The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next Series #1)

Everyone loves an underdog, and nothing defines an underdog like success in the face of constant rejection. Philip K Dick, one of 20th century’s biggest names in science fiction, once received 17 rejection letters in a single day. According to urban legend, he wallpapered half of his study with rejection slips during the 1950s. He was far from the only one. Here’s the […]

For a while there, it seemed the “mashup” novel was ascendant. A mashup results when a classic (and often public domain) work of literature is used as the basis for an alternative version that includes modern speculative tropes, like monsters. For a prime example, look at Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which reimagines not only our 16th President […]

You don’t have to live in a far-future dystopia to understand that corporations, those polished mechanisms of capitalism, have the capacity for evil, but it’s a lot more fun when we can imagine them committing truly outlandish sci-fi atrocities, rather than the everyday mundane bad decisions that add up to financial and environmental disaster on […]

Several summers ago, I rented a cabin in the Catskills for a weekend. It was perched on a hill in middle of nowhere—the nearest grocery store was 15 miles away and staffed by very suspicious locals—and decorated in high rustic style, with musty wool blankets and lamps made out of antlers. Best of all, it had a record […]