Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
This past summer, the sci-fi/horror cult classic Event Horizon got its first official tie-in comic: Event Horizon: Dark Descent. Regular readers may have seen the sneak peek I shared back in June. As of November 2, two issues are out, with three more on the way. Are they a promising start for an Event Horizon... Continue Reading →
Robert Zubrin is a persistent man. An engineer, author, and above all, space advocate, he's lobbied for a human voyage to Mars for about three and a half decades now, even as the US government has dilly-dallied its way through various questionable exercises in pork-barrel spending. It's 2025 and human boots haven't even returned to... Continue Reading →
Harry Turtledove is a big fish in a small pond. He may not be widely known outside of alternate history circles, but within them everybody knows his name, and has probably read some of his work. Dust jackets have proclaimed him the "Master of Alternate History" for about three decades now. He was my personal... Continue Reading →
Very early on, my family instilled in me a love of coffee table books: hefty, hardcover volumes, large enough to double as paperweights or even footstools1, bedecked with photographs and artwork from front to back. Instead of reading straight through, you could open one to whatever page you fancied. They covered all sorts of topics,... Continue Reading →
I've always been one for spooky spaceship stories. And while there are some terrific deep-space horror movies out there, I've had a much harder time finding a book that fits the bill---for whatever reason, it's a subgenre with relatively little presence in print sci-fi. So you can imagine I was intrigued when I found an... Continue Reading →
How to Mars is like Andy Weir's The Martian, if The Martian had been written by a humanities major instead of an engineer. It is also, not coincidentally, a better book. Now, the subject of today's review was something of a happy accident on my part. I was at my local library---the same library where... Continue Reading →
The longer one hangs out in alternate history circles, the more one starts to hear a common lament: "Our genre is about so much more than World War II and the American Civil War! Why do our most popular stories always involve Confederates or Nazis?" My own showcases of the genre have not exactly helped... Continue Reading →
Ah, to live in the old Solar System, before our nosy little space probes pushed back the veil and revealed the other planets to be absolute shitholes. Venus was, beneath its clouds, a steamy paradise world full of lush vegetation and primordial beasts; Mars, meanwhile, was one vast desert crisscrossed by canals, pockmarked by the... Continue Reading →
Hello, all! I'm following up on last week's book review with... another book review! I've been reading a ton lately, so you're probably going to get a lot of these---and where Deep Black was sci-fi, the usual theme for this blog, today's exploration is in another genre entirely: alternate history. We will be taking a... Continue Reading →
Hello, all! I have returned from my hiatus---and now that I've wrapped up my hectic school term, I ought to have ample time to blog during the long, hot summer. Let's kick things off again with another book review! You may remember my post on the novel Mission One, by Samuel Best. I deemed it... Continue Reading →
