ReadAndFindOut - Grand Opening!

I find it pretty difficult to write about the good SF that came out in the sixties and seventies, because a part of me always wants to go, “It was very ____, for its time,” which is not really a very helpful thing to say. But Larry Niven’s Ringworld took up a bat, smashed all my “for its time” cliches and laughed at my shock and pleasure.

Louis Wu is 200 years old, and he’s just ditched his own party to teleport through time zones to make the day last a little longer. He exhibits your usual signs of ennui and “back in the good old days”, so it’s an unsurprisingly good thing when Nessus (a Puppeteer, a race of aliens with beautiful voices and two heads [two heads! why do we not have more SF with people who have two heads? They are ALWAYS awesome]) kidnaps him and makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Nessus recruits Wu for an exploration mission whose details are currently, conveniently, left vague. He goes on to recruit Speaker To Animals, who is a Kzin (catlike aliens! also awesome!) and Teela Brown. Teela Brown is recruited not because she ...

Little Hands Clapping is a story of love returned and love rejected, of loneliness and despair and moths drawn to the flame. It's a story about a doctor, a model, a baker and a caretaker. It's a story about Pavarotti and accents. But most of all it's a story about something very hinky going on in a museum.

The museum is dedicated to the hopeless and despairing, to failures, and to death. Rooms are called “Unfortunate Survivors”, “Popular Methods”, “Count Your Blessings” and the like. The idea is to try to prevent people from committing suicide – museum ...

Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett
Published by Orbit, Jan 15, 2010

MR. SHIVERS is the debut novel from Robert Jackson Bennett. The novel is set during the Dust Bowl, mid 1930’s, in the central United States. The setting and the magical realism style creates an immediate and unique feel for the story that I found to be intriguing and submersive. The story revolves around an itinerant man named Mr. Connelly, who we first ...