The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘A Long Twilight Struggle’

That phrase from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address came to mind this morning as I was reading an e-mail from a friend lamenting the continuation of the war against Diana West and her book, American Betrayal. Busy with other matters, I had forgotten about the unfortunate internecine conflict that developed after Ron Radosh and David […]

Ender’s Game

— Wombat-socho The long-awaited movie version of Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction tale Ender’s Game hit the theaters today, and since I’ve been waiting to see it since the short story was first published, I went to see it this afternoon. tl;dr: Beautiful and sad and horrifying and wonderful. For those of you who […]

Loose Cannons And Enthusiastically Violent AIs

— Wombat-socho Apologies for the lack of book posts lately, but frankly, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to spend between the covers of a book while playing Dad Taxi while my daughter was in town. Since I’m not going to be doing much else this week, you may wind up getting two […]

Time Enough For…Anything

— Wombat-socho Time travel science fiction tends to come in two flavors: conventional time travel, in which the heroes journey into the future or the past, and the parallel worlds type of story where there are multiple alternate time lines which can be travelled to. Keith Laumer did both; in Dinosaur Beach, his hero is […]

Virtue by Proxy, and Thoughts About Books That Liberals Have Never Read

Republicans “can’t stand the fact that a black man is in the White House!” That’s what a studid liberal shouted at Joel Pollak, and I could name, off the top of my head, two dozen books that liberal has never read. Ronald Reagan once said that the problem with liberals is not that they are […]

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

— Wombat-socho This week’s book post is going up early since when Thursday rolls around I’m going to be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest and won’t have time to blog. So. Apocalyptic SF goes back practically to the beginning of the genre, with novels like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men […]

The Colossus Of Colorado Springs

— Wombat-socho As a lead-in to our main topic this week, I want to give a brief mention to a couple of things I read this week that are (at the very least) decent brain candy and might be worth your time. First, Marko Kloos’ Terms of Enlistment which right now is only available on […]

Three Authors and Some Extra Stuff

– Wombat-socho Last week I said I was going to talk about great SF writers of the 1950s, which I’ll do presently, but first a couple of items hot off the presses and onto my Kindle, so to speak. First up, Casey Neumiller sent me a review copy of Dead Man’s Fugue (for which much […]

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