Book Review: “Sleeping Dogs” by Joe Haldeman (from Gateways)
Haldeman’s addition to Gateways is, thus far, one of the best stories in the lot (granted, by this point, I’ve only read three). “Sleeping Dogs” is another military-related science fiction story set some time after an interstellar war. Flann Spivey is an ex-soldier-turned-futuristic-psychiatrist whose job is to aid people who have essentially become immortal on […]
Book Review: “Von Neumann’s Bug” by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein (from Gateways)
“Von Neumann’s Bug” (VNB) is occupied with a trope familiar to science fiction fans: the self-replicating machine. In this case, the machine is an alien search drone named Bert who terrorizes a small, middle-class family in an attempt to rebuild itself and escape Earth’s gravity to resume its mission. And it does so by inconspicuously tearing apart […]
Book Review: “Shoresteading” by David Brin (from Gateways)
(I’ve decided to review each of the stories in Gateways — a collection edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull in honor of Frederik Pohl — individually. I will collect my thoughts about the anthology as a whole later. I’m doing this as a kind of experiment, as I find reviewing collections enormously difficult.) David Brin’s contribution […]
Book Review: Serial Killers Inc. by Andy Remic
Callaghan is a scallywag, divvying up his time between bedding married women, exploiting the vulnerable and dead to make a living at a tabloid magazine, and consuming enough alcohol and hardcore drugs to send him to an early grave. And things are going well for him on this destructive path. But Callaghan has an admirer, […]
Book Review: Central Park Knight by C. J. Henderson
Disappointment is an unfortunate thing when it comes to reading. Sometimes a book doesn’t live up to the expectations set up by the cover copy. It’s not often that this happens to me. I’ve found books with such problems to be average or even below-average, but it’s a rare thing that a book leads me […]
Book Review: The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo
Readers will remember Kate DiCamillo as the author of the adorable Tale of Despereaux, which was turned into a computer animated film in 2008 (which I had the pleasure of seeing and enjoying). The Magician’s Elephant is a less expansive narrative, but one which attempts to reach into the heart of the human condition through […]