Umberto Eco is one of those authors who frustrates me. I truly enjoyed The Name of the Rose. I liked Foucault’s Pendulum as much, if not more. On the other hand, I gave up on Baudolino after about 100 pages. I did not give up on Eco’s new work, The …

Advanced particle physics may not seem the vehicle for popular fiction to address the conflict between science and religion. Yet Richard Cox uses the subject successfully in The God Particle. On the surface, The God Particle tells the stories of two men. Steve Keely is a California businessman who suffers …

It appears a brushfire is heating up amidst science fiction writers over the direction of the genre. Disputes between and among SF fans as to what types of stories and novels fit within the genre and/or deserve recognition are nothing new. Take, for example, the debate over whether J. K. …

World War II has Catch-22 The Korean War has MASH I’m not sure what book will ultimately serve as the satirical insight to the Vietnam War. I do know it isn’t Nam-A-Rama. Nam-A-Rama is a farce about “Almost Captains” Armstrong (first name Jack, of course) and Gearheardt, two Marine helicopter …

Cloud Atlas is a novel perhaps unlike any other. In essence, British author David Mitchell links six novellas together in one fashion or another and, thus, seeks to form a whole. The novel starts with the diary of an American traveling on a schooner in the South Pacific in the …

When I first discovered the joy of foreign films, I decided a salutary mission would be to see all the films that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the non-US winners of the Golden Palm (Palme d’Or) Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The venture teaches a few …

John Kelly’s The Great Mortality is one of those works that proves history can be a wonderful read and not merely a dry recounting of events and dates. The Great Mortality is subtitled “An Intimate History of the Black Death.” Intimate accurately describes how Kelly tells the story. In Kelly’s …

To a certain extent, Wayne Shorter is one of the guideposts on my way to becoming a jazz fan. A two-CD retrospective, Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter, served as definitive confirmation of that fact. Back in the late 70s, through a mutual acquaintance I ended up with …

Time travel, dystopias, robots, other planets, aliens. All these archetypes of science fiction — along with cigarette-smoking monkeys — make their appearance in one fashion or another in Foop!, the debut novel by Chris Genoa. Foop! is a comedic and at times scatological look at where the Earth may be …

Well, at least Michigan is safe from televised jokes told by a human penis. The First Amendment doesn’t protect that penis according to a decision (PDF file) by the Michigan Court of Appeals. Seems Timothy Huffman produced a program called “Tim’s Area of Control” on a public access cable channel …