Category Archives: Reviews

Game Review: Shank 2

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In a nameless, war-torn Latin American country, a group of brutal state militia pull over a bus and start waving guns and knives at the frightened people aboard. One approaches a solitary, hulking figure in back who has failed to evacuate the vehicle. The soldier draws a bead with his gun, and promptly loses his hand at the wrist.

This is the opening of the first level of Shank 2. By the end of it, Shank, the main playable character, will have gutted a hundred or more anonymous soldiers, using only a pair of machetes, an endless supply of throwing knives, and a pair of smaller, shiv-like blades. In the glow of the burning enemy base, the bus driver returns, and asks the blood-covered figure if he is part of the rebellion. “What rebellion?”

Yep. Don’t look for deep story here, though the melodrama in this 2-D brawler does have a way of sucking you in. This is a melee version of Metal Slug or Contra, with the violence ratcheted up a couple notches, and the battle system a bit deeper and more challenging. This is the game for the adolescent boy in all of us, and it fills him with glee.

The gameplay includes three main attack buttons, a quick blade attack good for starting off combos, a heavy attack (which varies between selected weapons: machetes, chainsaws, or a sword, for example), and a ranged attack (throwing knives; pistols). Besides this, Shank can grab and throw, pounce, take hostages, juggle enemies in the air.

Boss fights hold to the same core gameplay style but are sufficiently unique to keep things interesting. On the second or third level, I felt briefly overwhelmed by the number of different moves (a rolling attack I thought was oddly placed on the R3 analog stick). Every single button has an assigned function, and more than once I’ve thrown a grenade (R1) when I meant to pounce (R2).

Keeping track of so many unique moves and still managing to perform combos takes a bit of practice. I wouldn’t mind seeing the options slimmed down just a little bit, but I appreciate the potential for better and more advanced techniques for anyone who wants to put the time in.

I also appreciate the near-seamless integration of cut-scenes with gameplay. Each boss fight will allow for one super-attack (with a custom cut-scene) when you do enough damage. But it still feels like part of the fight; the damage bar still stays on-screen.

It’s mindless, gory, over-the-top fun. Way more to it and way more fun than I expected for a 10 dollar download title. If you’re into this sort of thing, I’d say it’s worth a look.

Article first published as PlayStation Network Review: Shank 2 on Blogcritics.

Game Review: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2

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The 21st century is a wonderful time to be a gamer. Online gaming has become standard with console releases; Japanese titles that would have once been deemed culturally untranslatable now routinely make their way to our shores. This latter is arguably a mixed blessing, however.

I’ve previously covered two games from NIS America (the acronym standing for Nippon Ichi Software), both sequels. Prinny 2 I found to be old-school platforming fun, and the story and humour, while very Japanese, also very funny. Cladun X2 was dungeon-crawling fun — to a point. Both had an exceptionally high learning curve, which I was willing to persevere against in Prinny but not in Cladun.

Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 is also a sequel, also from NIS America, also full of Japanese gaming/manga/anime tropes and general weirdness. The title sequence has still hand-drawn images of all of the main characters in magical girl poses that are bizarrely at odds with the revealing outfits they are wearing (black leather bikinis and other lingerie). These outfits thankfully don’t feature very much in the actual game.

It does feature the girls, though. In fact, there are no male characters in the game whatsoever, excepting sexually indeterminate dragons, rats, and other monsters. Our heroes are mostly CPU candidates, living in a world called Gamindustri and featuring magical guardian “mascots” that look like game discs.

The world is divided into nations that are essentially stand-ins for Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft’s current-generation consoles (plus one for the never-produced Sega Neptune). A clever conceit and probably the most interesting thing about the game, though there’s not much satire of the real-life corporate entities, or if there was, it went over my head.

I wondered whether NIS’ inability to take themselves seriously might be a problem with an RPG, where story matters. But of course, their wildly successful Disgaea series has already shown that RPGs don’t actually have to be sombre and serious. Of course, they do have to be entertaining, which requires a certain degree of sense and witty dialogue.

