Dicebox by Jenn Manley Lee is The Grapes of Wrath crossed with Star Wars. And I’ve read large chunks of it at two different times – it just doesn’t always serialize that well. It’s definitely a story that needs to be read in at least chapters to get sucked into it. I’ve been re-reading it from the start over at Comic Rocket which will help me from losing my place in it. I’m only about a little more than a quarter of the way through it’s almost 400 page archive.
Of all the great authors I read in the last decade or so, none seemed to possess the combination of utterly fantastic imagination and optimism in the future of humanity that Iain Banks put into his culture novels. It was startlingly sad news to read his post about his terminal cancer only two months ago; it is less startling but still sad news to see stories of his passing today. A heartfelt post from author Charlie Stross (another favorite of mine) about the passing of Iain Banks. He had a rare career combining success in science fiction and more general …
So yeah Warren Ellis has written a metric ton of comics, but only two prose novels: Crooked Little Vein and Gun Machine. Crooked Little Vein was a blast of weirdness, weird subcultures and hypnotic conspiracy building that if you had the stomach for was your favorite book that year. Gun Machine, relatively, feels far more straightforward. It’s still strapped to a framework of something deep and deeply weird, messing with history and detective stories in interesting ways.
Steven Gould is one of my favorite authors because of the way he takes one impossible idea and then logically delves into a world with this one new impossible idea in it. He has a scientific method feel to how he writes science fiction that I really enjoy and he generally has a nice touch with action and characters as well. He’s probably best known for his Jumper trilogy from which the movie Jumper was made. The movie loses a lot of what makes the novels special, with the movie instead crafting a gigantic mythology of war between jumpers and …
Game of Thrones is the first novel in the A Song of Fire and Ice saga and the teevee series adapting that string of novels. But you know that, everyone knows that. The popularity of this story is surprising to me; clearly the HBO teevee adaptation had a lot to do with it but it seems like the novels had gathered a lot of steam on their own. I only read the novels last year and only just now, thanks to the free “preview” of HBO on the local cable system for a few months, have I caught the first …
I just saw that Goodreads has been bought by Amazon. I don’t know what to think about that, I haven’t been super-active on the site recently but if it’s all now going to be fodder for Amazon’s store, I suppose I will think about it in a different light. But I digress from the zombies. I just finished watching the Season 3 finale of The Walking Dead teevee series. I thought this last season was mostly really good. Probably the best season yet but regardless I think we can all agree that it was better than Season Two. The comic …
I am a fairly big fan of Faith Erin Hicks’ comics. She got her start in pure webcomics but has since migrated to the webcomic collected into graphic novel approach. That approach is favored by several publishers now, including her most recent publisher First Second Books. She was recently interviewed on a Boing Boing podcast which is worth listening to. A lot of Hicks’ work is all from her but more recently she has collaborated with other creators on graphic novels, including Brain Camp, where she provided the art to a story by Susan Kim & Laurence Klavan; and the …
These “Bookmark” posts are useful for me; hopefully a few other people get something out of them along the way. I really enjoy Neal Stephenson‘s books. Unlike Stephen King, another novelist where the length of the book increases with each new effort, I never read a Stephenson book and wonder how badly he beat the editors. Stephenson books revel in their research, the density of information jammed into the pages is part of what makes his novels work. You can divide up the novels of Neal Stephenson into maybe three categories. Scholars and critics can tell me why I’m wrong …
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