Nightwatch, by Andrew M. Stephenson Too much and too little compete for the reader’s inattention in this barely workable SF book in which the most human characters are robots. The protagonist, though purportedly a human earthman, seems to understand human emotions as poorly as the author understands actual human beings and such things as plots …
Author Archives: steve
Monday Book Report: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl’s classic work of children’s fiction, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is neither very good nor very bad, unlike the ridiculous stereotypes of children presented to us by the author. The book is ‘classic’ in the both senses: old and made into a movie. (Two, actually, but the second does not improve the Gene …
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Monday Book Report: Suddenly, At Singapore
The first novel featuring the adventurer, importer, sometime gun-runner Paul Harris is not as cohesive, nor as finished as the only other I’ve read in the series (You Want To Die, Johnny?), but it rollicks around Malaya and Sumatra quite successfully, kicking off the long-running series with gunshots, plane wrecks, and hot boat on boat …
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Film Review: The Glass Key (1935)
Supplemental to Monday Book Report Just watched the 1935 film version of Hammett’s novel The Glass Key, which I mentioned in yesterday’s book report. I had never seen the short (just over 1-¼ hours) movie starring George Raft, and wanted to see how it compared with the 1942 remake featuring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. …
Monday Book Report: The Glass Key
Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key is one of the ten best books of all time. At least in English, which is the only language I feel even the slightest competence for such judgment. (Being born and raised in Georgia, English is my second language, never having had a first.) I’d be hard-pressed to say what …
Monday Book Report: Mission of Gravity
Just a short note to pay homage to a work of the hardest ‘hard’ science fiction I have read in many a moon. Mission of Gravity is that rarest of birds, a gripping adventure story on an almost impossible world, backed by meticulously calculated speculative science. The hero of the book, a wily trading captain …
Monday Book Report: The Devil of Nanking
“Some things are too terrible to be true,” sang Bob Dylan on the album he released September 11, 2001. Fiction was invented—in part—to resolve the paradox, to give emotional body to the merely true, to give life where the recitation of facts and history bathes its subject in a deadening radiation of memory and catalogue. …
Monday Book Report – Burning Chrome
The most noticeable thing about William Gibson’s future as seen in his 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome is just how relentlessly shiny it is. Just like the classics of 1930s Science Fiction he pretends to disdain, even the dark underbelly of his future is full of “Gee, whiz!” artifacts that take the observer’s breath …
Monday Book Report: Agnes Grey
In partial fulfillment of the promise I made to read works by the sisters of Charlotte Brontë, and in partial penance for baiting remarks I made purporting to disdain “women writers”, I have just completed Agnes Grey by the lesser Baldwin—I mean Brontë, of course—Anne Brontë, the youngest sibling of the much ballyhooed literary sisterhood. …
Monday Book Report: Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a 170 year-old romance novel in which the protagonists are beautiful only on the inside, their outward unattractiveness being dunned into the reader’s poor brain at every opportunity. I have read only one other author’s romance novels heretofore — by accident (thinking they were mysteries) — and though I should …