needs more demons?

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Entries Tagged as 's-author'

Tom Standage: The Victorian Internet

24 Aug 2008 · No Comments

(Subtitle: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers)
Basically, I loved The Turk so much I’m going to read everything by Standage I can get my hands on. This book explores the meteoric rise (and precipitous decline) of the telegraph from the historical perspective. pretty much, of Web 1.0 (the copyright […]

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Tags: history · v-title · science · s-author

Tom Standage: The Turk

15 Aug 2008 · 2 Comments

(Subtitle: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine)
The Turk recounts the amazing true story of a machine that purported to play chess, and which was seldom beaten except by the top players of its era. “The Turk” and its operators enjoyed a long and colorful career that intersected (and sometimes inspired) the […]

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Tags: history · science · s-author

Charles Stross: Missile Gap

04 Aug 2008 · No Comments

Good golly, I love libraries. I was delighted to have a chance to read Stross’s Missile Gap, a novella published in a small print run without coughing up its hefty price tag. I enjoyed Missle Gap, but truth to tell, if I’d paid the asking price, I would have been kinda bummed.
Missile Gap shares […]

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Tags: m-title · historical · horror · science fiction · fantasy · s-author

Robert Sheckley: Uncanny Tales

28 May 2008 · No Comments

Uncanny Tales comprises 16 short stories of uneven quality from the final two decades of Sheckley’s career. “Magic, Maples and Maryanne,” is a fine cautionary fable of magic and morality with an almost Jonathan Carroll-like vibe. “The New Horla” (the title is a reference to a classic Guy de Maupassant short) is grimly gripping in […]

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Tags: u-title · science fiction · fantasy · s-author

Karl Schroeder: Ventus

22 May 2008 · No Comments

Part of the fun of Ventus lies in discovering how Schroeder’s unusual milieu arose, so I will try to avoid spoilers (I didn’t read the book jacket flap before I started reading, and I’m glad). But it’s very quickly obvious that Ventus concerns a collision between two societies — one feudal and pre-industrial, one extremely […]

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Tags: v-title · science fiction · s-author

Charles Stross: The Jennifer Morgue

07 May 2008 · No Comments

I think The Jennifer Morgue is the most successful of Charles Stross’s novels that I’ve read so far. It’s a mutant melange of genres including xenophobic Lovecraftian horror/fantasy; Dilbert-esque, geek-celebrating cubicle rat satire; modern techno espionage thriller; and old-school shaken-not-stirred James Bondage — all served up with a hefty post-modern literary twist and dark […]

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Tags: thriller · j-title · horror · fantasy · s-author

Robert Sheckley: Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?

25 Apr 2008 · No Comments

I enjoyed the Interstellar Radio Company’s dramatization of Sheckley’s short story “Ghost V” quite a bit. It reminded me that Sheckley was one of the classic science fiction writers I’d never really explored. I’ve been working on remedying that, starting with the volume at hand, a short story collection from 1972.
The stories in […]

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Tags: science fiction · c-title · s-author

William Browning Spencer: The Ocean and All Its Devices

24 Jan 2008 · No Comments

William Browning Spencer’s fiction often features ancient alien creatures inimical (or at best, indifferent) to humanity, and as a result I don’t think I’ve ever seen a review of his work that didn’t mention a certain author whose name isn’t quite Howard Phillips Adoreart. Like many facile comparisons, it strikes me as unfair. For one […]

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Tags: o-title · horror · science fiction · fantasy · s-author

Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon

05 Jan 2008 · 1 Comment

Cryptonomicon has several attributes that will be familiar to readers of other Stephenson novels like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. There’s the crazy see-saw between action that’s basically naturalistic and surreal, exaggerated sequences. If Cryptonomicon were a movie, I feel like most of it would be live action, but many of the scenes […]

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Tags: thriller · historical · c-title · s-author

Sean Stewart: Perfect Circle

11 Oct 2007 · No Comments

I’ve been thinking about this novel for months, and I still can’t figure out out how it feels so fresh and original, even though it’s built from such familiar components. Will Kennedy is a slightly off-the-rails underachiever who could have a bit part in almost any Richard Linklater movie without sticking out. He has the […]

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Tags: p-title · horror · fantasy · s-author