clock — watching time, the only true currency

A month ago, Vin sent me a box full of books, including several Robert Sawyer novels. I’ve enjoyed earlier reads, and Flashforward was a quick romp.
Courtesy of a supercollider experiment, the world gets a glimpse of its future 21 years out. Sawyer takes a swing at the mundane (patent office is overwhelmed with applications based [...]

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I’ve read Robert Heinlein many times before, but never one of his most famous novels, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”
Published in 1966, the first-person story walks us through the revolt of a colony on the moon against the earth. The colony was founded as a prison, like Australia’s origins. Right away, the dialect hits [...]

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Alan Dean Foster is prolific. Long ago, I read several of the Flinx novels, so it was easy to grab Trouble Magnet off the library shelf a few weeks ago. Another quick, easy read… and not terrible. But I’ve clearly skipped some stories along the way and I felt the gap a bit. It’s also [...]

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Spider Robinson wrote a very solid Robert Heinlein book in Variable Star. I didn’t realize it was so new (Sept, 2006) when I picked it up at the library a few weeks ago. I’m rarely so up to date.
Variable Star weaves in some faithful sci-fi themes: space colonies, not-so-friendly aliens, faster-than-light travel, and [...]

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Richard K. Morgan’s third book, Market Forces, steps away from the world of Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). Like much notable fiction, Morgan spun a good story here out of a single exploratory thread: what happens to corporate politics in a world which is a state of managed disintegration?
Morgan’s answer? Sanctioned violence, with [...]

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Richard Morgan spins Takeshi Kovacs into another world, this time a world at war, in Broken Angels.
Where Altered Carbon felt more Philip K. Dick meets Raymond Chandler, Broken Angels feels more like the movie Alien meets a really violent Indiana Jones tale set thousands of years in the future. For Morgan, though, the menace is [...]

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Although I’ve read David Brin a few times before, I first learned about The Postman from the Kevin Costner movie of the same name. I haven’t seen the movie yet. Here are Brin’s thoughts on the film, which ran 177 (!) minutes. I won’t rush to see it, but I won’t avoid it, either. Still, [...]

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During Memorial Day weekend, I finished Orson Scott Card’s final novel in the Ender series, Shadow of the Giant. Ender himself is almost nowhere in this novel, as Bean is once more the lead character. The spotlight is shared with Peter (the Hegemon) as post-alien war Earth continues to shake out. As an exercise in [...]

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I travelled this weekend, which meant I got to start and finish Robert Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment. In a fun combination of two technology sectors, the story follows the impact of EEGs taken at a nanoscale level and software constructs of human brains/personalities. Call it a mashup, even…with an evil genius AI committing real-world murder [...]

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Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan felt right in line with Lethem, but with more of a William Gibson flavor. The language didn’t thrum like Gibson’s, but the world-framing theme of ’sleeves’ (human bodies as replaceable wrappers for your ‘core,’ or brain in a digital form) read well, and even original when taken to its [...]

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