Where to draw this line is at least somewhat a matter of personal taste. The fact that the first game was popular enough to merit a sequel, and the existence of a limited edition version of this game which runs for several hundred dollars may answer that question, at least for a certain contingent of hard-core fans.

So why not get right to the gameplay?

Besides the usual HP (hit points), registering the health of a character, action in battle is determined by AP and SP. AP is used up each turn for attacking, using items, special moves, and simply moving. SP is used up in special moves and in regular attacks (which involve three different types of button combinations), but only when a combo is initiated. Attacking enemies will slowly build SP back up, while AP is only refreshed after time has passed.

SP is essentially your magic points (or specialty points) while AP is like your action bar or timer. The system is strictly turn-based, but movement is free, defined each turn by the radius of a circle.

This seems logical but digitalizing basic actions along with both magic and health made it difficult for me to keep track of everything and plan strategically. Frankly, I rarely knew when I was held back from performing a certain action because I needed to attack to build up my SP, or if I had to end my turn without attacking so that my AP would carry over.

Just as the simplest actions were needlessly complicated, true depth was lacking. For the first few hours battles were basically hack and slash. The challenge level then began to rise as boss HP rose along with damage dealt, but there wasn’t a whole lot you could do about that but a) power-level and find rare equipment, or b) spend half an hour or more slowly shaving off a boss’ life while constantly healing and hoping he doesn’t unleash a super-attack.

In one sense this is extremely classic game design, complete with the high-rising difficulty, but on the other hand, haven’t improvements to role-playing game mechanics accrued over the last couple of decades? The general strategic uselessness of available support magic and special attacks compared to simple power-levelling had me wishing for more balance.

For me, NIS games have shined for their gameplay rather than creating an emotional connection to the story. Though I had some fun with it in a killing-time sort of way, my lack of real engagement with the battle system made it difficult for me to keep pushing through as the challenge level really started to ramp up.

You probably know if what I’ve described is the sort of thing you’re into, but if you’re not sure and haven’t played the original, you might want to rent it first.

Article first published as PlayStation 3 Review: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 on Blogcritics.

Book Review: Starman Jones

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Baen Books has been releasing new editions of Robert A. Heinlein works for over a decade, at a steadily increasing pace. So far this has included about half of the famed Heinlein juveniles, originally written for Scribner between 1947 and 1958. The latest from Baen is Starman Jones, first published in 1953.

Like other RAH reprints from Baen, Starman Jones includes an introduction from William H. Patterson, Jr. putting the novel in the context of the time and with respect to Heinlein’s other works. I already knew from Patterson’s biography of the grandmaster that Heinlein was consciously influenced by Horatio Alger, a nineteenth-century writer of adventure stories for boys.

Like Alger, Heinlein strove to provide moral training for the young people (especially young men) of his generation. The recurring moral theme of Heinlein’s juveniles (and many of his later adult novels as well) includes such prescriptions as “hard work pays off,” “honesty is the best policy,” and “study hard,” amongst others. By all accounts, Heinlein truly lived and espoused these values, and such universal lessons lend these books greater staying power than some of his more overtly political works.

One thing I didn’t realize, however, was that Heinlein had taken the basic plot for Starman Jones from a real-life event. If you wish to avoid all spoilers, you’ll want to skip over this next (quoted) paragraph, and Patterson’s introduction, as well. In Heinlein’s own words (as quoted by Patterson from the Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz):

“This book was written without an outline from a situation in the early nineteenth century. Two American teenagers took off in a sail boat, were picked up by a China clipper, were gone two years — and returned to Boston with one of them in command.”

