More Posts By Peter
Review: The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Holly Sykes runs away from her parents to go live with her boyfriend, but that does not go as she expects. Hugo Lamb is a student at Cambridge, and an expert at cheating his friends. Ed Brubeck is a war correspondent who finds it impossible to settle down with is family in England. Crispin Hershey once wrote a good book and has been looking for that spark ever since. All of their stories are tied together by a secret war between two cults of psychic immortals.
Review: All That We See or Seem – Ken Liu
Julia Z is a privacy-minded young woman with a history. She is also a a hacker and really good at her job. When a man shows up at her doorstep to ask her help in finding his abducted wife, she is forced to leave her life of carefully constructed quiet obscurity behind her to find a dream-weaving artist that dreamt with the wrong man.
Review: The Island of Doctor Moreau – H.G. Wells
Edward Prendick is shipwrecked and ends up on an island where he is taken in by the famous Dr Moreau and his assistant Montgomery. Prendick soon finds the island is inhabited by a whole host of human-animal hybrids. Can it be that the famous physician Moreau built these creatures – and must Prendick fear that he will be the subject of Moreau’s next experiment?
Review: Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
An early 20th century minor noble is exiled to Canada for his progressive ideas. A woman in the 2020s is trying to find out what happend tot an old friend. A writer in the 2200s is struggling to balance family life with a book tour. A detective in the 2400s is trying to resolve an anomaly in time that ties their stories together.
Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K. Dick
In a radioactive dust-covered, post-apocalyptic LA, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, charged with ‘retiring’ a series of androids, fake humans who are hiding in plain sight in society and who can only be found by testing them for their lack of innate empathy response. Deckard dreams of using the bounty money to replace his fake electric sheep with a real animal so he can demonstrate his own empathy to his neighbours. But these androids are of a new type – and Deckard must carefully control his own feelings toward these non-humans.
Review: We Can Remember It For You Wholesale – Philip K. Dick
This 1966 short story is the basis for not one but two films named ‘Total Recall’. It tells the story of Douglas Quail, an office clerk who dreams of an exciting life as a secret agent, and of traveling the stars to visit Mars. Because he knows he can never afford such a trip, he instead visits a clinic to have a memory of the journey implanted. That procedure, however, runs into some unexpected complications…
Review: The Minority Report – Philip K. Dick
The Minority Report is Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story on which the probably more widely known Hollywood film is based. It tells the story of John Anderton, the aging chief of Precrime, a police agency that prevents crimes on the basis of predictions of the future, whose life is turned upside down when it is predicted that he himself will commit a murder in the next week. Believing he is being framed, he prepares to flee, but there are other forces at work…
Review: Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. His task? Responding to alarms by pulling up to houses and hosing them in kerosine before setting them ablaze if they contain any – highly illegal – books. But Montag harbours doubts. Why must all books be destroyed? Has society not changed for the worse since the rise of anti-intellectualism?
Review: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus – Mary Shelley
Victor Frankenstein discovers a formula for imbuing inanimate objects with life. He builds a man, but is so repulsed by his creation that he flees in horror – and leaves the creature to fend for himself. Rejected by his maker and by society at large, Frankenstein’s creation returns to his creator to demand his pound of flesh.
Review: The Grace of Kings – Ken Liu
Kuni Garu is a charming bandit that cheats and finesses his way into a leadership position in the rebellion against the Emperor. Mata Zyndu is a stern aristocrat and scion of a noble family that was wronged by the regime. At first, they find themselves brothers, fighting for a new order in the place of the old one. But when that battle is one, their visions for a brave new world turn out not to be compatible.
Review: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories – Ken Liu
What happens when a recording becomes too life-like? What happens when you can go back to actually review history, but only once? What happens when Chinese immigrants come to the States during the Gold Rush? What happens when algorithms start deciding our every choice in life? The fifteen stories in this collection focus on the role of immigrants and intermingling of cultures, especially the integration of Asians in Western society, as well as the impact of technology on our daily lives.
Review: Vigilance – Robert Jackson Bennett
In a not-too-distant future, the United States has ceded global hegemony to China. The young and bright emigrate and leave behind a society governed by fear, prejudice and gun violence. In this degenerate America, mass shootings have become an excellent marketing opportunity for advertisers.