I just put up six new reviews over at The Billion Light-year Bookshelf. These include one on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which I look at how humorous works, even excellent ones, are often passed over for awards because "not serious" is seen as evidence of a lightweight.
On a darker note, I also look at Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic with an eye to the authors' treatment of the alien visitation as fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible to humanity.
There are also books by Robert J. Sawyer, Octavia E. Butler, and Marie Brennan, as well as a collaboration by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes which is arguably a technothriller, but is treated as science fiction because it deals with space travel.
Posts
