Where has C.J. Cherry been all my life?

Where has C.J. Cherryh been all my life? An SFWA Grandmaster since 2016, she has been producing hard science fiction and space operas since 1976, yet — unless some of her short fiction has crossed my path — I am almost certain that none of her novels have until now.

I'm going to blame that reader's omission on the fact she has been published by DAW Books, which for decades was an outfit whose covers somehow read amateurish to me. With very few exceptions, nothing published by DAW ever weighted my shelves.

Pity that, if Cherryh's Foreigner is anything at all to go by.

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More than 40 years later, this gift is still with me, and still makes me weep.

May 30, 2020 — Some gifts just keep on giving, and this omnibus hard-cover edition of The World of Pooh, which includes A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, is one I have returned to again and again.

I reviewed the book(s) back in 2010 — I see now I posted it on my 45th birthday —, and have re-read the books more than once in the intervening decade, so I can confidently state that I love Milne's masterpiece in my fifties as much as I did in my forties (and thirties, and twenties).

It's not news that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I have a soft spot for space opera; I confess, the big space base (which I initially mistook for a starship of some sort) adorning the cover of Neal Asher's novel, The Departure, helped sell me on it. As it turned out though, The Departure hardly qualifies as space-opera and only squeaks by as science fiction pretty much the way Superman does: on technicalities. Though it's set in the future and some of the action takes place in orbit and on Mars, the book is really just a narrated first-person shooter dressed up in some SF tropes — a corrupt and incompetent world government, artificial intelligence, robotic weapons and a trans-human genesis. But all that is only window-dressing. That spectacular cover is a gateway to lugubrious dialogue, sophomoric libertarian philosophy, hackneyed world-building and, especially, to one pornographic blood-bath after another. The Departure is one of the worst books I have read in a very long time. More boring than Atlas Shrugged (which I reviewed a while back), it drips with just as much contempt for ordinary human beings. Unlike Rand's John Galt though, Asher's superman does much of his killing at first-hand. Does this novel have any redeeming qualities? The short answer is "no". The long answer lives behind this link.

Photo of Kim Stanley Robinson by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Sᴜɴᴅᴀʏ, Aᴜɢᴜsᴛ 9, 2020 — Kim Stanley Robinson became one of my favourite writers with his novel, Red Mars and its sequels. His work has been uneven since then, but not to the point where I have stopped paying attention when he releases a new novel.

Galileo's Dream was released in late 2009, and I read and reviewed it shortly after. This review was originally published on Rex on January 19, 2010.

I have recovered it thanks, once again, to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Click here to read the full review.

Dylan was already a long-standing legend when I reviewed this memoir back in 2004 (to which I made some minor corrections when I posted it here in 2009). Since then, he has won the Nobel Prize for literature and, very recently, seems to have taken up song-writing again. Which Pati Smith's memoir, Just Kids, Chronicles Volume One remains one of the most interesting musician's memoir I've ever read.

Samuel R. Delany (2012?). Photo lifted from his Facebook page.

June 21, 2020 — Now 78 years old, Samuel R. Delany is a multiple award-winning writer and a retired professor of English literature. He is best known as a science fiction writer, but his work encompasses not only that genre, but fantasy, comics and pornography, as well as non-fiction.

His first novel was published in the early 1960s, when he was still a teenager, and his most recent (which I have on order) was published only last week. He is, to my mind, still the best living American writer, and his 2012 masterpiece, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, was a radical (and very successful — I hope to have a review of it up here soon!) fusion of gay erotica with science fiction.

Despite the genres mentioned above, Delany's books are anything but alike; he is a writer forever exploring and both de- and re-constructing genre tropes and conventions.

So, when I bought Dark Reflections back in 2009, I was not really surprised to be surprised by just how very different that novel was from those that had come before.

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Sometime in 2007, I sent in a review of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, Sixty Days and Counting, on spec to The Globe and Mail. When they didn't reply in what I considered a reasonable length of time, I shrugged and posted it to my Livejournal account and finally remembered to republish it here.

But sometimes good things take time. More than a year later, I received an email from an editor at the Globe saying he understood I was interested in reviewing things science fictional and would I be interested in taking a stab Gregory Maguire's latest. Naturally, I said yes, very much so, and another four or so months later, the following showed up in the Globe's Books section.

It remains my only paid review; if any of you reading this are editors, I am still open to offers. Read more ...

Tᴜᴇsᴅᴀʏ, Aᴘʀɪʟ 14, 2020 — You wouldn't think it necessary to review a 75 year-old pulp novel in the 21st century, but Ayn Rand's stupid and vicious philosophy has had a profound impact on western societies for the past 40 years at least.

I am pretty proud of my review of Atlas Shrugged, which I wrote back in 2008, and I stand by everything I said then about that morally execrable novel. Read more by clicking the headline above above ...