A good way to illustrate the utter failure of the Star Wars prequels on just about every level of storytelling imaginable is to ask someone to describe the characters without talking about their jobs or their costumes. [Come on, try it: Queen Amidala. Oh, she looks like a Kabuki... wait, no. She'...
Tommorrow is a wide palate, especially when all we really have to guide us is what we have experienced and what we have seen of or read about others' experiences. Darwin once made the now-famous statement about evolutionary biology and the process (uncovered by both he and Russell Wallace) of nat...
The Practice Effect is a pseudo-sci-fi, maybe a bit more of a fantasy book, about a scientist who travels to a foreign land where the laws of physics are ever so slightly different than they are on earth. We follow Dennis, our scientist, as he tries to make his way in this new and crazy world, o...
I had very high expectations for this book and was dissapointed that for the most part, they were not met. I loved Startide Rising. The pacing was fast, the action was plenty and the scope was incredible. The idea that a lone ship crewed mostly by dolphins had accidently happened upon a derelict ...
An insightful, quicksilver romp through Brin's own mind. In the 20 essays, short stories, and little wonders in this book, David will take you from the worlds of Galileo Galilei and Jules Verne, through thoughtful explorations of Orwell and Tolkien, and on into tomorrows that just may happen.From...
Zach stood at his desk to write his review of David Brin's interminably boring science fiction novel, Glory Season.I'd better start off by mentioning how tedious it was to listen to the main character's thoughts in every other paragraph, Zach thought to himself. That way, the people reading this...
David Brin is known for inserting current scientific knowledge of cosmos, biology, and evolutionary science both biological and non-biological (albeit at the edges of known science and speculation beyond, but always on scientific principles). The Uplift Storm Trilogyl exemplifies Brin's mastery o...
You cannot ask for a better premise than Uplift. Of all the science fiction series I've read, David Brin has something special here. Uplift is more than just panspermia, because Brin has taken the idea of aliens genetically engineering pre-sapient life to full sapience and wrapped his own entir...
Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. Th...
My copy of The Postman is battered, well-read, and much loved. It's a movie tie-in Bantam paperback that I found at a used bookstore, the pages ever so slightly yellowed, the cover worn, its top corner ever so slightly curling up in a dog's ear. It fits perfectly with the atmosphere that David ...
Millennia ago the Five Galaxies decreed the planet Jijo off limits. But in the last thousand years six races have begun resettling Jijo, embracing a pre-industrial life to hide their existence from the Galactics. Overcoming their differences, the Six have built a society based on mutual tolerance...
I have been digesting this pleasant miscellany by science fiction writer David Brin at a slow pace, and have found the experience (my first encounter with Brin) highly enjoyable.Otherness is a miscellany in that it mixes short stories (13), along with story notes (3 texts), and essays (5) in a fi...
In New York and Baltimore, police cameras scan public areas twenty-four hours a day. Huge commercial databases track you finances and sell that information to anyone willing to pay. Host sites on the World Wide Web record every page you view, and “smart” toll roads know where you drive. Every day...
Our mother had no business yanking us from Moscow, no matter how painful the city had become. Wasn’t it bad enough, with our father declared an Enemy of the Czar? Denounced by People, Coss and State? How could she thereupon haul her daughters along, like huddled gypsies, following the slender rai...
For reasons I can no longer remember but I'm sure made sense at the time, we left home at one A.M. and arrived at the Canada/U.S. Thousand Island border crossing at five A.M. Our ages ranged from eighteen to twenty-three, and we were not, at that hour, looking our best.Now, we'd all been across t...