This is old-school science fiction set in a huge underground “silo,” a vertical city where a remnant of humanity takes shelter from a deadly surface environment, their only view of the outside coming from a set of live camera images … Continue reading
Connelly is an excellent mystery author whose novels are highly readable if not necessarily memorable. In this one his main series character, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, who’s now nearing retirement and working on the department’s cold case squad, investigates a … Continue reading
Fry is a well-known British actor, writer, and public intellectual as well as the former comedy partner of Hugh Laurie. This is his first novel, a very weird and occasionally very fun cross between a coming of age tale and … Continue reading
The narrator is a boy of nearly 12 who lives in Larklight, a rambling Victorian house that reaches upwards in all directions from a central cellar where the gravity generator is located. Mechanical servants keep it clean with the aid … Continue reading
As I indicated in the set of reviews I posted back in May, I greatly enjoyed the Jesse Stone movies starring Tom Selleck that were broadcast on CBS in 2005-2012. I’ve now finished reading the original novels by Robert B. … Continue reading
Almost nobody thinks income and wealth should be distributed with perfect equality. Most of us want to see talent, creativity, and hard work rewarded, both because we think that’s fairer and because we recognize the practical benefits of giving people … Continue reading
Nobel-Prize-winning Princeton University economist Paul Krugman contends that we could get out of the current economic doldrums fairly quickly—not overnight, but in less than two years—were it not for the fact that so many politicians here and in Europe have … Continue reading
Pleiades, built by the non-profit Galaxian Society, is Earth’s first starship, and nobody, not even its builders, fully understands how it works. Theory says it should be able to leap instantly from a given point in space to another one … Continue reading
The late Donald Westlake is best known as a writer of crime fiction, some serious and hard-boiled (including a series he wrote under the name Richard Stark) and others very funny, notably those starring John Dortmunder, a professional thief with … Continue reading
This is an entertaining history of the idea of a hollow Earth, from what at the time was serious scientific speculation (concentric Earths supposedly explaining why the magnetic poles don’t line up with the geographical ones) to crank theorizing to … Continue reading