Book #106 of 2018: The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein This 1957 sci-fi romp is fun, but it bears many problematic hallmarks of the genre fiction written by white men in that era. Minor setbacks are blithely compared to slavery and rape, female characters are treated patronizingly, and the 30-year-old protagonist kind of …
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Book #102 of 2018: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #5) The flashback-centric Wizard and Glass is my favorite novel in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower sequence, but I’m willing to entertain arguments that this next book is its best. The setting has been firmly established at this point, and King …
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Book #220 of 2017: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland This book is a wild blend of Arrival, Timeline, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which a linguistics professor is recruited by a shadowy government agency to translate documents suggesting that magic actually existed in the world before …
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Book #116 of 2017: The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig (The Girl from Everywhere #1) There were some interesting ideas in this story of a father and daughter who can navigate their pirate ship time machine to any harbor on a dated map, but ultimately none of it really hangs together. The protagonist and …
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Book #87 of 2017: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by Scott Tipton and David Tipton Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time was a 12-issue comic book series written for the show’s 50th anniversary in 2013, telling the story of a mysterious enemy kidnapping the Doctor’s companions across all of the Time Lord’s incarnations thus far. It’s …
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Book #21 of 2017: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North I’m a big fan of time loop stories, but even in the context of that particular genre, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is remarkable. (I’d personally put it second only to Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay, which is one of …
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TV #2 of 2017: 11.22.63 I ended up really liking this adaptation of the Stephen King story where the guy goes back in time to try and save JFK, even though they changed a lot of what I loved about the book. But the core of the story is still there, and even James Franco …
Book #142 of 2016: Time Travel: A History by James Gleick A fascinating history of the evolving concepts of time and time travel, traced through the separate but related traditions of physics, philosophy, and popular fiction. (I was most surprised to read that the idea of going to another time period would have been inconceivable …
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Book #131 of 2016: Version Control by Dexter Palmer Version Control is a slow burn of a novel. Although set in the near future and populated with new technologies like self-driving cars, it’s not until halfway through the book that it really becomes clear science-fiction. That might be frustrating in other stories, but Version Control …
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Book #1 of 2016: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger So much better than I was expecting it to be. I remember seeing a trailer for the movie adaptation way back in the day, which made me think this story was going to be really Nicholas Sparks-y. And it was, to some degree, but …
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