Ryan

Six Wakes is a sci-fi/mystery that takes the familiar idea of the locked-room mystery and moves it to a spaceship. Six clones wake up aboard a ship, their last memory being just before they boarded it twenty-five years earlier. Around them is evidence that all six had recently met with foul play. The novel follows these six characters as they try to unravel the mystery of their missing time, and find out which one of them was the murderer in their previous life.

What makes this story so fresh and dynamic is how Lafferty is able to blend the the two pillars of the story together (the mystery elements and the sci-fi ones), creating a story that felt both familiar and completely unique throughout the entire time I was reading it. She slowly unveils this fascinating, complex world that's been impacted by its technological developments, and provides us just enough clues to keep us engaged in the novel's central mystery while withholding enough that it remains compelling and thrilling. Along with the worldbuilding, the interesting characters, and the engaging mystery, Lafferty weaves themes of rebirth, hopefulness in the face of tragedy, and how technology affects our sense of morality. This was a fascinating book and I loved the experience of reading it.

This series is really interesting, as it allows writer Simon Furman (who, for the uninitiated, is like the Proust of giant robot comics) to build Transformers up from the ground with relatively little outside influence. This volume features both Megatron and Optimus Prime coming to Earth to lead up their relevant factions after the events of the last TF volume. One of the great things about this comic was in how it treated the relative leaders - there was a great sense of danger and fear created in the characters when they learned that Megatron was coming to Earth, and likewise a sense of calm from Prime's involvement. Furman does a really great job of giving the characters individual personalities as well, which is something that's never really been done well with Transformers before.

This was a fairly enjoyable ghost story, but like a lot of stuff from King's middle period, it just feels bloated. You could probably have cut 200 pages worth of story out of this and still had a complete, enjoyable novel.

Based on the series this is part of and the misleading cover art, I thought this was going to be a hardboiled, trenchcoats-and-dark-alleyways sort of mystery novel. What I got was something completely, wonderfully different from that: Stephen King writing post-modern metafiction.

Two old newspapermen sit down with an intern at their small-town Maine paper and tell her the story of The Colorado Kid, whose dead body was discovered on the beach some 25 years previous. They lead her through the mystery, with the whens and wheres of his disappearance and discovery, and along the way teach her the difference between Stories, which have a clearly defined beginning, middle and ending, and Life, which rarely does. That's why, these newspapermen theorize, people like stories - they're cleaner and safer than life, and better fit our preconceptions of things. Life, in comparison, is messy and thematically incoherent (and, I believe, more beautiful for those reasons), and that's why it's the job of the storyteller to tell their stories well. To prove this point, the mystery of The Colorado Kid is just that - it's a mystery, one that has no solution provided and now easy explanation of how or why it happened. It just ends, and leaves us as the audience to try to make sense of it - to make the life of these characters fit our idea of what story should be. That twist at the end - that the mystery is just a mystery, and has no explanation - wouldn't have worked if the characters were any less realized, and it wouldn't have worked in a longer story, but here? Damn, it works.

The ending's a little on-the-nose but that's appreciated; given the amount of mystery surrounding the entire story, leaving it at all ambiguous would have been horrible.

One of the problems with war is that it requires warriors: you have to take people and turn them into weapons, which creates the problem of what to do with those weapons after the war is over. A gun can go on a rack, a sword can be mounted on a wall - but what to do with the warriors, and how to re-integrate them into regular society?

Starkings et al address this question by literally creating warriors - the oddly-named Elephantmen, warriors created by creating genetic amalgams of humans and different beasts, such as elephants, hippopotami, and crocodiles. The series begins after the war they were created for ends, and they deal with being celebrities, freaks, and the most visible veterans of war in a dystopian future.

Stylistically, the series is a blend of noir and science fiction, but one that avoids being overly “pulpy” in the traditional sense, while telling a series of loosely-connected short stories.

This was luxuriously and beautifully written. I've never read anything by GGK before, but I can absolutely see why he has the reputation that he has, based on this. Each sentence, each paragraph was an absolute treat.

Beyond the writing style, the story itself was absolutely worth reading. Three different religious groups struggling to coexist in an approximation of Spain during the time of Moorish occupation, and the novel follows the political and social conflicts that that kind of coexistence would imply. The characters that we follow come from a wide variety of social positions within that society, and seeing them interact was fascinating and informative. I loved every page of this book.

