F. Stuart Leeds

London - a great American voice

Revisado: 03-06-25

Brilliantly written apologetic of socialism —
and a damning rebuke of corporate hypercapitalism. It does for the Left what Atlas Shrugged failed so spectacularly to do for the Right, i.e., defend its position by means of artful and compelling storytelling.

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Well-written, good ideas...but juvenile

Revisado: 11-29-24

What do you call the genre that is one age bracket above YA? 20-something-lit? Gen Z Pandering? It's too bad, because the writer has command of the language, and has good – if rather derivative (cf. The Dresden Files, Monster Hunter International, etc) - ideas. But the incessant recourse to childish language, easy profanity, and scatological humor – all of which have their place when used artfully – just became a wearing distraction. Perhaps the sequels are better? Regrettably, i'm unlikely to find out,

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A PKD Masterwork

Revisado: 06-27-24

This one lands on the right side of Dick’s genius vs. madness binary. Full of vivid detail, high concepts and something very nearly approximating prophecy!

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Quintessential PKD

Revisado: 12-29-23

`This is one of those Dick stories that leaves you in slack-jawed wonder – viz., how did one mind ever produce a work of such raw imagination? Should a case be made that art is a drug, Ubik is the purest kind of psychedelic: totally disorienting, yet fully illuminating.

Dick was truly sui generis - a national treasure. No other writer...no other human being...could have written this book. Just think of that.

And did I mention that it's fun, fascinating, and totally engrossing?

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Great “page-turner”…

Revisado: 07-09-23

Especially on Audible, with the gifted narration of Ray Porter, who is perfect for all of Taylor’s work. Great storytelling and world-building. Taylor is this generation’s Roddenberry — a visionary fiction writer fundamentally suffused with (measured) optimism!

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Simply Wonderful

Revisado: 06-15-23

Vonnegut has been my artistic "spirit animal" ever since my mother gifted my 15 year-old fledgling self with a 5-book paperback collection for some holiday or another. Suzanne McConnell beautifully captures everything about Kurt that made him special then, and makes him special to me still, many (very many) decades later. But this is, first and foremost, a book for writers, and she artfully gathers and braids the wayward strands of KV's writing advice and wisdom into a firm but quite flexible guide wire that anyone – from professional authors to amateur note-scribblers – will want to grab onto.

Ms. White does a fabulous job of capturing Kurt's cadences and mannerisms without resorting to caricaturizing or low-rent mimicry. Brava!

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The Bobiverse is pure sci-if joy!

Revisado: 05-14-23

Carrying on in the best Trek tradition of great optimistic speculative fiction that also happens to be fun, funny, and thoroughly captivating…the Bobiverse series is as good as it gets. May Dennis Taylor find his way to a “cube” of his own…so that he can continue to write sequels ad infinitum…ad astra!

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Spectacular

Revisado: 12-20-22

Brilliantly written, and ever so much fun. This one really carried me away… As few books of recent years have managed to do.

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Absurd pseudoscience

Revisado: 11-10-22

I am not a science dogmatist, and I'm very much open to ideas like panpsychism, the simulation hypothesis, and informational ontologies. BUT...

If, in reading this, you just stop every time Vikoulov makes an extraordinary truth-claim and ask yourself..."what is his level of evidence for this assertion?"...you will quickly discover that it's typically somewhere between "shockingly low" and zero. His "research" seems to be of the sort that involves "researching" one's own brain for connections and associations and then advancing a facile narrative that gives the appearance that disparate ideas are part of some great thematic whole. This is what is cognitive scientists call "apophenia" – seeing patterns where there are none. Or "pareidolia" – seeing pictures in randomness. This is underscored by a tone which could only be described as grandiose – with frequent references to utopias, singularities, revelations, and awakenings.

I'm not saying Vikoulov is wrong in his incredibly fanciful and hyperbolic pronouncements and predictions. That would imply that they're somehow sensible and falsifiable. Instead, I'd just leave this book to the immortal words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli: "it's not even wrong."

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Like adding up hit dice…

Revisado: 09-20-22

For a really big Fireball. Necessary. Important. Kind of fun, but also kind of like accounting. A hardcover version of this book would be more at home in a Staples checkout line than in the Games section of a brick and mortar bookstore.

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