The Martian, 369 pages Andy Weir copyright 2011, Crown Publishing 2014, available on Amazon in ebook and audio. As threatened, I saw down and read Andy Weir’s The Martian, the book upon which the generally marvelous Ridley Scott / Matt Damon movie was based. This was brought about by reading Weir’s suspense/thriller/geek fest, Project Hail …
Billy Summers Stephen King copyright 2021 Scribner, 527 pages I sometimes think of Stephen King as being the Al Hirschfeld of writers. With minimalist precision, with just a few strokes he can create a fully recognizable and unique character. It takes amazing skill to do that, and the results are so simple and effortless that …
Project Hail Mary Author Andy Weir Audio read by Ray Porter Cover artist Will Staehle Publisher Ballantine Books Publication date May 4, 2021 Media type Print, ebook, audiobook Pages 496 In Ripley Scott’s The Martian, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is stranded alone on Mars, and has no way to communicate with Earth, which in turn …
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei Co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott and illustrated by Harmony Becker. Top Shelf Productions 2019, 204 pages I first learned of the Canadian internment of Japanese-descended people in British Columbia—some 90% of the residents in that province—when I was 12 years old. My father told me of …
Eight Novels by Joe Abercrombe I’ve been working my way through the collected works of Joe Abercrombie over the past few months, starting with the two books that begin his ongoing second trilogy, The Age of Madness (A Little Hatred and The Trouble with Peace) and his First Law Trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They …
Bad Dog Military Science Fiction Across A Holographic Multiverse (Gate Walkers) by Ashley R. Pollard Triode Press 317pp. The first few pages of Pollard’s book may strike some as a bit of a slog. You get hit with a lot of military jargon right off the bat and might feel that you picked up an …
Sun Fall by Jim Al-Khalili, 2019, Bantam Press, 440pp, available through Amazon. When I learned that Jim Al-Khalili, a top theoretical quantum physicist and world-famous television presenter had written a science fiction novel, Sun Fall, I knew I had to give it a read. In part, it was because [shameless plug follows] my own two …
Later Stephen King, 2012, Hard Case Crime, 256pp. Stephen King has gone back to his roots and written what he might call “a good old-fashioned horrorstory.” More to the point, it’s a ghost story. Specifically, a kid who can see ghosts. This is the type of story where King made his bones (so to speak), …
The Trouble With Peace A while back, I did a review of Joe Abercrombie’s A Little Hatred. the first book in his new Age of Madness trilogy. It was the first work of fantasy by a heretofore unknown writer to absolutely wow me since the 1980s, when I encountered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Abercrombie’s writing …
A Little Hatred A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie Copyright © Joe Abercrombie 2019 First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Gollancz, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group LtdAn Hachette UK Company A buddy of mine dropped off a copy of A Little Hatred without any comments attached. Our tastes in fiction are …