Has Brad Bird read Superfolks?
Most likely, since The Incredibles shares much thematically with this 1977 novel by Robert Mayer. Many of the concepts with Superfolks are familiar, but only because we have been immersed…
Worst Book Cover Ever?
Is this book cover for Alien Sex, a fantasy sci-fi short-story compilation, the worst ever? Let’s look at the evidence. The background color is pus gray usually reserved for orphan-grade…
In Place of a Soul…
I read the sci-fi book Leviathan Wakes as a bit of a palate cleanse after the intensity of McTeague. Yet in the midst of this potboiler (I am using that…
Greene’s The Tenth Man
Graham Greene could have been talking about today’s political pundits with this line from The Tenth Man: “She was like an old weatherworn emblem of wisdom – something you find…
The Iowa Legislature – Big Government Job Killers
The activist Iowa state legislature – aka job killers – has created a new level of bureaucracy by inventing “agricultural production facility fraud,” which essentially deprives us of our God-given…
The Challenge of the Cheese Sandwich
It takes a good writer to make a good paragraph about a cheese sandwich. And George V. Higgins does just that in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (page 167; Picador…
Thank you, Mr. Abercrombie
It is a late notice, I know, but I wanted to mention my sadness at the passing of Ian Abercrombie, who died on January 26, 2012. He was sublime as…
Mr. Spaceship
In the short story “Mr. Spaceship,” published in 1953 in a publication called Imagination (according to my Citadel Twilight collection, Volume 1), Philip K. Dick put a human brain into…
Douse your Pizza with Pepper Spray
Fox’s Megyn Kelly classifies pepper spray as a food product. So how long before we start putting it in school lunches?
Deep within a Madding Marriage
“A good wife is good, but the best wife is not so good as no wife at all.” That statement, from Pennyways in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd…