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The Magic Circle by Barry Ryerson takes the reader on a twisty, exciting ride through a post-apocalyptic world. I’d call this a techno-magic-thriller. Is that a genre? If not, I just made it up. The devastation wreaked by […]
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In the near future, a billionaire businessman aims to change the climate of the planet. What could go wrong? This is the Big Idea tackled in Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. The novel is huge, featuring multiple intertwined […]
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Kim Stanley Robinson has written a lot of books, but The Ministry for the Future is the first of his that I’ve read, largely because of the topic. I know quite a bit about climate change and the […]
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Knowledge comes into the world by many paths. The Knowledge Machine (subtitled How Irrationality Created Modern Science) has a lot to say about the process by which scientists since the 17th century have created scientific knowledge. The book […]
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Queen of Hearts is the first in a series of fantasy books that follow the young Princess of Wonderland. Colleen Oakes has taken Lewis Carroll’s work as a starting point to build an interesting and coherent world. This […]
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The City of Bones is the first book in a fantasy series by Cassandra Clare, the Shadowhunter series. The book imagines a world in which magical creatures of all sorts exist, but are generally invisible to ordinary humans. […]
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The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Book 1 of a cycle of four books) is about magic and yearning. The main characters, all teenagers of 16 or 17 years, try to solve a magical mystery while they struggle […]
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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a dreamlike mystery that unfolds like a rose: first the petals are tightly closed, but as they open one by one, a new flower is revealed. At the start, the protagonist, who narrates […]
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I usually have at least one book I’m reading (or listening to) — often more than one. As I walk around the city or work out in the gym, audiobooks keep me company. And curling up in bed […]
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Where do gods come from? Cities have had gods for millennia, but how do the gods of cities come into being? It’s a messy process and, like a turtle egg hatching on the beach, there are always predators […]
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