Robert Reed - Beyond the Veil of Stars

I love Reed for the scale of his SF thinking and ambition. This is relatively subdued and personal, which he does very well too, but there are huge concepts behind it, as humanity takes its first steps towards contacting other intelligences, and there are plenty of them. I'm looking forward to reading the ( Read more... )

Ishmael Reed - Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

A western more like that of Burroughs than Zane Grey, with the (black) Loop Garoo Kid on adventures involving voodoo and lots of satirical anachronistic content. One scene has him ambushed by a neo-social realist gang, then rescued by Native American Chief Showcase in the helicopter he has just invented. ( Read more... )

Robert Reed - The Well Of Stars

A sequel to Marrow, reviewed recently. Here the Great Ship (200 times the size of Earth, population around 100 billion) encounters an entity that dwarfs it. This nebula-being believes the creation of the universe was aborted, meaning we have a wrong universe, one that is almost entirely nothingness - and the ( Read more... )

Robert Reed - Marrow

The old 'sense of wonder' may not amount to much of a literary claim, but it is one of the things I love about SF. Here we have a spaceship the size of Jupiter arriving in the galaxy, and humans getting to it first. It's honeycombed with large and small corridors and chambers around a solid core, with energy and life support and ( Read more... )

( Ed McBain - The Last Best Hope )

( Lawrence Block - After the First Death )