I was once told that “art is the point where order meets chaos”, and that definition is one that kept coming back to me while reading this novel, as it is very concerned with the points at which opposites meet. The plot of the book concerns istelf with a nameless, faceless narrator, his complex relationship with his best friend F. and his wife Edith, and his increasing obsession with a 16th-century Iroquois saint. However, it's important to remember that this is poetry, so plot is relatively unimportant.

One of the most interesting elements of Beautiful Losers is that while the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, the Iroquois saint, is presented with crystal clarity, the story of the narrator and F. is told in a beatnik stream-of-consciousness that I found reminiscent of Burroughs. I think that Cohen is making a statement about nostalgia here - people yearn for the past not necessarily because it was better, but because it is structured, organized, and predictable. That's a strong pull, especially when contrasted with the pandemonium of choice that the present provides for us.

As it moves into its second part, Beautiful Losers transitions from the nameless narrator of the first part to F., who is composing a letter to his friend. In this we are presented with an opposing view - that the past was never as perfect as we made it out to be, and that the present is a source of opportunity as well. F. states this most clearly when he states that, even in the secularized, technological times in which we live, “God is alive. Magic is afoot.” Einstein said that he can live our lives as if nothing is a miracle, or that everything is a miracle. Cohen counters, with this book, that both of those statements are equally true, forming a yin and yang to one another.

I went through a bit of a Victorian period in my early teens, and Holmes was a major part of that. I don't think I ever read this one, though, oddly enough? A fairly quick read; the solution to the mystery comes across a little deus ex machina, and there's this weird interlude of 6 chapters or so focusing on the Mormons of Utah, and their “exotic culture” that is textbook Victorian literature. Still, an interesting introduction to Holmes and Watson, and their relationship.

A bittersweet ending to the Share series. Bitter because it is an ending to an excellent set of novels (as well as due to some plot elements I'm not at liberty to discuss, as per Article 37). But sweet, at the same time, because we've seen Ishmael Wang grow from an 18-year old whiz kid into a man who has built a life for himself in the cold of the deep dark, one fully different from the kid he was but yet fully recognizable.

I was a little worried about this entry in the series at first, because the plot seemed like the kind you would find in a sitcom spin-off series: Ish gets his own ship and company, and has to take on a new crew-member who needs to fulfill a year in space to fulfill the terms of her father's will and inherit a shipping fortune.

The entire thing, though, is handled with enough skill and graceful crafting that once the story's started, you don't second-guess it, and get dragged into the narrative. It's a fitting ending, one that brings us full-circle to both the beginning of the entire series and the second half of the series that was started in Double Share, while still maintaining its own narrative and emotional arc separate from the series on the whole.

I realized only in the middle of this that, while it's part 1 of a trilogy, it's also really book 7 of a 9 book set. So I was a little lost for a bit, but was eventually after to figure out exactly what was going on.

What Turtledove's done with this series is set up an alternate history of the United States; one in which the Confederate States of America won the US Civil War, and were able to establish themselves as a significant political and economic force.

This series, specifically, starts a little over 50 years after the end of the Civil War; The USA and the German Empire have just been victorious in World War I, winning a decisive victory over Quadruple Alliance of Russia, England, France, and the CSA. As a result of the war, the USA is occupying Canada, and is demanding reparations from the CSA.

If you're a student of history, you can kind of guess where this is going: hyperinflation, chronic unemployment, and bitterness about the outcome of the war result in a large group of people in the country becoming increasingly angry and leaning towards violence, which certain political forces manipulate by placing the blame on aristocrats in government and minority groups present in the country. Turtledove has the CSA parallel fate of the Weimar Republic in our reality, and seeing those parallels is one of the main sources of tension in the book.

The main problem I had with the book was that it relies too heavily on that knowledge of history to drive your interest in the story. The main dramatic tension comes from knowing your history between the two world wars, rather than from the characters; at times they seem almost like set-pieces being moved around in order to move the historical story from A to B. Still, the idea is interesting enough that I'll make sure to read the next two books in the trilogy.

Plot: six teenagers start classes at Morning Glory Academy, and quickly start to learn secrets about themselves and the school.

The mysteries of Morning Glories are definitely enticing: Is there anything connecting the students, other than sharing a birthdate? Why are members of the staff trying to kill them (or, at least, making them think they want to kill them)? Perhaps most importantly, what are the things in the basement? There have been some comparisons made to Lost, in terms of how these mysteries are laid out for later followup, and how certain reoccuring phrases (such as “The Hour of our Release Draws Near”) show up in unexpected locales. They're definitely the kind of sci-fi mysteries that draw me in, and I'm curious to see what happens next with them.

