(Originally posted in three parts October 25-27, 2010) I don’t know if I could define speculative fiction if you asked me to. I’ll leave that to the critics. What I can recognize is good fiction, no matter what you call it. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors, so its not surprising that I liked Anathem, but its a very different book than what you would expect from the author of Snow Crash. Take a first contact story and wrap it in a philosophical discussion and you have the basic idea, though Stephenson is too gifted a story teller for that description to do the novel justice. Stephenson takes…

(Originally posted in three parts September 28 – October 1, 2010) I read reviews of Never Let Me Go when it first came out and thought it sounded fascinating, though I’ve never been a fan of “literary” fiction. Still the concepts behind the story interested me. If you’ve never read the book, don’t read the rest of this post. The story is about children who are clones created for medical purposes. Their sole reason for existence is to serve as organ donors for “real” people once they reach adulthood. The children know this from the beginning and are raised to believe that being a donor is the highest calling in…