Burgess’s Honey for the Bears
I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded…
Technology Reveals our Psychosis
J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise is like MySpace pages or user comments on a blog about Glenn Beck or Michael Vick – it’s a good place to lose your faith in humanity….
It always happens…
When you’re way way way way down at the bottom of the writing world, it seems every time you look up, there’s a luminary (or at least someone with better…
Science as a Wedge
Back in the day, there were always rumors about big colleges accepting more freshman than the school could handle – but then forcing these wide-eyed fledglings through an intensely difficult…
Hammett’s Red Harvest
The plot of Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, plays out, in a microcosm, for larger events in the U.S. What starts the main sequence of events in the book is…
The Midwife Toad
The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler, focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The personal disputes that…
Short Story – Toy Lists
The short story “Toy Lists” is about an obsessive worker and his need to make a connection with another human in an anonymous and impermanent work environment. (Edits from the…
The Mundane
We have lost our sense of the mundane. That was one of the great things about Philip K. Dick. He didn’t make science fiction about the Space Prince or the…
A Legacy of Annihiliation
Palahniuk takes an expansive approach to the culling song in his book Lullaby. For those who have not read the book, it features a bedtime poem, the recitation of which…
Rekindling Bloodlust, Die Hard style
There is no cliché that is too cliché for Die Hard, but the film holds itself together quite nicely, right to the end, wrapped up as neat as a Christmas…