Re: Faith

If you’re a big enough gardening geek to know who Luther Burbank was, you might like “Faith,” by James Patrick Kelly. Or you might be in the mood for a nerdy love story. I just liked the way the title character, Faith, flings a Stephen King book at the floozy in her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s car, putting […]

Re: Itsy Bitsy Spider

Unlike yesterday, I only found metaphorical spiders in “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” by James Patrick Kelly. Oh, sure, this spider seems cute, but by the time you reach the singing, the story has taken you to uncomfortable places.

Re: How High the Moon

“How High the Moon,” by Patrick Lundrigan is a charming story in which a couple argue over who is a robot and who programmed whom. It sounds almost like a game they’re playing with each other. But if one of them really is a robot, maybe they’re programmed to say that. Shades of Blade Runner.

Mayflies and Eggs

All these little bugs having one last fling before winter are reminding me of a trio of stories I heard on Drabblecast a while ago, or as they like to call it, a Trifecta.

Re: Stable Strategies

After seeing Eileen Gunn at Readercon last July, I finally checked out her collection of short fiction, Stable Strategies and Others. It’s a slender volume filled out with three encomiums plus an author’s foreword plus endnotes for each story, all commenting about how slowly she writes. What she does write is good stuff.

Re: The Years of Rice and Salt

You probably already know that The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson tells an alternate history where the Black Plague wiped out Christian Europe, which leaves a world dominated by Buddhists and Muslims. This gives you a good excuse to explore parts of world history we don’t hear so much about. As […]

Re: Newton’s Wake

Newton’s Wake, by Ken McLeod has a terrific beginning, in which Lucinda Carlyle leads her team through a gate to another planet, on an expedition of combat archeology. They storm a henge and awaken an alien technology that unleashes war machines on them. And in the wake of that battle, the book reveals a grand […]

Re: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

I found Cory Doctorow’s first novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kindom,” a fast but annoying read. Fast both because the story rattles along at breakneck speed and because I was reading as fast as I could hoping to figure what the story was about. In the Bitchun Society, a post-Scarcity economy where your […]

Re: Mars Is No Place for Children

It’s just about a year since I last paid a visit to Mars. This time I went via “Mars is No Place for Children,” by Mary Turzillo. I like the story’s depiction of life on Mars, and the neat little inventive twists. Considering that this was my desktop image for over a year, it’s no […]

Hugo 2009 scorecard

If you care about the Hugos, you already know that winners have been announced. All I know is that it looks like neither my votes nor my predictions went very far.