just finished reading one of Lawrence Block’s collections of vignettes starring his charming philatelist/hired assassin, Keller, Hit Parade. easy on the eyes, though i have a hard time placing him on the same level as a similarly pseudonymic but eminently superior crime writer, Donald E Westlake. i’m spoiled. just trying to be broad in my …
just finished reading the sizable tome, Best American Fantasy. no, it’s not a biography of my girlfriend. it’s a collection from 2006 edited by Matthew Cheney and Ann & Jeff Vandermeer. it’s most successful when addressing ‘fantasy’ as form instead of genre (y’all should leave dragons to Lucius Shepard, who dabbles in them occasionally though …
just finished re-reading Philip K. Dick’s classic basis for the film Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as usual, PKD takes the reins of a far more complex possibility set than can be sustained in even the best of Hollywood’s Sci-Fi pantheon. still, the droids don’t give up quite so laxly in the …
just finished reading Seb Doubinsky‘s haunting novel The Song Of Synth, a tale of hackers, poets, revolutionaries, and multiple levels of deceit and duplicity, underpinned by SYNTH, a reality-enhancing drug (or is it an implied morality/conscience/consciousness?) Seb writes with a great balance of cinematic concision and romance that makes for compelling reading. highly recommended.
just finished re-reading Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. drug-induced alternate realities, intra-system life forms, divinity, profanity, a trip you don’t come back from, or an entity from which you can never recede. one of the best of PKD, beautifully illuminated by many passages of The Exegesis of PKD.
just finished reading Lucius Shepard‘s latest collection of stories, Five Autobiographies and a Fiction. it seems always to be the case that the latest of Lucius becomes one’s favourite; certainly the case here. all but one (Vacancy, a welcome inclusion in this handsome Subterranean Pressing) new, and each another flabbergasting original. there’s no one with …