The downside, I would have to say, is the characterization. There's a big cast here, but we're given little to differentiate them from one another (the art isn't a big help here, either, as everyone has the same, plasticy look to them). Also, there's a lot that happens to the kids in this volume, and they seem to take it all in stride. I think the story would be stronger if it were slowed down a little, and we got to learn more about the characters in between those moments.

A short, simple e-book that chronicles Leia's recovery after the previous book in the series. Fairly straight-forward, introduces a new faction of Jedi, and allows for some reconciliation between Han and Leia. Good, simple stuff all around.

I was expecting this to be yet another “kids with special abilities at school” story, in the vein of X-Men and Harry Potter. And yes, it was a very good example of that, full of the awkwardness, nervousness, and fun that high school can be, but it also had a deeper level of intrigue and mystery that will keep me coming back for more.

Apparently the fights between superheroes and supervillians are a sham, prearranged WWE style and fought for the benefit of an audience. But we're not told the how, or why, of this, and I think it's going to be fascinating when we eventually find out.

Lee and Kirby are the McCartney and Lennon of superhero comics, so this “lost” story was obviously of interest. It's definitely not their best work together, though, and the additional material thrown in with it to make this big enough for an entire TPB stretches a bit thin.

I've been getting more interested in the Inhumans, due entirely to their taking on more of a role within the MCU. I've been a lifelong Marvel comics fan, so I was aware of them before, but they were off in a corner of the universe that I didn't really venture into all that often.

This reprint collection ended up being a mixture of the utterly fantastic (Ann Nocenti's graphic novel, Colleen Doran's Medusa/BB pinup, and the Marvel Handbook enteries) and the utterly mediocre (the “Untold Story” special). Fun, interesting characters with a unique dynamic that sets them aside from the rest of the Marvel universe.

This made absolutely no sense. It's a bunch of short stories that are completely disconnected from each other, each of which are (I'm assuming) depending on other stories not in this book to have any tension or emotional connection. At the very least they shouldn't be in a collection together - I haven't read the rest of Secret Invasion so I can't comment on how comprehensible the storyline on the whole was.

This was a fairly interesting collection - it's all considered “non-canon”, but features a collection of short stories and art pieces by the artists that worked on Episode III of Star Wars.

The stories themselves are a mixed bag - there's an interesting Darth Maul story set after Ep.3, and a nice letter to Mon Mothma from her son before his death during the battle of Hoth.

This probably wouldn't be of interest to anyone but the biggest Star Wars fans, but for those that are fans of the movies, it's definitely worth a read.

I'm not usually a big fan of Ferguson's work, but this book was hilarious, and provided a good, general overview to Canadian history at the same time.

I don't feel entirely comfortable writing a detailed review of this book, because I didn't fully read through the entire thing - it was due back at the library, so I only had a chance to skim through the last few chapters. Eventually I'll get back to the rest of it, however.

Randall provides an introductory-level approach to string theory, as well as the history of physics leading up to it (Newton, Einstein, and that type of stuff). She does so in a relaxed, easy to follow manner that's definitely intended for people who want to learn more about contemporary physics. In that case, I suppose this could be considered the “Brief History of Time” of string theory.

That said, I'm still not entirely sold on the theory. The basic idea of string theory is that we live in a universe of more than the four dimensions we're used to, and that for one reason or another we haven't been able to understand or detect those dimensions. These dimensions are used to offer an explanation about why certain elements of physics don't seem to work together, such as the relative weakness of gravity compared to other fundamental forces, and the lack of cohesiveness between relativity and quantum physics. Answering these questions has been the goal of a lot of physicists in the past generation, so I can understand the appeal of the theory.
However (and maybe this is just me being uninformed), from what I've read, string theory seems to rely a lot on conjecture and guesswork, at this point at least, with little actual experimental reality to back it up. I remain unsold on the theory for now as a result.

This was an absolutely beautiful book of poetry. It is centred around Neruda's experiences with the Spanish civil war; I don't know enough about that conflict to analyze it too deeply, but this will definitely not be the last Neruda that I read.

When is a Star Wars novel not a Star Wars novel?

