clock … watching time, the only true currency

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 telepathy [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (Wikipedia page) read like a Philip K. Dick novel that wasn’t prepared to go all the way to the (crazed) edge. Similar first-person narrative, resonant mix of current culture with a future which has gone mildly awry with its reliance on central control (with a pervasive, encouraged use of [...]

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I finished Robert Sawyer’s Factoring Humanity several days ago. I enjoyed it, as I did the other Sawyer novel I read last summer. Also set in Toronto, Factoring Humanity blends human interaction — a marriage between university professors that family crisis has damaged — with three of the most challenging scientific problems in the world. [...]

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