Heinlein took that same basic situation and turned it into space opera. At the novel’s opening, our hero, Max Jones (his precise age isn’t given but he seems to be in his late teens) is a farm boy, working the land hard each day to provide for himself and his widowed, but irresponsible step-mother. When she comes home with a new husband, known by everyone in town as a drunk and a lout, announcing that they’ve sold the farm, Max decides his filial duties are over. He leaves the farm with not much more than the clothes on his back and a vague plan of getting into space.

Ultimately, Max finds a friend in the older and wiser Sam, a roguish character with a penchant for bending the rules, but a good heart, and the two of them scam their way onto a starship. Through a series of unlikely but plausibly-written events, Max manages to rise higher and higher in the chain of command. When disaster strikes, his talents turn out to be crucial to saving the ship, its passengers, and his fellow crew members.

Heinlein’s earliest novels did read very much like early “boys adventure stories,” with two-dimensional characters and pulp-novel situations. Books like Rocket Ship Galileo and Space Cadets weren’t bad, mind you. But they weren’t great. By the time he was writing Farmer in the Sky and Starman Jones, however, Heinlein was in the groove.

RAH didn’t apologize for a certain degree of formula in these stories, an update of Alger’s from a century earlier: a young man from a modest background, through the virtues of hard work, a bit of luck, and (uniquely, in Starman Jones) perhaps taking some liberties with the truth to get his foot in the door, eventually proves his mettle and resourcefulness and saves the day. Hey, it’s a good formula.

I haven’t read any of Horatio Alger’s books, but other comparisons spring to mind. A young lad on ship, starting at the bottom rung, eventually saving the day — sounds like Treasure Island, albeit without the treasure. In fact, Max Jones bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Jim Hawkins, each having lost a father, each finding a friend and role model in someone of dubious morals, Sam Anderson being Heinlein’s stand-in for Long John Silver.

Yet, though less obvious than the Robert Louis Stephenson comparison, I found myself thinking more frequently of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn during Max’s interstellar adventures. Max Jones is, like most of Heinlein’s scrupulously honest young protagonists, very much more of a straight-arrow than the uncivilized Huck ever was, but he still finds it necessary to lie in order to get a fair shot. For the protagonist of a Heinlein juvenile to profit by something like falsifying shipboard documents is unusual enough to be worth mentioning, and reminds me more than a little of Huck, who had little need for civilization or rules but had little trouble determining right from wrong.

Mark Twain had something to say in his book about the difference between morality and law, particularly with respect to slavery and discrimination; Robert Heinlein had a similar bone to pick as well. The SF Grandmaster’s targets were the unions who, he thought, sought to trample the downtrodden, and make the rich richer. Standing in for them in this novel is an exclusive hereditary guild system, making it almost impossible to get into space if you don’t know the right people. (This is a major plot point in the story, forcing Jones’ hand in the deception.) It seems to me that Heinlein, politically very different in many ways, sought the same sort of social equality and freedom that Twain had, some 70 years earlier.

And it’s these universal themes that make him still so readable. True, the technological aspects haven’t aged well. On the one hand Heinlein describes precision, supersonic bullet trains that never touch the ground. On the other hand, ship’s crew perform calculations by hand and feed the answers into antique computers for interstellar jumps.

Yet I’ll wager that most modern readers will suspend their disbelief on these points. The well-realized characters and smooth plotting represent this writer at his best. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about most of the ideas in this novel; it’s just a solid adventure tale (with a subtle moral undercurrent) that’s as fun to read today as it was 60 years ago. But with no larger goal than that in mind, Heinlein wrote a classic.

(Baen Books, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Food Review: Foosh Energy Mints

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Foosh Energy Mints are made by Vroom Foods, the same company that has been making Buzz Bites for years. The basic idea of both products is the same: take the caffeine of a full cup of coffee (100 mg, to be precise), wrap it up in a small candy that you can pop right into your mouth.

I happen to not be a coffee drinker. I drink both black and green teas, neither on a daily basis, and even the former has significantly less caffeine than a cup of coffee. I used to drink soda on occasion, but have essentially been off the fizzy sugar water for years. In other words, I was completely decaffeinated when I decided to test these “seriously caffeinated” peppermints out.