That seems to be one of the questions raised by Republic Commando: Hard Contact. On the surface, it very much seems to be one - you have a group of Commando clone troopers trying to rescue a young Jedi from a Mandalorian warrior, and the Clone Wars are very actively happening in the background of the novel's action. Despite these surface similarities, however, the novel bears very little in common with the rest of the Star Wars universe, and what is the “house style” of the EU (Expanded Universe) novels in general. If a few names and titles had have been changed, this could have very easily been an ‘original fiction' title, rather than a tie-in novel. For all of the stories that have been written in the Star Wars universe, most of them have focused very heavily on the ‘Star' portion of the title, with little if any focus done on the ‘Wars' part. Hard Contact changes that by delivering a story of military sci-fi, focusing on an elite group of Commando clones.

Throughout the course of the novel, Traviss does a very good job of developing all of her clone soldiers as distinct individuals. In other parts of the Clone Wars saga, the clones exist more or less as cyphers; in addition to sharing a genetic code, it appeared that they all shared a character (or lack thereof). One of the themes that Traviss explores is the idea of finding both a culture and an individual identity, and the difficulties that would be associated with that, when there are millions of others who share both your physical form and most of your personal past. [return][return]I generally try not to be a snob when it comes to liscenced material, but in the past year I've read a few that were really a chore to get through. Hard Contact is the exact opposite of that; with or without the Star Wars name attached to it, it was a really enjoyable piece of fiction writing.

Great collection of short stories, all 140 characters or less (the length of an SMS). And I'm not just saying that because I'm featured in it!

I gave this book a read after repeatedly seeing it listed as one of the “greatest science fiction stories of all time” in several different places. Quite frankly, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Overall, it's a good enough read. I can see why it's considered an “important” book, and why it would have caused such a splash when it was released, what with its themes of nuclear holocaust and the conflict between Church and State. And, while those conflicts are just as important today as they were then, the book feels somewhat ... dated, nonetheless.

Anyways, the plot in a nutshell: we are given three interconnected short stories, all taking place in the same post-apocalyptic future. Through them, we see how humanity manages to bring itself up out of the ashes, and into the next nuclear holocaust centuries later. The idea of the cyclical nature of time has never been more depressing.

This was an interesting experience for me - I came to the novel after having seen the film version and having read the manga (well, chapter 1 of it, anyways), and yet, at the same time, this was the first time that I can really saw that I got something other than mindless violence from Battle Royale.

The basic premise: a futuristic, totalitarian Japanese society has set up a game where each year, one high school class is randomly chosen to participate. Participants of the ‘game' are placed on an island, each given a randomly assigned weapon, and are told that the last one left surviving will be the one allowed off of the island.

It sounds grisly and violent, and it is - there were parts where I had to put the book down for a bit lest the violence overwhelm me. However, like any truly good violent piece of art, that violence is used as a metaphor - in this case, for how society tends to pit people against each other, and how living a dog-eat-dog type of life might end up with someone on top, but it also ends up with a lot of corpses along the way.

There are a lot of characters in the book, and it's a little hard to tell them apart from each other originally (due to them all being the same age, from roughly the same background, etc), but throughout the book you get to learn more about all of the little details that make up a life. You learn about their personal history, their silly little feuds and crushes, and the dreams they had for the future, before the game got in the way. If anything, that's the most horrific part of the book - not the blood and gore, but seeing people go from these little concerns over which boy (or girl) likes who, and then being thrust into a world where their very lives are at stake.

To sume up: the basic concept is The Running Man meets Lord of the Flies, with bits of slasher movies and The Catcher In The Rye thrown in for good measure. And, if you can get past the violent elements, it's definitely worth reading.

I'm not going to lie; one of my main motivations for reading this book was knowing that I could get a free copy of it as an ebook from the author's website. I mean, it also seemed to have some interesting subject matter, but that ease of accessibility pushed me over the edge, and gave me a chance to read it over the Christmas holiday. And I'm really glad I did.[return]Depending on the type of person that you are, the ideas of “fraud”, “graft”, “comic book back-issue pricing”, and “political donations” might seem like they're worlds apart. If you're someone like Rick Dakan, however, they make perfect sense together, and form the basis of a fast-paced, exciting caper novel.[return]The novels' protagonist is Paul Reynolds, comic book auter and video game designer who we meet in the process of being given the bum's rush by his former business partners. He happens to meet up with Chloe, a self-described modern-day pirate who offers to help him “get even” with those that wronged him.[return]What follows after that is a standard sort of caper tale, lovingly dipped in geek culture. If you're the sort of person who likes both of those things, you'll probably really enjoy this book. The characters are believable, sympathetic, and enjoyable; the plot moves along at a fast pace, with just enough twists and turns to keep you guessing about where it's going next. [return]On the other hand, if you don't know what an FPS is, or haven't heard about open source movement, this may not be the book for you.[return]