Category: Fiction
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A Review – Offworld (Day 2)
Six months out, six months back, two years on the surface of Mars. For dedicated astronauts, scientists, and adventurers, three years is just enough time to accomplish the greatest expedition in the history of mankind — but it’s also a long time away from home. Christopher Burke shares his teammates’ eagerness to get home, home…
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Offworld: CSFF Blog Tour
The time has come for another CSFF Blog Tour. Before I begin, I beg your leave to make an observation: It is HOT. This is BEASTLY. Thank you. August’s book-o-the-month is Offworld by Robin Parrish. In this sci-fi novel set in 2033, a team of astronauts returns from the first successful trip to Mars to…
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Men, God, and Men Like Gods (The Enclave, Day 3)
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:4-5) Karen Hancock’s The Enclave is set at an institution that’s high-tech and groundbreaking, modern…
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A Review – The Enclave (Day 2)
The Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute is a literal monument to science, creativity, and the ability of man to rise above his limitations: a black glass ziggurat in the Arizona desert, labs and conference rooms interspersed with rainforest atriums, coffee bars, and incredible views. True, the Institute’s director, the globe-trotting, womanizing Parker Swain, once fell out of…
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The Enclave: CSFF Blog Tour
Books–stories themselves–come in so many shades and textures and ways. Some books are lush, gorgeous, enriching. Some are dense but necessary. Some, like The Enclave by Karen Hancock, are just plain riveting. It took me all of about two chapters to be sucked thoroughly into The Enclave, guessing at its mysteries, marveling at its setting,…
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wind
The wind had a secret. All across the Seventh World it blew, whispering, shouting, singing its wild way in the far northern mountains and fjords; it danced the new-growing leaves and flowered boughs in Galce and the vineyards of Italya. It whistled through hollows and secret places in the Eastern Lands and skipped across the…
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A Review – Vanish (Day 2)
Conner Hayden: divorced lawyer struggling to relate to his teenaged daughter. Mitch Kent: tattooed mechanic on the eve of proposing to his girlfriend. Helen Krause: aging career woman and lonely ex-model. Three people with nothing in common — except that each is hiding a secret. Thunder rumbled louder now, low and sustained. Flashes of lightning…
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Vanish: CSFF Blog Tour
Over dinner recently my cousins and I got into a discussion about why anyone would read a book twice. One declared that she has never done so: “You read books to find out what happens, and once you know what happens, there’s no point in reading it again.” Others disagreed, including me, and the whole…
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Passages: Crystal-Clear Awake
I read Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising Sequence over ten years ago, but long after I had forgotten the details, its mood still lingered in my memory. It’s no wonder, with atmospheric writing like this. In this scene from The Dark Is Rising, eleven-year-old Will wakes up in a time that is not his own.…
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The Unpredictable Power of Prayer – Tuck (Day 3)
On Monday I promised to wrap up the CSFF tour for Stephen R. Lawhead’s Tuck by writing about "Deux ex machina , highly improbable happy endings, and the marvelous, unpredictable power of prayer." It is very late now, and I’m typing in the dark at the end of a long day that ran away with…