Damn that Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk does things that should not work. There is a quality to his writing that is prima facie absurd. It shouldn’t work. Kurt Vonnegut was the same way. It…
The Screwfly and the Y
I recently read “The Screwfly Solution” by James Tiptree Jr., although I think it was published under a different psuedonym, Raccoona Sheldon, all pen names for the actual person Alice…
The Death of Skynet’s old, alcoholic uncle… or What will the aliens do?
Some channels quietly switched off their analog signals last month. Maybe one day we will be all digital – but it looks like we will have to wait a little…
Watchmen & the future of Highway Virus
The Highway Virus series is a bunch of stories about a future world devastated by a virus. About halfway through it, as I was trying to turn my rambling notes…
The Plague of “Even”
A devil’s bargain in word processing is the quick-find option. David Lodge foresaw this curse in Small World, when his character Frobisher found, through an old-tyme computer, his unwitting penchant…
Why the hate…?
There is so much bigoted venom for animal-rights activists and in general for people who advocate for animal rights that it sluices its way into unexpected places. In a not-so-recent…
Character devolution
Who are the best whiners in cinema history? Not whiners like Luke Skywalker, who was going through a standard space farmboy phase, but full-on crybabies, where whining isn’t a phase…
One Fat Englishman
One Fat Englishman, by Kingsley Amis, was a decent read – but it was one of those works where reading plodded along, drawn more by the thought of finishing the…
The Supernova Warning
I have seen Supernova twice. Those who have seen this sci-fi movie from 2000 (with James Spader and Angela Bassett) – or at least know about its history – understand…
The Printer Moat
It is the ageless challenge in every office – how do you get people to stop printing crap they don’t need? At the end of every workday, there are printouts…