A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice BurroughsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw… and decided to give the first book in the series I try. It takes a […]
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Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O’Shea
O’Shea may think he’s written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation’s largest papers, but that’s because his own biases are at work here. Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it’s hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly […]
Crypto
Crypto by Steven Levy My rating: 3 of 5 stars Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative. I’m not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a […]
Rule 34
Rule 34 by Charles Stross My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters. The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little […]
Halting State
I’ve been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I’ve tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past… set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they’re writing about a distant world we’re never likely to visit in […]
Endings are hard
As a radio producer I’ve often struggled with the difficulty of ending stories. It’s easy to start a story. People often say just start at the beginning, but there are plenty of different places to start .You can start with an idea, an event, a character, an example, or any number of different elements Ending, […]
Sweating to the…documentaries
After watching the season 3 finale of Primeval last week and realizing the series continues to have plot holes large enough to drive a whole… planet through, I decided I needed to exercise my brain a bit more. So this week during my morning workout routine I’ve been cleaning off the DVR and watching programs […]