Category Reviews

Tucson, Arizona, fantasy artist Jessica Feinberg’s little “guide to hybrid creatures” is a visual delight. Each of the over five dozen beings—mostly hybrids of dragons with one or more other life forms—is beautifully and dramatically rendered in vibrant watercolors. OK, maybe the illustrations don’t quite live up to the standards of a John James Audubon, but I doubt that was ever the artist’s intent!

And I don’t care.

Each painting is accompanied by a brief note on the creature’s composition, history, habitat, preferred diet, size, and level of danger to curious humans. Good things to know, should you wish to have one as a pet—or avoid them...

(cover image)

It’s important to understand what David Williamson’s short book is and what it is not. It is not, and readers should not expect it to be, a complete or exhaustive guide to how to effectively critique another writer’s work. It’s clear Williamson never intended it to be that.

Instead, the book is a collection of 26 slightly revised blog posts, plus three additional articles, that provide brief discussions of some critique topics and techniques. Because the original posts—running in alphabetical order from “Appearance” to “Zaftig”—were short, Williamson could only scratch the surface, touching on a few topics each time.

In general, he does a reasonable job with the space he has available...

Give John Brunner credit for trying to do something hard: tell the story of an alien species living on a hostile world as they evolve from near-primitives to space travelers. To do that, Brunner had to create the aliens, their world, its solar and stellar environments, and then put all that into a story spanning thousands of years. In less than 400 pages.

No easy feat. I wish he’d succeeded.

His solution to the span-of-years problem was clever enough: write seven 10-chapter novellas, each focusing on the creatures at some point in their scientific and cultural development. Then hit them with a catastrophe of some sort to wrap up that novella and jump ahead hundreds or thousands of years to when the species had mostly recovered...

I’ve been fascinated by the work of 20^th Century Dutch artist M. C. Escher since I first encountered it in college. His impossible constructions and transformation tilings in particular drew my eye and brain as I tried to figure out how he was able to create them. Somewhere along the way I picked up this book but have only now, years later, gotten around to reading it.

The essays at the front include one by Escher himself, but the first one, by museum curator J. L. Locher is the most enlightening. It describes how the artist used mathematical principles (without getting deep into the math itself) to structure many of his works, and how he used ambiguous shades of gray to smoothly turn a floor into a wall or a ceiling in a work like “Relativity” or create the closed loop sta...

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...

Kate Jonuska’s idea to create a dictionary of critique terms and intermingle them with a bit of discussion seems like a clever technique at first, but the idea quickly loses its luster. First, Jonuska interrupts the flow of the book every time she inserts the definition of a new term and provides an example or two. These interruptions make it very hard to piece together coherent concepts from which a reviewer can build a critique.

Second, dictionaries are not typically the kind of book one reads in order to try to build a broad understanding of a concept...

Alan R. Velie’s 1991 revised edition certainly lives up to it’s anthology subtitle. The book is divided into six sections: Tales, Songs, Oratory, Memoir, Poetry, and Fiction. Each contains what Velie presumably meant to be a representative sampling of these kinds of works.

A theme that runs through almost all of the works from the Oratory section on is the deep anger, frustration, and heartache of a half-conquered people. Looking beyond the Americas, history is replete with examples of conquering forces invading territories, initially overwhelming the people living there, sometimes quickly, sometimes only after a great struggle, but then never entirely wiping them out and replacing them...

Not long ago I read The Portable Walt Whitman, an edited but complete collection of Whitman’s poetry, fiction, and accounts of his time in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. What a contrast between him and his contemporary, Dickinson! Where Whitman is voluble, open (perhaps to extremes), and accessible, Dickinson is brief (a few poems are only two lines long), often cryptic, and many times difficult to parse.

Reading the entire collection of all 1775 poems, plus variations, cover to cover is a task only for the determined. Or the patient. Even at a pace of 25 poems a day, it still took me over two months to get through them all, and “get through” is the right term...

This lavishly illustrated volume, published in 1961 in London, contains only about 50 of the over 200 folktales Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected during their lifetimes. It includes, of course, some of the most famous: Cinderella, Hänsel and Grethel (Hansel and Gretel), Rapunzel, Snow-White, and Tom Thumb, among others.

One of the most interesting aspects of reading these original versions of the stories is how different they are from the Disney-fied versions. Cinderella, for example, had no fairy godmother, no pumpkin-carriage, no clock striking midnight, and no glass slipper, and each of her evil sisters mutilated themselves to try to fit a foot into the shoe she did leave behind.

Even in their day, some of the Grimms’ stories were so bloody, or included certain topics, t...