Posted by Sandy Ferber | Jun 26, 2020 | SFF Reviews | 4
King Kull by Robert E. Howard & Lin Carter There’s a reason why I never lend out books anymore, even to my closest friends; namely, the fact that when I used to loan them out, I never got them back in the same good condition, or, even worse, never got them back at all. Cases […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Oct 11, 2018 | SFF Reviews | 2
The Devil’s Bride by Seabury Quinn Pop Quiz: Which author was the most frequently published in the pages of the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales? If your answer is the obvious one, H.P. Lovecraft, guess again. Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch? Still wrong. Surprisingly, the answer is Washington, D.C.-born […]
Read More
Posted by Jesse Hudson | Apr 20, 2017 | SFF Reviews | 0
Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip Jose Farmer At the risk of being overly simplistic, Jacque Derrida’s concept of deconstruction/post-structuralism (whichever you want to call it) is at heart the perspective that any ideological paradigm can be picked apart, bone by bone, until the skeleton lies in shambles on the floor. The purpose is not […]
Read More
Posted by Jesse Hudson | Jun 24, 2016 | SFF Reviews | 7
The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem “Mighty King, here is a story, a nest of stories, with cabinets and cupboards, about Trurl the constructor and his wonderfully nonlinear adventures.” I can think of no better introduction to Stanislaw Lem’s 1967 The Cyberiad (Cyberiada in the original Polish) than the line above taken from the text. Capturing […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Mar 11, 2016 | SFF Reviews | 5
The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett Just recently, I reviewed The Best of Leigh Brackett, a big, 400+-page affair from Ballantine Books that was first released in 1977. But this collection was not the first to gather the older works of Leigh Brackett, the so-called “Queen of Space Opera” into a nice, compact […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | May 19, 2015 | SFF Reviews | 2
Why Call Them Back From Heaven? by Clifford D. Simak Although the concept of cryogenically preserving the bodies of the living had been a trope of Golden Age science fiction from the 1930s and onward, it wasn’t until New Jersey-born Robert Ettinger released his hardheaded book on the subject, 1962’s The Prospect of Immortality, that […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Mar 13, 2015 | SFF Reviews | 4
The Man in the Maze by Robert Silverberg In one of Robert Silverberg’s novels from 1967, Thorns, the future sci-fi Grand Master presented his readers with one of his most unfortunate characters, Minner Burris. An intrepid space explorer, Burris had been captured by the residents of the planet Manipool, surgically altered and then released. Upon […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Feb 26, 2015 | SFF Reviews | 0
To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg It shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that future Grand Master Robert Silverberg dedicated 1967’s To Open the Sky to writer/editor Frederik Pohl. It was Pohl, after all, who induced Silverberg to begin writing sci-fi again on a full-time basis, after the author’s “retirement” from the field […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Feb 23, 2015 | SFF Reviews | 0
The Time Hoppers by Robert Silverberg This longtime sci-fi buff has a confession to make: Some time travel stories leave me with a throbbing headache. Not that I don’t enjoy them, mind you; it’s just that oftentimes, the mind-blowing paradoxes inherent in many of these tales set off what feels like a Mobius strip feedback […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Jan 20, 2015 | SFF Reviews | 5
Those Who Watch by Robert Silverberg There is a certain aptness in the fact that I penned this review for Robert Silverberg’s Those Who Watch on January 15, 2015. That day, you see, happened to be Silverberg’s 80th birthday, so my most sincere wishes for many more happy and healthy birthdays must go out to […]
Read More
Posted by Rob Weber | Oct 6, 2014 | SFF Reviews | 0
The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert A couple of years back Tor reissued four of Frank Herbert’s novels in absurdly cheap paperback format. For some of these titles it had been quite a while since they’d been in print and despite a poor quality of the paperbacks I snapped them up as soon as they […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | May 12, 2014 | SFF Reviews | 1
Thorns by Robert Silverberg Although Robert Silverberg had been a prodigiously published author prior to 1967, that year is often spoken of as being something of a watershed time for him. Before then, the author had written no less than two dozen sci-fi novels, starting with 1954’s Revolt on Alpha C not to mention dozens […]
Read More
Posted by Sandy Ferber | Sep 18, 2013 | SFF Reviews | 0
The Zap Gun by Philip K. Dick Cult author Philip K. Dick’s 20th published science fiction novel, The Zap Gun, was first released in book form (Pyramid paperback R-1569, with a cover price of 50 cents) in 1967, after having been serialized in the November 1965 and January 1966 issues of Worlds of Tomorrow magazine […]
Read More
Posted by Kat Hooper | Jul 16, 2012 | SFF Reviews | 0
Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick It’s 1998 and time has started running backward. Aging has reversed so that people are gradually getting younger, and dead people are awakening in their graves and begging to be let out. The excavating companies have the rights to sell the people they unbury to the highest bidder. When […]
Read More
Posted by Jesse Hudson | May 18, 2012 | SFF Reviews | 0
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov [In our Edge of the Universe column, we review books that may not be classified SFF but that incorporate elements of speculative fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.] While mid-20th century Russian propaganda wizards were twisting words to hide the […]
Read More
Posted by Jesse Hudson | Mar 27, 2012 | SFF Reviews | 5
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny The scholar Brian Attebery in his book Strategies of Fantasy writes that works of science fantasy can be divided into two categories: the beautiful and the damned. No middle ground to be had, technology and the supernatural remain relative to the era, and combining them is disastrous to the […]
Read More
We’re updating our theme, so things may be a little messy or slow until we’re finished. Thank you for being patient with us!
Recent Discussion