Book I Have Issues With: Gender Blender, by Blake Nelson

Let's just present this as a conversation between me and the book.

Gender Blender: I am YA bodyswap!
Me: Sold.
Gender Blender: So. Let's start off with a spurious Native American legend! Ha ha, those wacky Indians and their crazy gender-swapping gods!
Me: Um.
Gender Blender: And then I ( Read more... )

( Lesson One: Sharing Is Caring, Except for Vulcans )

Book I Have an Issue With: At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream, by Wade RouseI love essays, particularly funny ones. Find me a book of them and I will happily hand over $12 for the privilege of reading it. And this one starts off really well, because there's a raccoon attack. Raccoons to the head are funny. It's a basic rule of ( Read more... )

I just want to say, here and now, that every fandom should have a redo of The Naked Time. Every. Fandom. SGA: John finally talks about his feelings, and everyone is horrified! Smallville: Clark tells all his secrets, and everyone feels much better! The Sentinel: Jim cries, and everyone wonders if this is yet another sentinel thing! Torchwood: Group ( Read more... )

Mirror, Mirror won the poll handily, and is now appointed Lord High King of All Episodes TFV Should Watch after the Gay Sex One, the Robot Kirk One, and the One Where Everyone Is CreepyAnd the poll was right! Or the voters were, anyway. Mirror, Mirror is amazingly good. And it was educational for me; I never knew, before this, why people said ( Read more... )

Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about a planet right on the edge of a singularity. But it's about time travel instead, and time travel is one of my all-time narrative kinks, so I don't mind.

But who the fuck edited this? The episode doesn't look internally consistent. At all. Close-ups often look out of synch with the rest of ( Read more... )

( General Observations )

I realize everyone in the world is busy with Yuletide, but, well. We had a Very Star Trek Christmas in our household, and I though I would post my reactions for the four people not wholly distracted by small fandoms.

This was my first official episode of Star Trek! And, you know what, I enormously enjoyed it.

( General Observations )

Book I Have an Issue With:

SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I knew I was in trouble with this book during the first chapter, which is on prostitution, the glories thereof. (At least for white women.) They reviewed a single study and talked to two prostitutes, one a street walker and the other a higher-priced prostitute, and ( Read more... )

True confessions time: I love hard SF. My ideal, in this arena, is the kind of story where each page contains either an equation or a paragraph of dense scientific explanation (usually in stilted dialog, spoken by the story's Resident Explanatory Genius).

So I was pleased to get a copy of Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time for free. It contains ( Read more... )