Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

I found Cory Doctorow’s first novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kindom,” a fast but annoying read. Fast both because the story rattles along at breakneck speed and because I was reading as fast as I could hoping to figure what the story was about. In the Bitchun Society, a post-Scarcity economy where your [...]

The Revolution Business

The latest installment in Charles Stross’s Merchant Prince series, The Revolution Business, is, well, it’s the latest installment of a series. You know, the one where mild mannered technology reporter Miriam Bekstein discovers that she’s a lost princess from a Clan of drug-dealing warlords from a parallel world, and now she’s a pawn in their [...]

Little Brother

In Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, Marcus Yallow is a smartass who delights in playing Harajuku Fun Madness and in evading the security at his high school. He and his friends are caught in the post-bombing sweep after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. After a harrowing interrogation, Marcus is set loose. Though he knows [...]

Sly Mongoose

I’ve been having a terrible run of luck with fiction the last week, none of them worth talking about, though I was tempted to take a picture of the stack of books I could barely start that went back to the library. To some degree, I managed to break that streak with some kickass [...]

The Last Colony

The Last Colony reads like it was written by the same John Scalzi who writes his blog, which is relaxed, humorous, and entertaining. In Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, the prose tends to be stiff, the humor forced, and the story begins only after chapters and chapters of exposition, and is constantly brought [...]

The Ghost Brigades

After three chapters of talk and exposition, The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi really wakes up with Jared Dirac. He’s the second clone of the purported traitor Charles Boutin, who shot the first one in order to fake his death. Luckily, Boutin was a researcher in consciousness (sort of a critical field when you’re decanting [...]

Old Man’s War

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi really got under my skin! The feeling of the book is Heinleinesque.There’s lots of nifty ideas and some wit in the voice of the hero, John Perry. The premise of giving old people one last chance to make their deaths serve humanity is interesting. But…

Territory

It’s a good thing Tombstone, Arizona is a small town, because in Territory, by Emma Bull, you seem to meet all of them. The four Earp brothers, their wives, a daughter, Doc Holliday and his common-law wife, Kate Elder. Ike and Billy Clanton, John Ringo and his various rustler friends. In the first 200 [...]

Spin

Some science fiction reads like thinly disguised science articles, which makes me more interested in reading the source material than the stories. Sad, I know. Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, overcomes this by focusing on the lives of three people while using the science as a visionary backdrop. By the end of the first chapter, [...]

Ragamuffin

Back at Boskone 44, I heard Tobias S. Buckell explain how he pulled together a list of all the cool stuff he wanted to see in a book–and then he wrote the book. And another one. Lots of cool stuff and great action.
The hero of Ragamuffin is Nashara, a superhuman warrior woman, the last survivor [...]