Book Review: Freedom (TM), by Daniel Suarez
By Eric Pettifor
FreedomTM is the sequel to Daniel Suarez’s book Daemon which I reviewed previously, giving it four stars out of five. The sequel likewise is a very good read, progressing logically from the foundation laid in the first novel.
The reason I didn’t give Daemon a full five stars is that towards the end [...]
Book Review: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez
By Eric Pettifor
Reading Daemon, one can’t help but compare it to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, perhaps because both deal with rogue artificial intelligences (AI) and can probably be considered science fiction. If I sound a bit tentative about that, it’s because, while Neuromancer neatly fits the mold, set in a time at least some distance [...]
Fanfiction: flattery or thievery?
By Rachel Krueger
Diana Gabaldon either needs to stop writing such effortlessly good historical fiction, or she needs to keep her ignorant viewpoints on fan fiction to herself, because I am having trouble reconciling my shameless adoration of her Outlander series with my urge to kill her blog with fire.
Ditto goes for George Double-R Martin, whose Song [...]
Fame is the new “skill”
By Rachel Krueger
Books are shit nowadays, and I blame you.
You may not have made the book deal with “Jersey Shore”’s bronzed illiterates Ronnie and J-Woww (I wish that was a typo), but you will probably read it. And even if you bypass what is sure to be the most gloriously misspelled Gym-Tan-Laundry manifesto, you watch [...]
Rescued from the scrapheap
THE LIFE & ART OF FRANK MOLNAR, JACK HARDMAN, LEROY JENSEN
By Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, Wendy Newbold Patterson
Mother Tongue Publishing
146 pp., $34.95
Review by Brian Brennan
Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, and LeRoy Jensen were three dedicated and unfashionably tradition-based Vancouver artists of the 1960s who today are largely forgotten. Because they operated outside the confines of the [...]
Part II: On being disappeared by The National Post
By Frank Moher
In our last episode, I said I’d tell you what I found out about why my review of What the Furies Bring disappeared from The National Post website a day after being put up. My little investigation provides a tonic insight into what happens when journalists find themselves on the receiving end of [...]
On being disappeared by The National Post
By Frank Moher
I knew when I submitted my last book review to The National Post that it might not be published. What I didn’t expect was that the Post would publish it, and then unpublish it.
The review was of a book of essays, What the Furies Bring, by Canadian poet Kenneth Sherman. Doesn’t sound like [...]
The Write Huff
By Rachel Krueger
An infinite number of bloggers on an infinite number of netbooks blathering for a handful of years have produced an entirely new face for marketing. Whereas widely-spread opinions could once only be held by those with credentials, now anyone with dial-up can wax judgmental about any old thing. And it’s driving some people [...]
Death on the homefront
THE DAY THE FALLS STOOD STILL
By Cathy Marie Buchanan
Harper Collins
307 pages, $22.99
Review by Frank Moher
Halfway through The Day the Falls Stood Still, a first novel by Toronto author Cathy Marie Buchanan, I thought it might be a worthy companion to Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars — a sort of distaff variation on [...]
Mmm. Bacon.
FISHING FOR BACON
By Michael Davie
NeWest Press
234 pages, $22.95
Review by Frank Moher
Coming-of-age novels are a lot like podcasts: there are too many of them, everyone thinks they can make one, and not everyone is right. They’re also like Twitter messages, predicated as they are on the assumption that just because an experience is universal — bad [...]
