LittleBear says: The second mouse gets the cheese.
Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard is the sequel to The Knight, reviewed here, and the conclusion to the tale of Sir Able. The short version? If you’re a fan of literature, even in the slightest, get both of these books and read them now. While they are certainly classified as Fantasy novels, they […]
Kafka on the Shore is Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, and in my opinion his best. Not his most charming, I reserve that for South of the Border, West of the Sun, but Kafka on the Shore is perhaps his most mature and complete novel to date.
The novel centers around the stories of two […]
The movie, A Scanner Darkly, based on the Philip K. Dick novel is coming out soon. Some trailers are available here, requiring Quicktime. This looks amazing. What a style to “render” a movie in.
Gene Wolfe is a subtle writer. Subtle in that he has an uncanny ability to lead you through a story, never revealing the incredible importance of his characters until it’s absolutely necessary. In fact you kind of enjoy a seemingly slow pace and then suddenly find yourself in world-changing situations. And the […]
All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe is an entertaining mystery novel with some interesting twists. The novel tells the story of Shinsuke Honma, a middle-age detective who’s wife has died and is left trying to raise his son alone. He’s a likeable fellow and has a perceptive grasp of human nature and […]
I just finished The Iron Council, by China Miéville. This is his third book set in the New Crobuzon universe and continues in his tradition of The New Weird.
At some level I feel that China Miéville is writing books using all the classic industrial appendages of Dickensian London. He’s written about the city […]
Electric Sheep is the coolest screen-saver I know of. First there’s the reference to the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired BladeRunner, my favourite movie. The screen-saver consists of beautiful, computer generated “electric sheep”. But not generated by your machine alone, the application is […]
The title comes from Mirror Worlds, by Dr. David Gelernter. Or rather from the full title: Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox : How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. Among the many compelling concepts Dr. Gelernter introduced in this book was the Tuple Space. […]
I haven’t read it in a long time, but it was David Brin’s book Glory Season that first got me thinking about Conway’s Life and games. My memory is hazy, but in it the characters play a version of “real-life” Life, with wind-up automata, large playing grids and competitions with shooters, generators and gliders. […]
A few years ago I came across the book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. I don’t remember exactly how I found out about it, but it’s likely that it happened through a series of links and recommendations at Amazon. It’s a surreal story bordering on science fiction […]
the2bears © Copyright 2004-2006 William R. Swaney. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 