Somewhere around mid-morning on a Friday, I decided to try my first one. Vroom didn’t invent caffeine, and I’m not going to hold them responsible for the effects of the stimulant, which can vary from person to person. I will note that the body adjusts to caffeine, so if you want your cup of coffee, Foosh, or whatever to be truly effective, you should make sure you are not ingesting caffeine either frequently or regularly, but only as needed.

Having done just that, the result in my caes was a certain nervous energy that, unfortunately, I had no real way to dissipate. I wondered if I might be experiencing a placebo effect, so I took another mint to make sure, and soon the physical signs were unmistakable. I was jittery, my hands were shaking, my heart was running a little faster, and I wanted nothing more than to start running laps until the feeling went away. If I were on my way to a work-out, this would have been ideal. For the bad timing of being over-caffeinated in an office environment, I can only blame myself.

Don’t be so surprised at my poor decision. I wasn’t really expecting such a pronounced effect, since I didn’t realize how high this dose was compared to anything I’ve ever experienced before. It turns out that 100 mg of caffeine is the equivalent of three cans of soda (which put me at six cans’ worth of caffeine, with my two mints). Also, besides the caffeine, the mints include a cocktail of other, somewhat less potent stimulants, like ginseng and taurine, plus a handful of vitamins. I’ll be sure not to underestimate their effect on me the next time.

Taste is almost beside the point, so long as the candies aren’t inedible. I’ll note that caffeine is actually quite bitter. Most people don’t realize this because it’s rarely found in such a concentrated dose; in a soda or cappuccino, for example, the caffeine taste is basically drowned out by sugar and other flavours. Given such a large amount in a candy of this size, it’s impossible to completely mask the taste of the bitter alkaloid. The strength of the peppermint flavour, however, similar to what you’ll find in an Altoid, at least relegates the bitterness to an odd aftertaste. Certainly the caffeine peppermint pairing works much better than the “chocolate” Buzz Bites chews.

Foosh Energy Mints do pretty much exactly what they promise: they’re edible enough, serve as potent breath fresheners, and deliver a powerful dose of caffeine (along with a handful of secondary active ingredients). How you use them and to what effect will depend on how much of a caffeine hound you already are, and probably on many parametres of your baseline physiology. But I have no qualms at endorsing these as, indeed, seriously caffeinated.

Article first published as Tastes Review: Foosh Energy Mints on Blogcritics.

Book Review: Man Plus

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Frederik Pohl is nothing if not versatile. A contemporary of Asimov and Clarke, he too started publishing during the pulp explosion of the late 1930s at Amazing Stories and John W. Campbell’s Astounding. Unlike Asimov and some other Golden Age authors, however, he didn’t slow down or stop his output with the New Wave of the ’60s and ’70s, but joined in enthusiastically. Thirty years after his first published story, he contributed to the highly influential New Wave anthology, Dangerous Visions. Decades later still, he joined the blogosphere. The Way the Future Blogs won the 90-year-old Pohl a Hugo in 2010.

It’s the New Wave that’s relevant here. The 1970s, if you ask me, provided a particular embarassment of riches for SF fans. 1972, for example, saw the publication of two of my all-time favourite Robert Silverberg novels, Dying Inside and The Book of Skulls, both nominated for (but not winning) the Hugo and Nebula the following year. The Nebula Awards for works published in 1975 included more than 20 novel nominations: particularly impressive non-winners include Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, and The Mote in God’s Eye from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. And 1976 saw the publication of Man Plus, a novel which would bring Frederik Pohl a Hugo nomination and a Nebula win.

