Tagged: Fiction

Dystopia Week

Welcome to Dystopia Week. Let’s begin by taking a moment to understand why we write this way in the first place.

The Bath

A short story about an old man, his loneliness, and his resolve to perform a simple ritual.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Bar Applications

A few thoughts on recovering one’s reputation for good moral character from very public past misdeeds. There should both a skeptical eye cast towards those who have been dishonest in the past and room for redemption from mistakes made in the past — but when does the latter overcome the former? Is it enough to have stayed out of trouble?

The Executioner

“I’ll get the right arm, you get the left. One of us will have the actual agents, and the other will have saline solution.”

Bachmann, Burr, and Patriotism

How about a break from arguing over the mandate? I’m in the middle of Burr, Gore Vidal’s fictional account of the life of America’s most reviled duelist. Why am I reading it? Well, the...

On Hobbits, Race, and Self-Contained Worlds

I come down closer to Jamelle Bouie’s side of the Hobbit argument than Adam Serwer’s. Jamelle argues that basically Tolkien’s story is one of the British Isles, and that the mythological backdrop of Middle-Earth...

Charmed Life

I finished reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life a few days ago. As far as young adult fantasy goes, it was quite good with more than a few unexpected twists. It wasn’t as funny...

Science Fiction Friday

io9 lists the best science fiction novels for fantasy fans. I’m not familiar with any of these selections, but I’ll go ahead and recommend Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth, Gene Wolfe’s Book...

A list of books from my childhood

Tyler Cowen and Peter Suderman have both compiled (non-definitive) lists of books which have influenced them the most over the years.  I have thought about this some, and come to the decision that the...