In Life After Sleep, a fascinating and very funny science fiction novella about an invention that allows human beings to thrive on very little sleep, author Mark Brand explores the essence of our innately contradictory nature: no matter how much we humans beings have, we always want more, and no matter how potentially good something [...]
Continue Reading →Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena is a bizarre and utterly mesmerizing book of science fiction horror. I never would have found it, much less read it, without being pointed in the right direction by a good friend with a unique taste in books. I am now pointing anyone I know in the direction: Read Parasite [...]
Continue Reading →I don’t often read Scifi and just about never read any Fantasy but I was thrilled with the stories I discovered in the 2010 Anthology of the Fresno Scifi and Fantasy Writers group, coordinated by R. Garrett Wilson. Entitled I Dreamed A Crooked Dream, the Anthology hooked me immediately with its prologue of a young [...]
Continue Reading →The days I spent reading The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse by Dale Pendell were uneasy ones. While reading this chilling book of fiction set in the future, I happened upon a very real article of fact entitled “On Thin Ice” written by Ben Wallace-Wells (Rolling Stone Magazine, September 30, 2010) . In the [...]
Continue Reading →I am not really a huge science fiction fan, as you can tell if you go through the books I’ve put on my “Great Books” list (one), and if you notice that only two books grace my “Best Science Fiction” list. My favorite science fiction I’ve read this year was Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, but [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I went for a science fiction break from reality and I was not disappointed. Philip K. Dick never disappoints and his book The Simulacra was a fun and engaging read. Set in the future (of course), Dick creates a scenario where the world has been divided into four governing states (one of them is France: [...]
Continue Reading →I was enthralled by Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. It is a great book. Butler was a science fiction writer, unusual for a black woman, and she was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. Kindred is not really science fiction, although it uses the device of time travel to set up the [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read The Pisstown Chaos, the third in a series of bizarre novels set far into the future (I hope) and written by the wildly imaginative and just plain wild, David Ohle. This novel is so funny and so strange — and cannot be read while snacking. The images are too gross and involve putrefaction [...]
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