Category Archives: science fiction

Rereading HOW TO READ A BOOK

Posted on Tuesday 1 March 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Is this book anywhere near as commonly known as, say, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE? I have the impression it was widely known at some point, and my 1972 revised edition is subtitled “the classic guide to intelligent reading” – the … Continue reading →

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Thoughts on Jo Walton’s WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT

Posted on Saturday 27 February 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Jo Walton’s WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT is a wonderful book, and I wish there were more like them. It’s not a book of reviews, so much as a book of reviews about *re*-reading books, and why she does … Continue reading →

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Syllabuses and Sfadb.com rankings

Posted on Monday 25 January 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

This op-ed item in Sunday’s New York Times, What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us, caught my eye initially because part of my long-range plans for sfadb.com involves continuing to add ‘citation’ and ‘anthology’ references to complement the awards data, … Continue reading →

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Review of Alastair Reynolds’ SLOW BULLETS

Posted on Saturday 14 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Alastair Reynolds’ short novel SLOW BULLETS – the latest in a series of short novels from Tachyon Publications, following among others Nancy Kress’s Yesterday’s Kin and Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine, both awards winners – is a spectacular … Continue reading →

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The World’s Young: a review of Robert Charles Wilson’s THE AFFINITIES

Posted on Friday 13 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert Charles Wilson’s THE AFFINITIES is ‘social’ science fiction in the most literal sense. (I seem to recall how Isaac Asimov made the distinction between hard SF, social SF, and social satire – the latter being Huxley, Orwell, and the … Continue reading →

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Rereading Early Heinlein, part 3: If This Goes On

Posted on Monday 9 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Heinlein’s earliest serial — that is, a long story requiring a split into parts across two or more issues of a magazine — was “If This Goes On–“, published in the February and March 1940 issues of Astounding magazine. He … Continue reading →

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Rereading Early Heinlein, part 2

Posted on Friday 6 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Heinlein burst upon the SF scene in 1939, the same year Asimov did, but much more forcefully. He published 28 stories, including four long enough to require serialization over multiple magazine issues, from 1939 to 1942, of which all but … Continue reading →

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Rereading Early Heinlein, part 1

Posted on Monday 26 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I reread three early Heinlein volumes in the past few weeks, and as with my Asimov rereads, these were revisits to stories I first read some 30 or 40 years ago, and mostly have not read since. Both Asimov’s and … Continue reading →

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Rereading Isaac Asimov, part 4

Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Comments about “Nightfall”, “The Dead Past”, “The Last Question”, “The Bicentennial Man”, and “The Ugly Little Boy”. To finish up commenting on my rereading (or in a few cases, reading for the first time) some 100 short stories, novelettes, and … Continue reading →

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Oliver Sacks on SF

Posted on Monday 28 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

There are many reasons why I might have mentioned Oliver Sacks here before, which somehow escaped me, but here’s one from a couple weeks ago. From The New Yorker, Sept 14th, a piece by Atul Gawande remembering the late Oliver … Continue reading →