Nikola Tesla was an inventor and engineer known for his work with alternating current, magnetic fields, and radio. His accomplishments were extraordinary, but before reading The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt all I knew about him was that he was a scientist who discovered some amazing stuff (although I couldn’t have said what). [...]
Archive for the ‘Speculative Fiction’ Category
Invention of Everything Else
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction, tagged Review Copy on November 4, 2009 | 8 Comments »
The Year of the Flood
Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction, tagged Review Copy on October 10, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Oryx and Crake is far from my favorite Margaret Atwood novel. (I’m actually not sure I could choose a favorite Atwood novel because I enjoyed The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, and Cat’s Eye all so much, and all about equally.) But I didn’t dislike Oryx and Crake, and I came to [...]
The Solitudes
Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction on October 9, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Back in July 2008, I read John Crowley’s novel Little, Big, and judged that it was the best work of speculative fiction I’d ever read — truly a masterpiece. My local library doesn’t carry anything else by Crowley, and I have had a moratorium on buying books because my TBR pile is so large, so it’s [...]
Poe’s Children
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 29, 2009 | 12 Comments »
If you bought a bag of apples, and only a third of them were worth eating, would you complain to the store? If you bought a lawn mower, and it only cut the grass a third of the time (or worse, a third of your blades of grass), would you return it?
Poe’s Children, a collection [...]
The Little Stranger
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 24, 2009 | 15 Comments »
The BBAW — and a recent vacation together, during which we did little but talk about books — reminded Teresa and me how much we enjoy the collaborative nature of this blog. We decided, therefore, to do a joint review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, which has been shortlisted for the Booker prize and [...]
Infinite Jest
Posted in Contemporary, Speculative Fiction on September 17, 2009 | 16 Comments »
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling postmodern 1,079-page tome, was the center of a summer-long project called Infinite Summer. I had been curious about this book for years, and this opportunity to read and discuss it with others motivated me to finally give it a try. It’s difficult to sum up such a complex book [...]
Ice Land
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 14, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Reworkings of famous stories are tricky things. I’m enough of a purist that I get a little crotchety when authors’ reinventions seem more interested in grinding their axes than in putting a new twist on an old story. That’s why I love Mary Stewart’s Merlin and Mordred books, which look at Arthurian myth from a [...]
Oryx and Crake (audio; reread)
Posted in Audiobooks, Speculative Fiction on September 10, 2009 | 9 Comments »
As a novelist, Margaret Atwood is, in my mind, two completely different writers. Sometimes she’s a writer of particularly good fiction about women and relationships (The Robber Bride and Cat’s Eye), and sometimes she’s a writer of chilling dystopian fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale). Only in the case of The Blind Assassin does she seem to straddle [...]
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (audio; reread)
Posted in Audiobooks, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on August 25, 2009 | 15 Comments »
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke has to be one of my top-five favorite books of the last 10 years. Published in 2004, this novel presents an alternate history of the early 19th century, one in which two magicians restore magic to England. Strange and Norrell, the two magicians, use their magic to serve the English [...]
The Rapture
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, tagged Review Copy on August 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Back in my pre-blogging days, I read and enjoyed Liz Jensen’s The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, so when I saw that her publisher was offering up review copies of her latest novel, released August 11, I was eager to get a copy.
Set in England in the near future, The Rapture is an apocalyptic eco-thriller about a [...]
