ratiocinations out of thin air and elsewhere
I HAVE ALWAYS loved fantasy and science-fiction, even the endless lame movies that we watched at family night at the drive-ins back in the early ’60s. By the end of that decade, I was hooked on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line of novels and the Dangerous Visions school of science-fiction.
In this category I address/review/criticize books and the people who write them—especially the work of Poul Anderson, Philip Dick, Harlan Ellison, Anne McCaffrey, and Norman Spinrad.
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“MAYBE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND how complex a structure the human brain is. Believe me, it makes the sidereal universe look like a child’s building set. There are many times more possible inter-neuronic connections than there are atoms in the entire cosmos—the factor is something like ten to the power of several million. [Continue reading]
ISAAC ASIMOV was one of America’s greatest intellectuals, and a prolific writer: he authored or edited more than 500 books! His interests were all over the map, but he is generally known as one of science fiction’s most accomplished writers.
His Foundation Trilogy of novels is considered a classic of science fiction, must-reads for any serious fan or historian of the genre. [Continue reading]
I WAS MOTIVATED to dig up my old copy of Poul Anderson’s novel Brain Wave when I discovered Joachim Boaz’s site Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. I read Joachim’s take on the Anderson book (he considered it “vaguely good”) and the comments submitted by his readers and I disagreed with certain observations of theirs. [Continue reading]
IN 1969, I MET NORMAN SPINRAD. Well, met him in the sense that I discovered his novels while I was working at Leo Matus’s newsstand. Leo carried tobacco, magazines, and sundries and was located on Public Square—smack dab in the middle of Wilkes-Barre in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He had a couple of spinners with racks for paperback books on the floor filled with the latest in every genre imaginable. [Continue reading]