Otaku by Chris Kluwe will have to be compared to Ernie Cline’s Ready Player One because they have a lot in common. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a dystopian world that’s gone to hell and it would really suck if there wasn’t some kind of global virtual reality game for people to get …
Ready to flatten the curve, everyone? Sure, Netflix is great, but after telling the damnable thing that YES, I’M STILL WATCHING “THE OFFICE” for the 47th time, it may be time to turn to books. If you’ve a bit of schadenfreude in you, or if you’d like to remind yourself that it could always be …
Ted Chiang, the author of Exhalation, a collection of short fiction that won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and was named a New York Times Best Book of 2019, responded to questions from members of the 2020 PNBA Awards committee. Exhalation is your second heralded collection. What draws you to the short story form? I …
Charles Soule is back with Anyone. Soule wrote an interesting near future SF novel called The Oracle Year a while back, and he’s tackling the near future again with Anyone. This time around, the premise is human consciousness can be transported between bodies. Naturally, this becomes both thrilling and terrifying (when you start to extrapolate some of the effects …
The Polish science fiction writing genius, gave us a short story par excellence with The Seventh Voyage. It’s one of many adventures of his indefatigable comedic protagonist Ijon Tichy. In this instance the innocent Ijon is merely cruising in his space ship when he gets caught in a time loop. As a result, past and …
To this reader, two of the scariest book and life scenarios are that of cybersecurity and cyberterrorism. Richard Sandford in his novel The Soul Snatchers has achieved both scenarios. The time is the near future. The locales include the San Juan Islands in Washington State, Seattle, Portland (Oregon) and the Bay Area of California. The …
by Paul Constant for The Seattle Times Once upon a time in Kingston, Kitsap County, a little girl fell in love with books. Annie Carl was born with a rare spinal birth defect called a lipomyelomeningocele — a fatty deposit at the base of her spine a little bigger than a pea. It’s a condition …
“Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. And when you’re here, you’ll never want to leave.” The world is dominated by Cloud, a retail conglomerate that controls everything — your home, union, healthcare, government… it’s all Cloud. Essentially, it’s the Amazon of the next decade. That’s what makes it so …
Live from PAX West, a book review! There’s something to the notion of a time war, isn’t there? One faction wants This, another faction wants That, and time is the battlefield. There’s also something futile to the notion, but that’s another book (All of an Instant by Richard Garfinkle [out of print]). This book is …
… Chuck Wendig goes full Stephen King with Wanderers, where he channels The Stand as he delivers a full-tilt deconstruction of our current technological malaise. Kirkus Reviews notes that Wendig “is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time,” and to that we say: “It’s about time that someone did.” This one sprawls …
