There’s a reason for two book reviews in one week. We’ll get to that later. But The Ugly American is a seminal and hugely influential work of fictionalized reporting that still deserves your attention fifty-one years after its publication. Co-written by by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer it tells the story, in a series of linked vignettes,…
The Face in the Frost, John Bellairs ISBN 158754105X (2000) Magic Mirrors, John Bellairs (Edited by Ann Broomhead and Timothy Szczesuil) NESFA Press, iSBN 978-1-886778-67-2 (12009) This is fantasy reduced to its purest form. From a laugh out loud first few pages you are plunged into nightmare and horror through to a purely satisfying ending. In…
Theodore Sturgeon is nearly forgotten. A part of science fiction’s Golden Age, he was a prolific, very highly regarded author. He wrote a dozen or so novels, but mostly he wrote short stories, more than 200 of them. Today is the 60th anniversary of WC’s favorite Sturgeon short story, “Like Young.” It’s an unmatched parable…
In a better world, Schaeffer Cox’s mental illness would have been diagnosed sooner and the events of Blood of Patriots wouldn’t have happened. His paranoia and delusions magnified his narcissism and shaky grasp on reality. The explosive combination of a pathological liar and remarkably high charisma were exactly the wrong traits for his personality. It still…
Terry Pratchett died back in 2015, but that hasn’t stopped WC from posting his annual tribute to his favorite author. Pratchett’s brilliant body of work, fifty or so novels and dozens of short stories, are a legacy that will outlast us all. Among Pratchett’s many wonderful attributes was his modesty. For a man who sold more…
“Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.” N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy is simply the best fantasy series WC has read in the last 25 years. It’s better than the…
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier‘s and Bellamy‘s and Morris‘s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a…
