I’ve read plenty of good “first contact” stories, and a few great ones. A personal favorite, The Mote in God’s Eye, goes some distance to portraying the tragically insurmountable gulf that might appear when two very different species encounter one another. But no one has realized that gulf […]
It’s a classic set-up: humans are exploring space and receive a mysterious signal. Time for first contact! A.C. Crispin takes this familiar idea and runs with it in StarBridge, a smart and fast-paced novel from a few years ago, now released as an ebook for the first time.
I like massive (and improbable) space battles, and Timothy Zahn’s Conqueror series seemed like just the ticket. Nothing but spaceships in the cover art, always a good sign, and I had memories of lots of space explosions from when I read the series about a dozen years ago. […]
Here’s a mission: write a series for young adults that is six books long, competes with all the digital distractions of current life, and keeps the kids coming back for each new entry. Sounds hard! A lot of series break down just on the issue of writing sequels […]
Publishing is a wacky world, with huge conglomerates controlling the big imprints, return policies that see half of all published books destroyed as a matter of course, and only a small fraction of authors making a living at what they do. Why would any sane person get involved […]
At first, I resisted reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. A guy is stranded on a raft – it sounded like a concept that had been done before. But my friends raved about the book constantly, and when I finally broke down and read it, I found […]
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The Cultural Gutter 