The Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. The award was established with a grant given by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, an icon in British science fiction (Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous […]
Brother’s Ruin Industrial Magic, Book #1 Emma Newman Tor.com Release Date: March 14, 2017 ISBN 978-0-7653-9396-8 It’s probably not politically correct to illustrate something literary by using a television reference, but I couldn’t help but think what a wonderful TV pilot Emma Newman’s first book in her Industrial Magic series, […]
I’ve never been good at drawing connections between things. I’m perfectly fine with Point A and Point B being distinct and separate dots on a grid, but I pretty much have to be prompted to plot between them, and often along the way I get derailed. So what I’m going […]
The “Best Books of 2016”? Pul-eeze. Unless one has a universally agreed-upon metric that can be applied to every single book published in any given year, there can be no anointing “the best”. Most popular, sure. Best seller, most prestigious, highest lauded, yup. But “Best”? As if. Ah, but “Favorite”! […]
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford If this novel had been published under the title the author selected, The Saddest Story, contemporary readers would likely have had a difficult time locating a copy. But fortunately, Ford Madox Ford agreed to his publisher’s suggestion of The Good Soldier, and with […]
The Films in My Life, by Francois Truffaut This past week, Francois Truffaut would have turned 84. The revered French filmmaker, who died in 1984 is the subject of numerous books, dearth of books that cover the director’s life and work, but few directors step into the role of critic. […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.