Re: Glory

An ingot of metallic hydrogen… Whoa, wait a second. An ingot. Of metallic hydrogen. Okay, I see what kind of story “Glory,” by Greg Egan is going to be. Old school, hard core, science fiction. That hydrogen gets put through some outrageous changes, which are mind-bending beyond the point of disbelief all the way back […]

Re: Finisterra

In the world of Sky, island-sized living zaratanes float through the upper layers of the atmosphere. A zaratán is so big, whole towns live on their backs and go unnoticed. So naturally, people fly to get about, in balloons or anemopters or starships lurking in orbit. It seems like just the place for an ambitious […]

Re: Tideline

As with “The House Beyond Your Sky,” what impresses me most about “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear is the sound and imagery of the prose. Here’s the opening: Chalcedony wasn’t built for crying. She didn’t have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled […]

Re: Last Contact

In the classic mode of Big Idea impacting little people, “Last Contact,” by Stephen Baxter opens with two women in a garden talking about the end of the universe. The mother, Maureen, tends to go on a bit about her garden, but speaking as one who tends to go on a bit about her own […]

Re: Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?

Set in the same universe of Learning the World, where stars are surrounded by green habitats, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?,” by Ken McLeod starts out looking like a romp across the stars. The narrator sleeps with the wrong woman, and rather than work for the next 257 years to pay off his fine, he […]

Re: The House Beyond Your Sky

Some science fiction reads like popular science writing dressed up in story. “The House Beyond Your Sky,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, is a story you really can’t understand unless you already know some science. The references to cosmology–like simulated universes and critical constants–go completely unexplained. And you know what? I like being treated as an adult.

Re: All Seated On The Ground

I usually don’t like Christmas stories. Or Christmas. And especially not Christmas carols. But I do like choral music. Which probably goes a long way toward explaining why like “All Seated On The Ground,” by Connie Willis so much. It begins in the middle of the frenzy of the “holiday season,” when six aliens come […]

Re: Wikiworld

You know how you’re not supposed to use wikipedia as a reference? By the same token, you can’t take “Wikiworld,” by Paul Di Fillippo all that seriously. Full of wordplay and in-jokes (the biggest being the term jimmywhale), it’s set in a world were wikis become social groups that collect for various purposes, from building […]

Re: Recovering Apollo 8

I was just a kid in the 60s, but I remember the uncertainty of the Apollo program, from the terrible reality of Apollo 1, to wacky speculations that Apollo 11 would sink into the lunar dust. The movie “Apollo 13” captured wonderfully the constant fear that something might go wrong. When you look at what […]

What’s your favorite SF movie scene?

Chris Howard asks what’s your favorite SF movie scene? Well, this is a huge spoiler, but the first thing that comes to my mind is the sudden impalement of a beloved character near the end of “Serenity”. It’s the classic, shocker, anything-can-happen-after-this moment. The next that comes to mind is from “Dark Star”: “It’s time […]