I remember thinking to myself, “What the hell?” when I started the first page, and I probably thought the same thing a hundred more times as a tore through the book in a weekend. It was my first exposure to cyberpunk and the first time reading a book written in present tense. My friend, author Ahimsa Kerp, lent his copy to me a decade or more ago, and I still have it (this is why we don’t lend out books!). So that leaves with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as my recommendation. It’s like recommending that you breathe-most any SF/F fan has already read it. I can’t in good conscious recommend Hitchhiker’s, though. I’d had a subscription to MAD Magazine growing up, but it never occurred to until reading Douglas Adams that humor and spec-fiction could be combined. The first book someone lent to me was a leather-bound edition of the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy (although it was my college roommate Ben who lent it to me, and I wasn’t allowed to leave our dorm room with it).
Most of my friends, like me, are highly protective of their books and don’t like to lend them out. Her piece resonates not only with your intellect, but with your heart and guts, too. The anthology is pretty solid in general, but most of the pieces work largely on a cerebral level.
Because of this, I’m horribly behind the times when it comes to new SF/F, but I am managing to carve out time to read the Hieroglyph anthology, and Vandana Singh’s novella “Entanglement” is one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read in recent memory. One of the byproducts of being a writer and a teacher is that I don’t get the opportunity to read much for fun.
#PATH OF CHAMPIONS MIND MELD SERIES#
The series is lost world pulp at its best, with scantily clad heroes, dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers-you’ve likely seen some of the great Frank Frazetta cover art from the paperback releases. He’s most well known for his Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels, but equally fantastic are his Pellucidar novels, and that’s what I’d recommend to readers. I discovered his books when I was a kid and absolutely devoured them. When I think old, I think pulp era SF/F, and Edgar Rice Burroughs is my favorite of that era. When someone asks me to recommend a book, I do the same thing as when I walk into a pub to find twenty or thirty beers on tap: I get so excited by all the possibilities that I freeze up and mumble something stupid like, “Mmm, beer,” or worse, “Mmm, books.” The criteria of “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed” does narrow things down a bit, though, so I think I can manage to be a bit more articulate with these recs. The second book in the series, Souldrifter, is coming out later this year from Diversion Books. Garrett Calcaterra is author of the epic fantasy novel, Dreamwielder. It’s a cliché to say fashion is an ugly business but the relentless pace at which the designers are driven to produce would grind any sane person to sausage. Her amazing short fiction collection Heartbreaker comes out next year from FSG Originals.Īnd the borrowed is Champagne Supernovas, Maureen Callahan’s tripartite bio of fashion icons Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Kate Moss, a book I would not have found had I not been researching (and devouring) all I could find regarding the genius McQueen. Something new is so new it’s not yet published: Maryse Meijer’s passionate, astringent, sui generis novel The Architect, which I’m reading in ms-there’s no voice like Maryse’s, ever. Something old is something classic: Dracula, that dark twisting path of a novel that wends between solemn and hysteric, glutted appetite and frightful hunger, with a most modern and fragmented voice: no narrator, just a jumble of diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and shorthand notes, as the characters, some central and some peripheral, tell us both the story and their stories, and let us piece it together as we go.
With her ensemble, nerve, she creates immersive performance events Dracula is forthcoming in 2016. Her novels include The Cipher, Skin, Buddha Boy, Talk, Under The Poppy and The Mercury Waltz. Kathe Koja’s 16th book, The Bastard’s Paradise, is forthcoming this fall from Roadswell Editions.
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