The Orville is a riff of Star Trek the Next Generation from Seth McFarlane, creator of Family Guy/American Dad and resurrector of Cosmos. It’s a problematic mess…However there is a moment in the Orville that spoke to me.
Author: James
Review – All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
A young witch and an aspiring super scientist try to survive childhood and save the world.
There’s no getting around it, this feels like an excellent novella stretched into an OK novel.
Review – Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
A loyal commander teams up with a traitorous general to crush a rebellion through a combination of super advanced weapons and manipulation of the calender.
Weird is easy. Believably, coherently and off-puttingly weird is much harder…
Review – Rivers of London Series by Ben Aaronovitch
A member of the filth finds his calling as the police’s newest, and nearly only, wizard.
Peter Grant is not your typical urban fantasy protagonist. For starters he’s a cop, and an extremely junior one at that. More importantly, at the beginning of the series, not a very good cop: better than a hanger, but lacking in the instincts and discipline that would make him stand out. He’s also black, which matter less then it might have in the past, but certainly carries varying degrees of baggage in the Police, London, and England respectively.
Essay – Harry Potter, my father, and me?
Harry Potter day falls in the same weekend as father’s day this year, and so this seems like an appropriate time to meditate on how I missed the Harry Potter boat. My father and the book are so inextricably linked in my mind that I vividly remember where I was when I read Harry Potter […]
Review – Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik
The first book is in this series is pretty close to the platonic ideal of Napoleonic ships and Dragons. As the series continues however, Novik sets her sights on bigger things, and does something laudable that many fantasy authors never do – thinks through the consequences of her premise. Over the course of the next five novels, she examines the extension of the franchise, slavery, colonialism, mercantilism, and the conflict between honor and duty, through the prism of a world where power is shifted by the existence of Dragon’s weighing 10’s of tons.
Essay – Salvaging Iron Fist
The critical consensus has been savage, and the post show pile on has continued. However Netflix will be pushing forward with the Defenders, and possibly with further Iron Fist seasons. Rather than lament the Iron Fist we could have had, let’s look at what can be done to salvage the character, using what we have on the screen.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – Shorter fiction recommendations – aka what to read beyond the winners!
One of the tragedies of the Hugos is that once the winners are announced, all the other worthy nominees tend to get forgotten. This can be particularly egregious when there is a large disparity in the categories, or there is an instant classic in a category that overshadows works that would have won in any other year. So instead of discussing the Hugo’s in terms of winners and losers, let me instead present a list of nominated stories that I think are worth reading. I hope you find something that peaks your interest…
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – Categories I probably shouldn’t have voted in…
I’m a big believer in trying to read all of the eligible works in a category before voting, but I sometimes, hypocritically vote in some of the “fan” categories for sites or writers I regularly read. Obviously these awards shouldn’t become popularity contests in terms of site readership, but by the same token, unless an […]
Review – 17776 The Future of Football by Jon Bois
A look at the role of football in the far future of 17776 from an extremely unique perspective…
Sometimes surprise is everything. If you have any interest in social science fiction – in particular how society adapts to change, or the nature of play, then just give 17776 a try, preferably spacing the chapters out and on a device that can scroll pages easily.