The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester) ---»
...Out of control media empire expansion bulletin! Unbridled aggression designed by machines funneled through human flesh! Fight the Order! A classic of the struggle to Entropize freedom. A good re-read, also, now that there are about twenty years of cyberpunk lit behind us. Kind of reminiscent of Spinrads Agents of Chaos, if it had been [...]
Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Alfred Bester) ---»
...No one can Best the Bester. In some ways, Besters writing requires the heavy onslaught of his novelistic form to function, as his language is highly immersive. In short stories, it mostly highlights the weird prose poetics of his florid writing style. However, its unfortunate that we have so little from Bester.. He really should [...]
The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester) ---»
...Alfred Bester… a hard-sf writer buried in the body of a florid linguistic dandy. The Demolished Man is one of Besters best known novels, and for anyone who appreciates the density of the Media environment in which humanity finds itself trapped in increasingly smaller concentricitys, a candy store of novelistic complication. Highly psychological, but overlaid [...]
The Drowned World (J. G. Ballard) ---»
...Best of all Ballard books. An early one, and out of print currently. Strange fever dreams, like Thomas Manns Death in Venice, but, unlike Mann, Ballard never ignores science. This is about a reptilian fever dream in a post-warming world, where all of humanity has retreated to some small islands north of greenland, and send [...]
The Drought (J. G. Ballard) ---»
...Yes, another ecological, archaeological apocalyptic disaster science fiction book classic from an early master of the message… although most people only know him as Oh Yeah, That Guy Who Wrote The Book They Made That Movie About. (google him if you dont know.) Like Frank Herbert, whose early classics like The Green Brain outpace, IMHO, [...]
The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (J. G. Ballard) ---»
...A true poet of the scientific. This collection has an excellent grouping of Ballards short stories, many of which have been hard to find until now. Known too much for his Crash, Ballard is, like early Frank Herbert, an extensively environmentalist author, and many of these stories reflect it. Not a bad story in the [...]
A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr.) ---»
...Nothing like post apocalyptic Monks to cheer one up. An argument could be made that monks took us out of the middle ages, or at least helped something of ourselves survive the period. But perhaps, it has just prolonged our suffering? These are metaphysical questions, best left to priests and jesuetical dreamers and profits (sic). [...]
On the Beach (Nevil Shute) ---»
...Beautiful red sunsets. Doom on the horizon. A still is in the air. Nuclear Terror proliferates. What is this, the 1950s? NO! Its the 2000s, reading the 1950s. Nevil Shute is the bomb, especially in his blockbuster hit. Nobody who wishes to read about apocalypse and apocalyptic nuclear world ending beaches should avoid this book. [...]
Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban) ---»
...Ai em inthrallt with hiss buk. I em to red eat egan and egan. Ef nuklar wares in ihran end irahq goes feather, wull thin house must red thay buk. Its herd enuf too sea wares redding et wont beyall tooth in handt. Whin munks leaf the hoses end grow to waffle irons, thend sense [...]
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Stanislaw Lem) ---»
...Stanislaw Lems Memoirs found in a Bathtub has got to be the best polish scifi of the middle century. Its like The Castle by Kafka but with technology, not crummy old villages. And its got confused people wandering around, trying to do stuff to the best of there ability, and failing miserably. But hey, thats [...]
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