Category Archives: Book Notes

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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Links and Comments: Tyson v. Douthat

Posted on Wednesday 24 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

I started writing up a few notes about the new (small) Neil deGrasse Tyson book, ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, and got sidetracked by a passage that reminded me of a Ross Douthat column from a few weeks ago. … Continue reading →

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I Can Do Anything: Mark Haddon’s THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

Posted on Monday 24 April 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Last week I posted a look back at 20 Years of Locus Online and, having asked my lead contributors over the years for their best or exceptional posts, revisited an 11-year-old essay by film reviewer Gary Westfahl, Homo aspergerus: Evolution … Continue reading →

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Harari on THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION

Posted on Sunday 23 April 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

In today’s NYT Book Review, Yuval Noah Harari reviews THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION: Why We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. The review’s opening echoes Harari’s own work, e.g. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other … Continue reading →

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Lawrence M. Krauss: THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD — SO FAR

Posted on Thursday 13 April 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Lawrence M. Krauss’ new book is a book by a theoretical physicist, and so the greatest story turns out to be — a history of physics, especially of the last few decades. He begins by emphasizing how this is a … Continue reading →

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