Mike, Diane and I went to Santa Cruz today to watch Blade Runner: The Final Cut.  Afterward we stopped by Bookshop Santa Cruz.  Aside from a few books, I faced a dilemma as to whether I’d rather buy the George W. Bush Voodoo Kit or the Albert Einstein Action Figure.  Albert won.

Arthur C. Clarke invented the geostationary satellite, hence the designation of the circular orbit over the equator as the “Clarke Orbit”.  His science fiction has received many awards, including the Hugo and Nebula.

Three friends and I took BART to San Francisco last night to see The Golden Compass at the Metreon.  If I’d gotten around to it sooner, we wouldn’t have had to go 45 miles each way to do it.  Prior to that, the longest trip I’d taken to see a film was 35 miles from [...]

I was somewhat surprised that the cover of the mass-market paperback edition of Spin, the 2006 Hugo Award winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson, quoted a review in the Rocky Mountain News as having said that it was “the best science fiction novel so far this year”; that seems like damning it with faint praise, [...]

I certainly was shocked when it turned out that Voldemort is Hermione’s father!

In an article about the Amazon merchandising of the forthcoming final installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), The Inquirer has accidentally leaked the ending:
Over one million advance orders have already been placed for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as readers young and old tune in to [...]

I really enjoy reading Josef Conrad. I faked my way through the classic Conrad novels we were force-fed in high school, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, getting by with Cliff’s Notes. However, as and adult I have actually read and enjoyed both novels: so much so that I have gone on to slowly [...]

On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes about the novel The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod, a thriller that includes as a plot element an internet video feed of people being tortured and killed. No one knows where the signal originates. Sound familiar?  Long live the new flesh!

John Morressy, author and retired english professor, was perhaps best known for his stories of the wizard Kedrigern. Hardly a month went by without one of his short stories appearing in F&SF or other magazines.

When I was in the second grade or thereabouts, the teacher read us “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl in installments after lunch. I loved the book, and was delighted by the first film adaptation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. I’ve read the book [...]