So this week I was reading A Scanner Darkly, a shortish dystopian novel by some guy named Philip K. Dick. Maybe you’ve heard of him. If not, you’ve almost certainly heard of the movie Blade Runner, which was based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*
So this week I was reading The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, which is a “sequel”, of sorts, to Hyperion.
So over the last few weeks, with Dickinson between seasons, we’ve sort of been looking for some new programs to intersperse amongst the lighter Big Bang Theory and New Adventures of Old Christine fare—sitcoms that my wife likes to refer to as “dessert”. I had been hoping the new HBO series The Nevers would fit the bill:
Continue reading “Not a Review of “Mare of Easttown” and “Upload””So far, in 2021, I’m back to reading the books on my eReader in the order in which I acquired them, which means at the moment I’m excavating the sedimentary layers of 2017. Remember 2017? It was a bygone era when everyone still liked Game of Thrones and people were able to leave the house and travel just about anywhere they wanted and, apparently, I picked up a lot of bad books, mostly, I think, from BookBub and Amazon Prime First Reads*.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: “Earthseed””So recently we started watching Ad Astra, a science fiction movie in which Tommy Lee Jones has gone from Space Cowboy to (maybe) Space Loony when, 30 years after his exploration ship vanishes*, powerful electromagnetic surges emanating from its last known location begin threatening to annihilate human civilization. So what do you do when you have a great big movie star who has gone missing? You send an even bigger movie star after him, of course.
Continue reading “Not A Review Of “Ad Astra””A few months ago—before the shelter in place started, but not long before—I started watching The Expanse. This is an adaptation of the science fiction book series of the same name; the first season (mostly) follows the plot of the first book, Leviathan Wakes, which I read last year during my recovery from The Event. I say it “mostly” follows the plot of Leviathan Wakes because it includes characters and subplots I’ve never seen before, which is what’s making me a little reluctant to watch too much of the series just yet, because …
When adaptations are involved, I usually try to read the book before watching the adaptation, so that I can properly position the adaptation somewhere on “the book was better”* spectrum. (By this measure, The Expanse is pretty good.)
So this week I was reading Spin, the Hugo award-winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson, in which mysterious aliens give Earth the Krikkit treatment by encasing it in a “membrane” that induces an extremely steep time differential between what’s inside and what’s outside. Hilarity ensues.
So this week I was reading The Atomic Sea by Jack Conner:
Going on a little trip, but will be back before I leave.
So this week I’m continuing my recent spree of reading translated works* with The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin, depending). As you may be able to guess by the author’s name, this is a Chinese science fiction novel.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/11/2019: “The Three-Body Problem””
