Category Archives: Books

Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold

I did something recently that I haven’t done for a very long time. I stayed up late–ridiculously late — to finish a book. Farnham’s Freehold was written 50 years ago, but while it kept that long, it turned out I couldn’t wait … Continue reading

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Robert A. Heinlein’s The Star Beast

If I hadn’t already decided to finish reading the Heinlein juveniles, I might have been tempted to skip this one. The jacket copy describes some hijinks involving a boy and his pet alien, Lummox. The cover has a possibly pre-adolescent … Continue reading

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Robert A. Heinlein’s Between Planets

There’s a bit of a progression in the Heinlein juveniles; several progressions, in fact. The physical distance of each book’s journey was to steadily increase, with Heinlein essentially finishing off the Solar System with The Rolling Stones and kicking off … Continue reading

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Seanan McGuire’s Fairy Tale Survival Guide, and notes on The Border at Kinrowan Estate

Seanan McGuire, author of one of my favorite novels of the year, Indexing, which has its premise that all fairy tale archetypes, be they Sleeping Beauty or the Wicked Witch, are tropes that manifest in certain people and there’s nothing … Continue reading

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Tom Parker Bowles, et al., Lonely Planet’s The World’s Best Spicy Food

Regarding the growing popularity of spicy and hot food, I feel rather the way I do when one of my favorite musicians suddenly gets very popular. I’ve been eating hot chiles since the 1960s, long before you could get any … Continue reading

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Seanan McGuire’s Indexing

Upon upon a time, Robert Heinlein based most of his writing (some considerably long after he wrote it) on the idea that all realities were equally possible, so that Robin Hood truly existed in some realty and in another reality … Continue reading

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Matthew Jarpe’s Radio Freefall

Matthew Jarpe’s debut novel, Radio Freefall, is good hard science fiction about good hard rock and roll. Fast-forward Earth a couple decades. A mysterious older musician known only as Aqualung has emerged from the desert with not much more than … Continue reading

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Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children

Once upon a time, 1992 if you must know, the late Robert Heinlein published a spiffy novel called Friday about an Artificial Person, a clone to be precise, named Friday who was genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and … Continue reading

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Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones

In Robert Heinlein’s juvenile romp, The Rolling Stones, a nice Lunar family — mom, dad, grandma, and four kids — hop in a Winnebago and go driving across country for a couple years, to see the sights. Except replace Winnebago with spaceship, … Continue reading

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Glen Cook’s The Tyranny of the Night and Lord of the Silent Kingdom

I’ve been an admirer of Glen Cook’s writing for many years, ever since I read Shadowline, the first book of the Starfishers series, way back when. I had never run into anyone who had quite that mix of myth and … Continue reading

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