Flash reviews — November ‘09

Title: Breaking Point
Author: James E. Gunn
Year: 1972
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Short story collection with your standard range of quality: some good ones, some average ones, some poor ones. Solid reading, but nothing overly memorable.
Title: In the Problem Pit
Author: Frederick Pohl
Year: 1976
Rating: 3 out of [...]

Some recent blogroll additions

I want to mention a couple sites I’ve added to my Blogroll in the last few weeks, to help send them some of the attention they deserve.
First is a relatively new one by none other than Frederick Pohl, called The Way the Future Blogs. He describes it as a sort of continuation of, or [...]

Pohl’s Jem may not be a “gem” but is still worth a look

In various profiles of Frederick Pohl, I have more than once seen Jem (1979) listed as one of his best and most important novels. After giving it a read I can see why it’s considered “important,” but I haven’t read enough of his work (at the time of this writing) to know if it’s [...]

The makers of our science fiction dreams

I just finished a fascinating book called Dream Makers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers At Work, by Charles Platt. It’s a book of author profiles based on interviews Platt (an editor and writer himself) conducted in the late 1970’s. The work was originally published in two paperbacks in the early 80’s; [...]

From Madison Avenue to Venus, the space merchants rule

Widely regarded as a classic of the genre, Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953) takes critical aim at the increasing commercialization of society, and particularly one of the main tools used to drive it: the advertising industry. Woven into this framework is commentary on many related topics such as overpopulation, depletion of natural [...]