Book #4 of 2024: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams This 2008 anthology collects 22 short stories about life after various apocalyptic scenarios, all but one of which had been previously published elsewhere (although Stephen King’s plague journal “The End of the Whole Mess” was the only entry I’d read before). …
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Book #9 of 2021: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow Although author Cory Doctorow’s debut novel doesn’t indulge in the patronizing moralism of some of his later works, its edgy nihilism is nevertheless nearly as tiresome. There’s a neat concept here about an “adhocracy” stepping in to keep a beloved theme …
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Book #134 of 2017: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow I liked Cory Doctorow’s earlier novel Little Brother, about teens using technology to nonviolently resist an overreaching surveillance state, but I couldn’t stand this one about illegal downloading and copyright violation. The characters are like those in an Ayn Rand novel, existing merely as cardboard mouthpieces …
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Book #35 of 2017: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Little Brother #1) As the title implies, Little Brother is something of a modern update to George Orwell’s authoritarian surveillance classic 1984. But whereas Orwell was constructing his totalitarian state as a potential future that unchecked modern trends could eventually bring about, this novel feels like …
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