve barely heard of? That certainly makes me feel stupid. For instance, last year Lucius Shepard was the GoH at Readercon, and had interesting things to say in his interview. I decided I needed to do my homework. Now I’m [...]

The Secret History of Moscow

In 90s Moscow, where the streets are filled with kiosks “selling everything and manned by loud men who wouldn’t leave you alone,” something even stranger than capitalism is happening. Galina’s sister Masha is transformed into a jackdaw, sending Galina looking for her. She meets a cop, Yakov, who is assigned to track down rumors [...]

A Geography of Oysters

Some people have loved oysters since childhood. Some would never touch them. Some discover them as adults, and then can’t get enough of them. That last group describes me.
The first time I ate an oyster on the half shell, I had the usual fears. It would be slimy. It would sicken me. It was [...]

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 [...]