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Personal blog devoted to long-form book reviews and criticism.

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Showing posts from February, 2020

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The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

February 18, 2020

Epic Fantasy Multiverse Stories Novels Philip Pullman Reviews Young Adult

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(Cover Artist: Erika Meltzer O’Rourke) It may seem strange to say that Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy is a series whose politica…

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Popular Posts

Lock In by John Scalzi

(Cover Artist: Peter Lutjen) I don't mean it as a bad thing when I say that the plot of John Scalzi's 2014 novel Lock In outwardly resembles that of a slightly tired TV crime drama. In fact, this is a major part of the book's charm. On the surface, Lock In is very unapologetically a noir-mystery centering around the exploits of a chain-smoking FBI agent struggling to solve a set of gruesome murders, with the novel's sci-fi elements manifesting via the fact that this otherwise familiar story is told (essentially) from the perspective of this woman's android coworker. Predictable to the crime-thriller genre, there is an elaborate plot-line involving murder and corporate espionage, and a long list of suspects whom the protagonists must investigate one by one as the mystery deepens. All the while, this story takes place within the context of a larger narrative involving hundreds of thousands of beings who, at least outwardly , appear to be sentient androids who in t...

Strange Horizons Review of Kaisa Saarinen’s Weather Underwater

(Cover Illustrator: Alice M.) Strange Horizons have posted a review I wrote for them of Kaisa Saarinen's novel Weather Underwater , which can be read at this link. This book was an intense story to read, but also a fascinating work to spend time thinking about. The main plot follows two characters who end up on opposite sides of a fascist takeover of a near-future version of Britain. One protagonist, Mia, is an environmental engineer who joins the titular antifascist organization Weather Underwater after the rise of an anti-immigration dictatorship called the Ebbtide party. The book's other character, Lily, is a former romantic partner of Mia's who chooses to work as an undercover agent for Ebbtide itself, but who is unintentionally reunited with Mia when she is tasked by Ebbtide with secretly infiltrating Weather Underwater as a spy.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

(Cover Artist: Ernst Haas) There's a way that Ursula Le Guin's 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven is often described, and I want to start this review by talking about why this is a summary of this book which I disagree with. Generally, the way I've seen The Lathe of Heaven characterized is that it is the story of a man named George Orr, who believes that everything he dreams becomes real. Terrified of this power, George is assigned therapy with a psychiatrist named William Haber, who sets out to cure George of these (supposedly) delusional beliefs in his brain's ability to change the world. In time however Haber reveals himself to actually be a mad scientist with a god complex--a man obsessed with finding a way to manipulate the reality-bending power of George's dreams so as to remake the world in his own image. Soon, George realizes that he must do whatever he can to keep the power of his dreams from Haber's control, and in so doing protect the universe from h...

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This blog does not use generative AI. All of the articles and reviews posted here were written by me, and I have done my best to block web crawlers used in training commercial Large Language Models from accessing this material.

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