Man Plus is not a book that would have been written even 15 or 20 years earlier. Though a one-sentence summary of the plot, “Man colonizes Mars,” might make it seem right at home amongst the Heinlein juveniles, Pohl’s novel is very different from the shiny, optimistic rocket-ship adventures of the 1950s. Earlier colonial science fiction stories generally featured capable, morally upstanding young men (very occasionally women), infinitely adaptable to both the familiar and unfamiliar challenges of planetary frontier life. The heroes’ romantic relationships, where they exist, are a source of stability rather than conflict. The inevitable casualties of pioneer living are not long-dwelled-upon and rarely tragic.

But Pohl’s protagonist, Roger Torraway, the not-entirely-willing “Man Plus” of the title, does not feel like a hero. His relationship with his wife is endlessly complicated. The impetus behind the Mars project comes not from a unified and progressive planetary government, but the desperate administration of just one country in a politically-unstable world. And the sacrifices asked of Roger are not superficial, nor does Pohl gloss over them. In fact, it becomes clear early in the novel that this is not really a story about establishing the first colony on Mars, it’s a story about what it is to be human, more a riff on Frankenstein than Red Planet or Farmer in the Sky.

Through a series of operations, Roger literally loses his humanity piece by piece. Ultimately his organic self is reduced to heart, lungs, and brain, while his limbs, skin, eyes, and other parts are all replaced by machine components, or, if “redundant”, simply removed and forgotten. Simultaneously, he must learn to see the world through software-mediated crystalline eyes, capture radiative energy through massive bat-wings, and balance atop powerful, mechanical legs.

And time is short. The president of the United States regularly drops in to appeal to Roger’s patriotism, reminding him that the future of the “Free World” depends on his mission. The planet, on the verge of environmental collapse, simultaneously seems to be moving towards total nuclear war, as governments fight over scarce resources.

The 1970s energy crisis no doubt provided one real-life inspiration to the author, the ongoing Cold War may have been another. But Pohl’s near-future tale manages to still resonate decades later by mostly avoiding obvious dating. He makes no reference to the Soviet Union, instead the main antagonists to the future US-led alliance are the fictional Pan Asians. A lot of Mao’s China (contemporary to the writing of the novel) can be read into this imagined world power, but the connection is mostly implicit.

The environmental crisis — a combination of pollution, implied climate change, and shortage of resources — is also familiar to today’s reader. Again, Pohl drops only hints to the specific circumstances that led the world to such a point. It is thanks to his decision to focus on the general that this vision of the future doesn’t pile up anachronisms for a contemporary reader. With the possible exception of over-large supercomputers, there’s little plot-wise to explicitly tie this novel to a particular decade. Pohl’s then future, both scientifically and politically, could still be our future.

Thematically, on the other hand, Man Plus is very much a novel of 1970s science fiction. Imperfect, complicated characters. Moral ambiguity. No guarantee of an unqualified happy ending. While Mary Shelley’s monster was Victor Frankenstein’s antagonist and victim, Roger Torraway — as the monster — is a tragic and flawed hero. While Shelley’s Romantic-era theme warned against scientific hubris, Pohl describes a struggle against apathy and ignorance.

In common, the monsters of each novel must reconcile themselves to what and who they’ve become. Roger Torraway has the added benefit of a defining life mission (ensuring the human race will go on), but as he feels less connected to his species, he begins to question whether he has any stake in their survival. His friends and colleagues, the ones doing this to him, ask themselves whether the end justifies the means — though they still feel driven to rage against an extinction level “dying of the light”.

The questions first raised in this novel 35 years ago remain intriguing today. For those who haven’t yet read it, the 2011 trade paperback edition of Man Plus from Tor-Forge (under their Orb Books imprint) is a rediscovered treasure. And while the text has stood the test of time, the new cover design by Gregory Manchess is a nicely modern update over the original. Frederik Pohl has written SF for over 70 years and managed to remain relevant throughout. This isn’t the only gem of his worth revisiting, but it’s not at all a bad place to start.

(Orb Books, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes

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I’m sure you’ve all watched Guy Ritchie’s second Sherlock Holmes movie. Where can you get your detective fix, now? I can help you with that.

