Category Archives: Book Notes

Ray Bradbury: FAREWELL SUMMER

Posted on Tuesday 13 March 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

FAREWELL SUMMER (2006) is a belated sequel to Ray Bradbury’s famous novel DANDELION WINE (1957), the book set in a fictionalized version of the town Bradbury grew up in, in Illinois, named in the books Green Town. (My post about … Continue reading →

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Ray Bradbury: DANDELION WINE

Posted on Thursday 8 March 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

DANDELION WINE (DW) is certainly Bradbury’s most personal book, because it is so clearly based on Bradbury’s own life as a boy in small-town Illinois. It was published in 1957 as a novel, not a short story collection, though actually … Continue reading →

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Ray Bradbury: Core Bibliography and Themes

Posted on Wednesday 7 March 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a chronological list of principal Ray Bradbury titles I’ll be referring to in coming posts. For an exhaustive bibliography, see the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry for Bradbury; but as thorough as the listings are in that reference, in cases … Continue reading →

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Ray Bradbury: THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

Posted on Thursday 22 February 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Ray Bradbury’s THE OCTOBER COUNTRY (TOC) was published in 1955, part way through the publication of what I think are Bradbury’s three essential, classic books: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (abbreviated in future as TMC; first published 1950), FAHRENHEIT 451 (F451; 1953), … Continue reading →

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SFNF: Bretnor, Modern Science Fiction

Posted on Friday 19 January 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Reginald Bretnor’s 1953 Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Future is one of the earliest critical volumes about SF. If follows Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s 1947 OF WORLDS BEYOND (summarized here) and precedes the anonymously-edited 1959 volume THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL … Continue reading →

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Pinker and Crane: Quotes and Comments about Faith and Religion

Posted on Monday 30 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Still working my way, slowly, through Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. In Chapter 4, The Humanitarian Revolution, he discusses various kinds of violence over human history, beginning with human sacrifice, and then to violence “against blasphemers, heretics, … Continue reading →

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Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian: Summary and Comments

Posted on Thursday 14 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a famous essay/lecture by one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. I first read the book containing this essay in 1979, when I was 23; I was thrilled to find someone so eminent unapologetically spell out the … Continue reading →

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Link and Comments: NYTBR reviews Kurt Andersen’s FANTASYLAND

Posted on Monday 11 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Just published, a big book by novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Random House), which is in my to-read stack. For the time being, here are some passages from Sunday’s front page review … Continue reading →

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Pinker: Better Angels: Passages and Outline from the Preface

Posted on Wednesday 6 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is Steven Pinker’s big 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, that takes a long-range view of human history to show that the human condition, over millennia and especially in recent centuries and decades, … Continue reading →

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Gary K. Wolfe, How Great Science Fiction Works

Posted on Tuesday 13 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a course released by The Great Courses (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/) in early 2016. The course consists of audio or video downloads or discs (as lead Locus reviewer Gary K. Wolfe delivers lectures on a set), and comes with a 200-page … Continue reading →

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