Posts tagged with "Elitist University" :: Page 3
How to Review Books the EBR Way
I get asked on a weekly basis about my method for reviewing. Why? Heck if I know, but I like to think that all the questions mean I’m doing something right.
Recently, a friend of mine sent me an email detailing his thoughts on a book he had read based on an old review I’d written – SERVANT OF A DARK GOD by John Brown. Obviously, since he is an intelligent chap, he agreed with the review. One of his acquaintances, however, didn’t. This isn’t an unusual occurrence. Amazingly enough, people don’t agree on everything – a shocker, I know. I don’t have a problem with people not agreeing with me. Usually. Where my problem resides is when people think they are among the best of literary critics, and slam (or praise) a novel in defiance of any logical thought.
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Startide Rising
DOLPHINS IN SPACE!
Doesn’t that sound exciting? Don’t you want to read that book right now?
OK I jest, but in all honesty if you have a problem with Dolphins crewing a starship and getting stranded on an alien planet than this book isn’t for you.
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Childhood’s End
Aliens have invaded Earth. At first glance, the Overlords’ motives appear altruistic—they eradicate war, poverty, and sickness—but some men question their motives, and the aliens aren’t exactly forthcoming.
Written in 1953, CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C. Clarke (Amazon) shows us the results of an alien-imposed utopia on mankind. With this book Clarke asks a lot of questions—he answers some of them with possible solutions of his own, but leaves others open that are worth exploring. First contact with aliens is a common theme in Science Fiction, from Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS, to Star Trek, and other, more current fiction. Clarke’s version imagines mankind as a small, but still meaningful, part of the universe.
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Dragonflight
Pern is a planet inhabited by human colonists, whose way of life is affected by the deadly Thread that rains down at intervals from a nearby star. The only way to stop the Thread from reaching land and causing destruction is to burn it en route using genetically engineered telepathic dragons with their dragonriders to guide them.
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Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea
Perhaps Ursula K. Le Guin‘s most recognizable work, her Earthsea stories are categorized as YA—but are definitely worth reading as adults. The first novel, A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA was published in 1968, and revolves around the wizard Ged and the islands and sea of Earthsea itself. It starts off with Ged leaving home to learn magic at a school. Sound familiar? Le Guin is the reason why it does.
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Little Fuzzy
LITTLE FUZZY (Amazon), the Hugo-nominated novel by H. Beam Piper, has been getting a lot of attention recently since fan favorite author John Scalzi wrote a novel-length, Tor-published piece of fan-fic rebooting the series. Scalzi has said repeatedly that he hoped that his reboot would in turn send attention back to the original works and that people would read those books that Scalzi himself loved.
For me it worked. The book LITTLE FUZZY is available for free from multiple sources online (Amazon Kindle free version) and since I had pre-ordered Scalzi’s book FUZZY NATION (EBR Review), I thought it would be fun to read the original work and have a kind of book double-feature reading experience.
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Asimov’s Foundation
Isaac Asimov was an author of ideas. In the case of his Foundation series, it’s about the possibility of using science to predict the fall of a Galactic Empire far in the future. Hari Seldon is the brainchild behind mathematical sociology, aka psychohistory: predicting the future based on the actions of a large population. Unfortunately, the future is bleak, with a thirty-thousand-year dark age on the horizon. But Hari also predicts that it’s possible to close that gap to only a thousand years by safe-keeping human knowledge using his Foundations.
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Citizen of the Galaxy
Robert A. Heinlein is a god in the science fiction world, and for good reason: he brought literary quality and high scientific standards to a growing genre, as well as attention-grabbing controversy. I’m sure you all know about his classics including STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (Amazon), THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (Amazon), and STARSHIP TROOPERS (Amazon).
But did you know he also wrote juvenile fiction?
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