You get drafted in the year 1997, your brain tortured out of its pacifism by hypnotic compulsion to kill. Many of your troopmates die in training on the icy planet of Charon, past Pluto. You spend the next thousand years, fighting a skirmish then sleeping through a trip […]
Joe Cube is a regular Silicon Valley guy, worried about his relationship with his wife and the upcoming Y2K crisis. One day a fourth-dimensional being named Momo manifests in his house and she wants to make a deal: she’ll supply 4D antennae, and Joe can market cellphones that […]
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton is about dragons and, to be perfectly honest, I had low expectations for this book. Too many fantasy novels have been written about dragons, and the subject has been beaten quite to death. Could it still be possible to write something interesting […]
Toronto’s downtown has been abandoned by government and police. The rich have fled to the suburbs, and put up a barrier to keep all those nasty poor people from leaving the middle of the city. Nalo Hopkinson’s first book, Brown Girl in the Ring, takes this simple and […]
Yevgeny Zamiatin was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution in 1917 but by 1924 and the publication of a book ironically entitled We, he was worried that the revolution had brought not freedom but repression and conformity. After being persecuted for many years, he wrote an angry […]
With his new book Ilium, Dan Simmons has written an exciting work of science fiction that is partly based on Homer’s Iliad. At first it would seem that Simmons is writing Ilium in the shadow of the Iliad — a dry and dull piece of literature, right? — […]
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The Cultural Gutter 