Re:SUM

SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman is a collection of 40 flash stories, each packed with dense, lucid, playful ironies about what might come after this life. Many play with SF tropes, like the idea that we can transfer our minds into computers, or perhaps we were created by other intelligences that […]

But wait there’s more Boskone

Does anything ever really end? Even coming home from Boskone and talking about it afterwards, my friends were still recommending more books to read.

Boskone to the end

Naturally, the last panel I went to at Boskone was “How Do Endings Matter?” It was a small crowd eager to join the discussion with Debra Doyle, Toni L. P. Kelner, Jim Mann, and Peter Weston Toni L.P. Kelner opened with the classic definition of a good ending being one that leaves you surprised, but […]

YA at Boskone

Consider how many YA books were mentioned at the “If You Liked That, Read This” panel, I was expected even more recommendations from “Why Adults Love YA.” But Bruce Coville, Michael J. Daley, Sarah Beth Durst, Margeret Ronald, and Navah Wolfe pretty much stuck to the topic. Short answer: What’s wrong with liking books that […]

More books you might like at Boskone

One thing we book readers love to do is recommend books to each other. At “One More Time – If You Liked That, Read This …” Debra Doyle, David Anthony Durham, Faye Ringel, Edie Stern, and Christopher Weuve did their best. Christopher Weauve even had a card listing books for those interested in naval history […]

How beer leads to books at Boskone

Possibly the high point of hanging with friends and talking came at the literary beer at the end of Saturday, with various alumnae of the Ultimate SF Workshop, headed by one of our teachers, Craig Shaw Gardner. Sadly, Jeff Carver succumbed to mystery bugs. So Hello again to Fran, Chris Howard and his daughter Chloe, […]

Revisiting The Chinese Room

I’d like to thank Alec Deason again for lifting some of my confusion about his story, “The Chinese Room” while allowing the mystery to remain.

Re: ISO

“ISO,” by Derek Zumsteg makes “Faith“‘s jaunt through the personals look even more nostalgic. The narrator is as spam-writer, who takes a commission to ghost-write an ISO ad in the W4M section. And those are the easy acronyms.

Re: The Chinese Room

I admit it. I need some help with “The Chinese Room,” by Alec Deason. From the first line, it paints a curious scene, full of wonderful details: It held out its palm for Jason to see. There was a single grain of sand on the worn plastic surface. “I have many thoughts,” the thing elaborated.

Re:Think Like A Dinosaur

When I first read “Think Like A Dinosaur,” by James Patrick Kelly, and put the book down, all I could think was, Wow. What a wrenching story.