reading notes

by Kevin Brockmeier
ISBN: 9780307387769
This collection of thirteen stories is hard to describe. There are fables (“A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets” is stunning), some are science fiction (“The Lady with the Pet Tribble” is probably best example of Brockmeier’s humor), and one is a choose your own adventure format (but is [...]

by C. June Wolf
ISBN: 9780981065809
This collection of fifteen short stories surprised me. Individual stories — the ideas in them — stayed with me in ways I didn’t expect. There’s a museum security guard who transports otherwordly spirits, a discussion of hungry ghosts, an alien crash landing in the woods, and a kid who finds an [...]

by Kelley Eskridge
ISBN: 1933500131
A few days after I finished reading Dangerous Space, I cranked up some tunes to get through a tedious bit of work on the computer. Not far into the first song (I’ll confess it was something from Fall Out Boy’s latest album, but the specific doesn’t really matter) I stopped, stunned, [...]

by Jeanette Winterson
ISBN: 9780151014910
I read this book pretty much in one go, on a Sunday afternoon. I love (okay, I have a love/bitter disappointment relationship with) Winterson’s books, so it isn’t that surprising I read it at that pace. I couldn’t help it: I wanted to know what was going to happen, if she could [...]

Complete Protection From the Living Dead
by Max Brooks
ISBN: 1400049628
I thought World War Z was absolutely brilliant. This book is good, but Z was much better — probably because the Guide is played for humor, and Z was serious. Yes, I know, zombies — but it was serious, and very well done.
The Guide is a very [...]

by Vernor Vinge
ISBN: 0812536363
I thought A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky were fascinating books: Vinge is able to write quite convincingly about non-humanoid aliens, not just as ideas, but as characters. In the Realtime books, bobble technology had me hooked. I searched for his earlier books Tatja Grimm’s World and [...]

An Oral History of the Zombie War
by Max Brooks
ISBN: 0715635964
Monterey, California is an insanely beautiful place — perfect weather, blue ocean, barking sea lions — and when I was there recently, I kept thinking about zombies. Such is the fascinatingly creepy power of World War Z.
The book is a collection of stories that didn’t [...]

by Daniel Keys Moran
ISBN: 0553562495
After reading The Long Run early this year, I said it may be one of the best science fiction books you’ve never heard of before now. At this point, I feel confident saying this is probably true of the whole Continuing Time series.
What do you do when rebellion against an unpopular [...]

by Daniel Keys Moran
The Long Run may be one of the best science fiction books you’ve never heard of before now. (Bantam published it in 1989, and it is is now, bafflingly, out of print.)
I got my hands on it because a co-worker recommended Keys Moran and happened to have copies of several of his [...]

by Karen Joy Fowler
ISBN: 0345426533
When I read Fowler’s two novels, Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season, I did not know she was well-known as a science fiction story writer. Black Glass is a collection of the kind of stories that built her genre reputation.
In the title story, Fowler manages to skewer the DEA and use [...]