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Ursula K. Le Guin was one of our finest science fiction writers, and The Left Hand of Darkness is probably her best book. Not only did it anticipate by half-a-century the seismic cultural shifts that are currently roiling Western society regarding issues of gender-identity and sexual orientation, it’s also just a damned good sci-fi story.…
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Back in the dot.com boom of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work for an IT company based in New York City. I was a remote worker, writing software eight hours a day in my spare bedroom in Gainesville, Florida. It was a win-win situation. I got to work from home, and my bosses got a…
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Back in the 1980s, The Psychedelic Furs were one of those bands that were so good, everybody had a roommate who loved them. I was that roommate. Rock on…
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Of all the categories of genre fiction that I’ve consumed over my lifetime, fantasy has probably best the least represented. Sure, I love The Lord of the Rings, and The Narnia Chronicles, and the works of Ray Bradbury that I consider to be dark fantasy (see Something Wicked this Way Comes). But I don’t keep…
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I have written about the band Collective Soul before. They were one of my favorite bands of the 1990s, and not just because they hailed from my part of the country (Atlanta isn’t too far from Gainesville, after all). I remember when their first big singles hit the radio back in the day, and how…
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Well, I finally watched Dune: Part Two (henceforth known as Dune 2) last night. I’m a big fan of the first film (part 1), and I was very eager to see this one (although not eager enough, apparently, to shell-out for theater tickets; oh, well). Dune 2 is, obviously, an amazing film, even when viewed…
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Back in the early 1990s when I was a poor graduate student, I used to stay home on Saturday nights and watch my little black-and-white TV. I couldn’t afford cable, of course, but thankfully there was always PBS, so I watched a lot of documentaries and episodes of Great Performances. On one such night, I…
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In this latest episode of Read a Classic Novel…Together!, Margaret and Ash discuss the first half of George Eliot’s 1872 classic Middlemarch. We discover that Eliot was not even a man (her real name was Mary Ann Evans) and that she was probably everyone’s favorite, super-smart aunt of the 19th Century. Also, we agree that…
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Ah, how the tide turns. Back in the 1990s, The Dave Matthews Band bestrode the music world like a colossus. With their incredibly inventive and fresh jazz-rock stylings and bewitching lyrics by frontman Mathews, they were one of the most popular bands in the world, and deservedly. Now, for reasons I can’t quite understand, they…
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Frank Herbert’s Dune is arguably the most successful science fiction book ever published, kicking off a series that (thanks to his son and other writers) continues to this day. Actually more a work of epic science fantasy than hard sci-fi, it was amazingly inventive and original, and it surely would have been a huge hit…
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