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Written by Dave Karlotski
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Thursday, 06 September 2007 |
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William Gibson
371 pages
We are time travellers, all of us, waking up each morning slightly farther into the future.
In 1984, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his
novel “Neuromancer,” a book whose bold imaginings were like the dreams
of the as-yet-unborn Internet: it did not grow up to be quite as it had
dreamed, but the dream was so powerful that it shaped the course of the
Web, or at least the course of ideas about the Web.
“Neuromancer” was set well into the 21st century; “Virtual
Light,” a later Gibson book written in 1993, was set in 2005—we’ve
already sailed past it. “Pattern Recognition,” from 2003, was set in
the then-present, so that’s even farther gone. Completing this trend,
William Gibson’s new book, “Spook Country,” is actually deliberately
set last year, in 2006.
What kind of science fiction is set in the past?
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Written by Patrick Law
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Thursday, 23 August 2007 |
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Last summer, after hiking all day on unsure paths, I found myself lost
in the Carpathian Mountains of central Romania. My map of the area was
brand new, but the trails seemed to have not been updated since before
the Communists were in power. I had no water, an empty stomach and my
feet had been tenderized by the rough trail. After almost stepping on
an angry little snake, I started scanning the ground and noticed that
there was fresh bear excrement everywhere. That’s when I asked myself,
“What the #@$%*& are you doing here?”
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Written by Liberty Hardy
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Tuesday, 07 August 2007 |
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CS Richardson
119 pages
Ambrose Zephyr has come to the end. At 50,
he has just had a physical exam and learned that he only has a month to
live. The doctors aren’t certain what the disease is, just that it’s
fatal.
Because he only has 30 days left, give or take, Ambrose
decides he’s going to do something he’s always wanted to do: visit all
the places and see all the things on an alphabetical list he made as a
young man. D is for a beach in the Dutch Antilles, E is for the windy
coast of Elba, etcetera.
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Written by Matt Kanner
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Friday, 03 August 2007 |
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2007, Alfred A. Knopf
339 pages
Kaddish Poznan makes a living by erasing evidence
of the past. The son of a Jewish prostitute raised at a time and place
when the Jewish community was attempting to eradicate its memory of his
mother’s profession, he is clandestinely hired to sneak into a derelict
cemetery and chip names off of headstones with a chisel. The headstones
bare the names of the pimps and prostitutes whose services were once in
high demand in Argentina, but their grown children want to lead
respectable lives, untainted by the stigma of their parents’ aberrant
trade. So they pay Kaddish, the one son-of-a-whore not ashamed of his
heritage, to eliminate the only physical piece of evidence linking them
to their relatives.
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Written by Harvey Shepard
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Wednesday, 18 July 2007 |
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by Michael Ondaatje
Alfred A Knopf
276 pages, $25
The title of Michael Ondaatje’s latest
novel, “Divisadero,” comes from the Spanish word for “division,” or “to
gaze at something from a distance.” The book tells the story of how a
number of events, especially an incident of great violence, separate
and scatter the lives of three individuals who grew up together, and
how memories of their common pas haunt and deform their divided lives.
As the principal narrator, Anna, says, “It is the hunger, what we do
not have, that holds us together.”
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