Category Archives: Book and film reviews

Unless you really enjoy conventional, comfortable story telling. I have lot of sympathy for Sean Penn since he was visiting a relative on the same floor of hospital in LA where my mother was for a time. But I can’t … Continue reading →

I finished Against a Dark Background earlier this week. A basic adventure space opera with a sympathetic android and a fairly obvious bad guy who is slowly revealed.  It moves quickly and occasionally the settings are interesting but quite often … Continue reading →

On the Air France flight I enjoyed (the standard on a 10 hour flight is low, but they were all better than Deadpool 2) several films (that incidentally I has never heard of): Les derniers Parisiens: A low-budget film about … Continue reading →

Read this on the flight to Burkina Faso and then over a few days. Entertaining and occasionally compelling but the writing was just not edited enough to really shine. I appreciated the central idea, but the execution left me unsatisfied. … Continue reading →

The Hydrogen Sonata, a science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks, was a long but good read. Infused with Banks’ theme (in all the novels of his I have read so far) of loneliness and, well I have to say … Continue reading →

This book was circulating in the house so I started reading. Reading and skipping. What is there to say? I mean, did someone challenge Cline? “Hey, bet you can’t write a sci fi dystopia where female characters function only as … Continue reading →

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Robert Reed. His “great ship” series of novellas and stories I found fantastic, and he has lots of other good stuff. But Sister Alice was a mess, at times virtually unreadable.  I’d … Continue reading →