clock … watching time, the only true currency

Another Doctorow paperback pickup, Eastern Standard Tribe thrilled me more than his earlier novel. With a simple yet imaginative idea, Doctorow makes corporate espionage seem like a new story. The concept — that allegiances and tastes run by time zone, not nation-state — is presented as fact, not explained…which is for the best. Just set [...]

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was Cory Doctorow’s first novel. More famous (to me) for being given away for free in many digital formats, Down and Out appeared to me in physical form, as a paperback I picked up off a neighborhood book table this fall. Imaginative story, more of a novella than [...]

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Pat Cadigan earned a recommendation and cover blurb from William Gibson for Tea from An Empty Cup, but the book failed to match expectations. A police novel at its heart, the creative note is the imaginative setting, bridging virtual reality and the real world. But that’s not enough.

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Richard Morgan entertains me, darkly, with each of his books. Broadly within the cyberpunk genre, or an evolved variant thereof, Thirteen evokes Bladerunner in print, without the (at times boring) atmospheric scene-setting of Ridley Scott’s vision. The number 13 refers to the chromosome where the aggressive instincts which propelled humanity forward (however brutally at times) [...]

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Orson Scott Card is profligate, and I’ve loved several of his books, notably Ender’s Game and a few others in that series. The Worthing Saga collects several related short stories and novellas in a single paperback. I appreciated the Trantor-like setting for several of the later stories, but overall, this was a struggle to complete.

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From Vin, he of Sportscolumn and Favorite10 fame, I received Rollback, the best Robert J. Sawyer novel I’ve read to date. Per usual, simple premise opens rich exposition of some eternal questions. The narrator’s wife Sarah decoded an alien message (a la Carl Sagan’s Contact) long ago. Now, another message has arrived. But Sarah is [...]

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Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer is the third and final book in The Neanderthal Parallax, exploring the imagined interaction between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens via parallel universes. Hybrids completes what began in Hominids and continued in Humans. Once again, Sawyer delves into where science and religion mix, this time “finding” the God organ in the [...]

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Humans by Robert J. Sawyer is the second book in The Neanderthal Parallax, a set of three novels exploring interaction between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens via parallel universes. Humans picks up from its beginnings in Hominids. The story is a bit dialog-heavy. The conversations between the Neanderthal male named Ponter and a human woman named [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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