No Middle Name

The Internet made me buy "Boneshaker", by Cherie Priest. Much lauded by electric curmudgeon Warren Ellis, geeky actor Wil Wheaton, amongst others, this steampunk/zombie adventure proved to be a good read. Exciting, different, fun. I'd steered clear of "The Time Traveller's Wife" for no particularly good reason other than that stupid form of snobbery that dictates that the popular isn't cool. I'd read reviews that essentially said this was science fiction that's ok to like even if you're not a sad geek. I'd also read reviews from the other side that said it wasn't SF enough, and merely recycled old tropes. Usually, people who use the word "trope" are wankers. It happened to be on prominent display, thanks to the film I suppose, when I wandered into Borders so I gave it a go. It is good. Really good. Funny, likeable characters. A simple love story complicated and enlivened by the main character's temporal disability. P...

I've just realised that I've got on the train still carrying the book I finished yesterday. Nothing to read, so I'll write a review. I picked up "Tales of Pirx the Pilot", by Stanislaw Lem, in the same stack of secondhand books from Woodend that I got the classic Fritz Leiber Lankhmar book and Chalker's Well of Souls. This one I picked up because I'd loved "The Cyberiad" by Lem. It's a compendium of three of Lem's books from the Sixties: the Pirx the Pilot stories, "Return from the Stars", and "The Invincible". The Pirx the Pilot stories are closest in tone to the Cyberiad, and have a hint of the same gentle mockery of human silliness. They're a set of short tales about the career of Pirx, a spaceship pilot. Similar to some of Asimov's early works ("ingenuity and applied science save the day"), they differ in that Pirx is no super-competent science hero - he's more of an everyman. Most are funn...