In keeping both with his to-the-point writing style and the cultural expectations of the time, Conan Doyle did not much expound on Sherlock’s early life or psychology, and the detective himself rarely spoke of such things. The potential for interpretation is broad. . . .

While Robert Downey, Jr. portrays somewhat of a wise-cracking action hero, Sherlock‘s title character (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is both intensely intelligent and coldly indifferent to the human element in his puzzles. . . . “I can’t be the only one that gets bored.”

Read about several of the most interesting film, television, and book properties to re-imagine the great detective recently in my article, The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Biochemistry

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I was looking forward to No Starch Press’ latest Manga Guide release for months before it actually came out. I quite enjoyed The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, and thought this would make for an excellent companion piece. Obviously I wasn’t the first person to think so, the author of that previous book, Masaharu Takemura, must have felt the same or he wouldn’t have agreed to write this one as well.

Biochemistry and molecular biology are like solid state physics and physical chemistry or, if you like, psychology and sociology. Both disciplines find themselves interested in many of the same phenomena, but consider slightly different aspects of each one.

Molecular biology is interested in how the body works as a system on the sub-cellular level. The basic processes of life are considered with respect to how they manage to maintain all the functions of a cell. Biochemistry is interested in all the chemical behaviour involved in life, which ultimately is responsible for all those same cellular functions.

Both books discuss many of the same ideas, therefore, but there’s virtually no overlap in content. In Molecular Biology, enzymes were considered as helpers in chemical processes. In Biochemistry, more time was spent on the specific reactions they catalyzed, and the actual chemical structures of reactants and products. Both books discuss the way DNA information is read and translated into specific proteins, but biochemistry goes into the chemical detail of DNA, RNA, and the amino acids that make up a protein and determine its folding.

The storyline is cute: Kumi is a teenage girl constantly worried about her weight. She decides to study biochemistry so she has a better understanding of her metabolism and its relationship to weight gain. This is not just an entertaining framing device; Takemura is intentionally using a non-traditional approach to the topic, introducing major chemical characters into the narrative in an organic way as they become relevant to particular chemical processes.

Proteins, fats (lipids), and carbohydrates (saccharides or sugars) are each discussed in different chapters. The chapter on carbs isn’t really just about carbs, it’s about how sugars are used to create ATP which in turn provides energy for the cell (amongst many other things). The chapter on proteins isn’t just about the Atkins diet, it’s also about how enzymes are created and how they function as biological catalysts.

This isn’t the first Manga Guide to take a non-traditional approach to a topic. Calculus took a much more intuitive, less mechanical approach to derivatives and integrals, though not a less rigourous one. Universe followed a historical sequence in discussing the heavens, steadily overturning pre-conceptions as contradictions were discovered. And all of the books in this series have emphasized real-life examples and applications, whatever the topic. The chemical reactions discussed in the book are used to explain everything from the ripening of fruit to the springiness of mochi-style rice.

And it works. There are a number of topics in science that are frequently taught a certain way because it makes it easier to organize a textbook, or faster to “cover” in class, even though it’s not the most efficient approach to actual learning. I appreciate this series’ willingness to eschew traditional learning sequences in favour of intuition, learning in context, and developing ideas organically from previous knowledge. Another enjoyable entry to the series.

(No Starch Press, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Responses to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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John Scalzi recently wrote a post for Tor.com about Starship Troopers the film, listing several reasons for watching it. The film is ostensibly based on Heinlein’s book of the same name, which, amongst other things, is often credited as creating the military science fiction genre.

My own reason for watching it, a couple years ago (or, rather, re-watching it), came from this AV Club post, which told me a lot about director Verhoeven and his intentions with the film I hadn’t picked up on the first time through. On the surface, it’s a crappy, brainless action movie. A little deeper, it turns out to be incredibly satirical, both anti-war and an intentional argument against the very ideas Heinlein put forth in the film’s source material.

