Marie Lu’s engrossing YA sci-fi trilogy offers a dystopian vision of the future US. In Legend, the first book, the action takes place exclusively within the Republic. Its territory corresponds to the Western states of today’s US. There, a military dictatorship holds sway under the...
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In the spy novels of John le Carre and Graham Greene, things sometimes go wrong. Their spies are not superhuman, or even always competent. In Mick Herron’s books, things always go wrong. Herron writes stories about the men and women of MI5 and what the British would call their cock-ups...
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Let’s get real. What the news media and the pundits call populism these days is actually something more familiar to European historians. It’s fascism. And it’s high time for Americans to recognize that. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the politics of the Trump...
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Nineteen-twenties Shanghai harbored both the best and the worst of China in the early decades after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. It was the largest city in the country, the most prosperous, and the most dynamic. Since the mid-19th century, Europeans and Americans had controlled the wealthiest...
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The title is off-putting. It’s hard to imagine a clever science fiction story built around an expert system. Expert systems were among the earliest approaches to artificial intelligence. In building an expert system, one or more human experts in a given field transferred their knowledge to a...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.