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Book Review: Leonardo da Vinci (2004)

All too frequently, when you think about a 500+ page biography, your eyelids automatically start getting heavy. Charles Nicholl, though, does a wonderful job with his exhaustive (by way of detail, not wear on the reader) biography, Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind. Nicholl details da Vinci’s life and work with a writing style […]

Book Review: Sunstorm (2005)

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the primary reasons I became a science fiction fan. During the early 1970s, I read Childhood’s End and the incomparable Hugo Award-winning Rendezvous with Rama and one or two collected works. The enjoyment of those books not only led to more of his books but to many, many other […]

On the Brits and the Hugo Award

Charles Stross, whose Iron Sunrise is one of five nominees for the Hugo Award for best novel, has a lengthy blog post on why all the nominees are British. It is well worth reading in its entirety but here’s some excerpts:

American SF is going through a gloom-laden period induced by external social conditions[.]

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SciFi v. LiFi

I hate the term “SciFi.” At least in the book world, it seems to carry this derogatory connotation that the work probably is not worth reading because it borders on pulp at best. Yet even when certain works are essentially science fiction, if the pundits consider it “LiFi” or literary fiction, it is accorded deference […]

More on McEwan

As I’ve indicated, the clarity of writing and expression isn’t the only reason I am so impressed with Ian McEwan‘s Saturday. Another part of it was he seemed to put on paper thoughts virtually identical to my own on a variety of topics, from post-9/11 society to the power of music. What perhaps hit closest […]