Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon
{4/5} “We abhor violence. The fact that you can be induced to inflict it upon yourselves, is, to us, proof that you are food, less-than-Krundai. If you and other races did not spare us the necessity, we should be forced to kill our own food like beasts. But the Great Brood saw our needs and […]
The Reality Dysfunction
{4.5/5} “When their full size has been reached they slide up out of the water to range through the planetwide jungle. Gills adapt to breathe the harsh musky air, tentacle muscles strengthen to support the drooping limbs away from the water’s cosy buoyancy. And they eat, rummaging through the matted undergrowth with insistent horns to […]
Expendable
{4.5/5} “There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage abruptness or the stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If […]
Why We Make Mistakes
{4.5/5} “Many of the qualities that allow us to do so many things so well contain flip sides that predispose us to error. We happen to be very good, for instance, at quickly sizing up a situation. Within a tenth of a second or so after looking at a scene, we are usually able to […]
In the Beginning… was the Command Line
{4.5/5} “Even the least technically minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your […]
Author discovery of the year
2013 was a great year of reading for me, and in particular a great year of discovering new authors. The winner of my author discovery of the year is Iain M. Banks. I read three of his books, including the brilliant The Player of Games. Runner ups are Sarah Zettel for A Sorceror’s Treason, Michael Swanwick […]
The Princess Bride
{4.5/5} “Fool!… You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well known is this: ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.’” Buttercup is the most beautiful woman in the world. Westley is […]
Gold
{4.5/5} “It seems to me, then, that the best one can do is to present one’s story as a struggle between sides which are both mixtures of good and evil (thus placing it somewhere between the extremes of utopia and dystopia), and don’t make the odds overwhelming in either direction. One can then proceed to […]
Sphere
{4.5/5} “Wear these at all times, even though they’re just a precaution: the alarms trigger automatically if life-support conditions go below optimum. But that won’t happen… Every single major system is redundant. We can lose power, we can lose air, we can lose water entirely, and we will be fine for a hundred and thirty […]
The Postman
{4.5/5} “All considered, it was amazing a man like him had lived this long. Everyone he had known or admired as a boy had died, along with all the hopes any of them had had. The soft world made for dreamers like himself broke apart when he was only eighteen. Long since then he’d come […]