Urban Honking

JEM, a limerick: There once was a planet named Jem, Which seemed to accommodate men, With Earth torn asunder, By one nuclear blunder, Humankind thought to try it again. JEM, a haiku: Dim red sun overhead, Sad beasts of the sky and earth. Humans, welcome home. JEM, a sonnet: In the air float sentient balloons, […]

The first and most egregious mistake I made when I sat down to determine the guidelines of this project was to forget about short stories. By populating my reading list exclusively with novels, I flouted the genre’s most sacred form. The cultural heart of science fiction is in short-form pieces, due to its longstanding relationship […]

Stranger in a Strange Land is a classic of early 1960s American science fiction, and a game-changer for the genre’s sexual politics, so long relegated to a weird ghetto of three-breasted Martian babes and earnest blondes defiled by tentacled monsters. It’s hard to overestimate this book’s influence: it was the catalyst for a neopagan religion, […]

Foundation is a trilogy of Isaac Asimov novels that was honored with a special Hugo award for “Best All-Time” series. It beat out some heavy hitters for the title, including Lord of the Rings. After reading the first book of the trilogy, I can understand the semantics that make this award relevant: it’s, like, the […]

The Invisible Man is a fine modern tragedy. In it Griffin, a young optical physicist, in an ill-timed fit of desperation stemming from his hope for scientific recognition and his inability to cope with people, renders himself invisible. He does this by lowering the refractive index of his body, bleaching his blood, and undergoing a […]

The Einstein Intersection takes place on an indeterminately future Earth: humanity is long gone, replaced by a genetically troubled race of people, largely mutants and idiots, living within the ruins of human society, struggling to make sense of abandoned technologies and enacting the remnants of our culture through exaggerated myths about the ancient heroes of […]

Larry Niven’s Ringworld is the first book of the project that I have not liked. In fact, I disliked it so much that it shook the very foundation of my belief in science fiction as the greatest of all genres. All of a sudden: I was embarrassed. As I explained the plot to my friend […]

It’s been telling me via Google text ads.

Impetuously, a space-living Man, still young, Plots his first and last journey to Earth, for him, a Return to his long-forgotten birthplace. In the ship, he trains for All those forgotten rituals, including: Life with gravity. Everything he finds, including the most anodyne of Animals, seems mystical, meaningful, alien. Returning to his home on the […]

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to read William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984. It’s so absurdly dense and riddled with cryptic terms which have since become commonplace, that it must have been virtually hieroglyphic at the time. Part of the experience of Neuromancer is this incredible recent-history disconnect: to know that the […]