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Monthly Archives: July 2018
Quarry’s List, by Max Allan Collins
But I did have a system. Not an alarm system; nothing more than my own built-in alarm, which comes from those rice-paddy warfare years I suffered through, where you learned to sleep light unless you didn’t care about waking up. … Continue reading
Captive Universe, by Harry Harrison
A theme running through many Harry Harrison (1925-2012) titles is the battle of an enlightened individual against an all-controlling state apparatus. His Deathworld and To the Stars trilogies feature a can-do protagonist attempting, and mostly succeeding, to “solve” the metaphorical … Continue reading
Eyes of Fire, by Michael Bishop
Eyes of Fire (1980) is a remake of Bishop’s first published novel, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire — EoF was meant to be the replacement, and the only version to exist in post-1980 editions. I read the earlier version … Continue reading
a preview
Life and work have been getting in the way of writing reviews lately, so I thought I’d share an update of what’s coming up …. So far, I’ve only read through the bottom three (plus another Charles Williams: Nothing In … Continue reading
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Quarry, by Max Allan Collins
Many of the novels of the Hard Case Crime series take place in the time between 1940 and 1970 (all of those rediscovered titles) or in the last decade (the debut printings of Charles Ardai’s books, among others). These have … Continue reading
The Luck of Barry Lyndon, by William Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was, during his time, one of the prominent novelists of Victorian England and the primary competition to Charles Dickens. These days he is known mostly for the satirical Vanity Fair, but it was the fictional memoir The … Continue reading
The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd
Satirizing our (Western) past of imposing religion onto new cultures is a familiar theme of SF, using spacecraft or time travel as a substitute for ships and covered wagons. One of my favorite stories in the Harry Harrison collection The Best … Continue reading
U.S.A., by John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) is not among the most celebrated names in American literature anymore, but several of his books had major cultural impact when they were published in the first half of the 20th Century. An ambulance driver during … Continue reading
Posted in books, literary fiction
Tagged dos passos, economics, library of america, red scare, wwi
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