Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
This is the Year Zero
{4.5/5} “Following their meeting with world leaders, and a single, carefully orchestrated press conference, the aliens had been keeping a studiously low profile. They were here, they claimed, strictly in a touristic capacity. They wished only to obtain the requisite visas to come and go as they liked, along with a supply of native currencies. […]
More Than Human
{4.5/5} “He was in the wood, numbly prying the bark from a dead oak, when it happened. His hands were still and his head came up hunting, harking. He was as aware of the pressures of spring as an animal, and slightly more than an animal could be. But abruptly the spring was more than […]
The Last Dragonlord
{4.5/5} “He landed, claws scraping against stone, the sound harsh in the crystalline air. A red mist surrounded him and the great dragon became a wraith; the mist contracted, then disappeared, leaving behind the figure of a tall man.” Linden is a dragonlord, a human who can turn into a dragon. But he’s the last […]
Brightly Burning
{4/5} “Lan stared at the wine the color of old embers glowing in the heart of his glass. ‘I would like to toast my family,’ he said, taking an absolute malicious pleasure in choosing words heavily weighted with irony and loaded with a definite double meaning. ‘For without your actions, I would not be where […]
Codex
{4.5/5} “But there was something magnetic about them, something that compelled respect, even the silly ones, like the Enlightenment treatise about how lightning was caused by bees. They were information, data, but not in the form he was used to dealing with it. They were non-digital, nonelectrical chunks of wood pulp and ink, leather and […]
Burning Chrome
{4/5} “When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn’t know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler’s time, […]
The Beekeeper’s Pupil
{4.5/5} “It’s hard to put into words the effect he has on the household, being both its master and a blind man. I caught a glimpse of him this morning seated at the harpsichord, just beginning to play, with such pain on his face that I hardly dared to look. For an hour the house […]
The Many-Colored Land
{4.5/5} “The notion that time-travelers might disrupt the present world by meddling with the past had seriously troubled Madame Guderian for many weeks after the departure of Karl Josef Richter. She had concluded at last that such a paradox must be impossible, since the past is already manifest in the present, with the continuum sustained […]
The Andromeda Strain
{4/5} “Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and your instruments, but in the end your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.” When a satellite is brought down […]
Hitchers
{4.5/5} “My success came by standing on the shoulders of someone I hadn’t even liked, who had expressly forbidden me from doing what I did. On his death bed.” Finn’s wife Lorena was struck by lightning and died two years ago. Now he’s trying to date again, but it’s tough. Finn is a cartoonist — […]