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

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Showing posts from April, 2020

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Redshirts by John Scalzi

Absurdism Humor John Scalzi Novels Reviews Space Opera

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John Scalzi's satirical 2012 science fiction novel Redshirts is the sort of book whose premise has a tendency to obscure its depth. The plot of…

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Popular Posts

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...

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

(Cover Artist: Raphael Lacoste ) There's a part of me that wants to recommend Paolo Bacigalupi's Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl to almost everyone I know, just not in a good way. The book means well, and the story Bacigalupi wants to tell--one in which the pressures of climate change and resource scarcity drive humanity to begin segregating itself along racial, national, and economic lines--is perhaps even more valid today than it was when the book was first published back in 2009. Outwardly, The Windup Girl is a story which charts not only the horrors of dehumanization resulting from a hyper-capitalist society, but also the numerous ways in which the repeated experience of emotional and physical abuse which this society creates can become internalized by its citizens. On top of all of that, Bacigalupi's storytelling is informed by a clear and meticulous research into the real-world religious and social traditions that his story's setting re...

Strange Horizons Review of Paul Cornell’s Rosebud

(Cover Designer: Jim Tierney ) A review I wrote of Paul Cornell's novella Rosebud is currently up at Strange Horizons. This book is a surreal story about five characters residing within a space-craft called the Rosebud , all of whom possess an eclectic set of unique backgrounds and personalities. The main plot of the story unfolds when this crew discover an apparently inert alien vessel drifting in Saturn's rings, and in the process of attempting to make first contact with this entity, are forced to confront the true nature of the corporate dystopia in which they live. An excerpt from my review is below:

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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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