Raritania

Aspiring writers face many hardships as they learn their craft and try to break into the business. One of them is the bad advice inflicted o...

I first started watching Chuck mainly because it was on before Heroes , and wasn't sure what to make of it at first. For one thing, the...

Watching the fourth season Sanctuary episode "Fugue," I was again struck by the tradition of "musical episodes" in rece...

Popular expectations regarding technological progress in areas from artificial intelligence to fusion, from cloning to space, have commonly ...

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, pp. 432. Clive Cussler's Deep Six (1984) can be thought of as something of a transitional work ...

I recently finished watching the first three seasons of Mad Men . The second viewing confirmed many of my first impressions, but I have co...

I found out about the protest against SOPA ( H.R. Bill 3261, innocuously named the "Stop Online Piracy Act" ) too late to partici...

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012, pp. 368. Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow Returns (published last year in his native Australia as Sca...

As many of you already know, Lex Gigeroff, best known as one of the three principal writers on Lexx (as well as a sometime actor on that sh...

W. Somerset Maugham is perhaps best known for his books Of Human Bondage (1915) and The Razor's Edge (1944), but students of the spy n...

New York: Doubleday Press, 1974, pp. 185. In M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device , a chaotic twenty-first century saw the Arab-Isra...

The great George Carlin, following his troubles with the Federal Communications Commission, offered his own official policy on inappropriate...

J. Michael Straczynski's series Jeremiah (2002-2004) is set fifteen years after a plague wiped out virtually all the adults on the plan...

Twenty-five years ago this month Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove published a massive update of Aldiss' Billion Year Spree (1973), appro...

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, pp. 414. Jeffrey Deaver's new James Bond novel Carte Blanche makes an interesting contrast with...