Some might suggest he misrepresents Heinlein’s ideas in responding to them. For example, he’s clearly stated his belief that Heinlein’s imagined society was fascist, but this isn’t really a fair reading. Still, I’m of the school “everyone should read Heinlein, but never stop arguing with him”. So I appreciate the effort to refute him, even if Verhoeven does a sloppy job of it.

And I did get something out of re-watching the movie with a more critical eye; I even went back and watched Robocop for the same reason. But when it comes right down to it, I didn’t enjoy either one. They may only be pretending to be crappy, brainless movies — hiding deeper messages just below the surface — but really, what’s the difference between pretending to be and actually being crappy?

For that matter, the messages were pretty vague and simplistic. They’re anti-fascist, and? Can you get a little more specific with that? In the end, I suspect there’s only so much you can do with satire compared to a more detailed argument in a compelling story. That’s why Brave New World can’t live up to 1984. The former is satire at the expense of being real literature.

For that matter, I don’t need Verhoeven’s to refute Heinlein. It’s been done. The Forever War was written maybe 15 years after Starship Troopers, and is a clear, politically-opposite response, written by a veteran just returned from Vietnam, no less. Joe Haldeman had both the writing and military creds to challenge Heinlein, and in so doing may have exceeded his work.

In fact, even Verhoeven’s cheerleader, Scalzi himself, has done this. Old Man’s War is clearly aware of Heinlein’s work, challenges it, and is an excellent novel in its own right. Scalzi should just read his own book next time he feels the urge to watch Verhoeven’s film.

I guess the moral of the story (as I take it) is that even when something is arguably important as part of a body of critically relevant work, it may have few artistic merits of its own.

Book Review: The Green Hills of Earth & The Menace from Earth

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The stories of Green Hills have that special just-can’t-wait-for-the-future sheen that science fictional works of the ’40s and ’50s tended to have. Luna City, colonies on Mars and Venus, a new class of adventurers and fortune-seekers rocketing to the outer planets to establish new outposts and write their own tickets. There’s opportunity for the taking, if you just have brains and gumption enough to get it!

Read my complete review on Revolution Science Fiction.

Sweating to Books on Tape*

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A few years ago when I was living alone in China, my job gave me a significant amount of free time. I taught either one or two classes per day (biology and pre-calculus), had no official office hours — I was able to make it to the gym most weekdays (morning or afternoon depending on my schedule) and had all my evenings free save Tuesday nights when I ran a sort of phys ed program until about 5:30 or 6:00.

What I didn’t have were friends. That may be part of the reason I started listening to audio podcasts. Craving the human voice (in English, rather). I listened to Escape Pod and enjoyed it quite a lot, though I stopped being able to keep up after a few months back in Canada, particularly once I was working a genuine full-time teaching job.

I do like audio fiction, and it’s particularly ideal for short stories, which I am also fond of. Not everybody is, even avid readers. Or at least, it doesn’t occur to a large segment of the reading population to pick up an anthology or collection. This is a shame, really.

Certainly there’s a place for novels and short works, both, but there are a number of advantages to short fiction, including the ability to read it in one sitting, the chance to get a number of neat and unique ideas in a single book instead of focusing on just one, the ability to see a basic narrative idea stripped bare and not buried in an overwritten novel (it’s harder to overwrite a short story and still get it published).

All of which is to tell you I was thinking of a short story I “read” some time ago (I realize I heard the audio version only), and tracked it down, and if you’re interested, perhaps you’ll give it a listen. It’s called “Usurpers”, it’s hosted on Escape Pod, and it’s about a stubborn runner in the future who refuses any sorts of bodily enhancements, but still dares to compete against modified humans. He’s kind of a jerk but the story makes an important (and legitimate) point about “grit”. It’s more important than you think. For anyone who strives for greatness, physically, intellectually, artistically. . . .

*The title is a reference to a Family Guy cut-away gag.