Monthly Archives June 2021

Contrary to author Mark Alpert’s claim in his note at the end of the book, The Six is most definitely science fiction. Its essential premise and technologies are based on the states of science and technology in the mid-2010s, and it relies heavily on projections of the science and tech into the future, making it “hard” SF.

There are two core story-lines: the ability of doctors to map all of the synaptic connections in a human brain—the “connectome,” although Alpert never uses the term—and artificial intelligence...

British author Norman Turrell does something difficult for a how-to book: he manages to simultaneously be both too vague to be useful to the would-be critiquer, and too detailed. On the one hand, the “advice” he gives on what a reviewer should look for when critiquing a work is so general the reviewer has nothing to hang his or her critique hat on. Then he suggests the reviewer take so many notes on each read-through of the work that they could end up with more words written than the story or chapter they were reviewing contains. (Those notes being based on the vague guidance he provided.)

A former mathematician, Turrell recommends the reviewer graph out their impressions, chapter by chapter, for features such as plot, character development, percentage of dialogue contained...