Steven Gould’s JUMPER was one of those sci-fi novels that seemed like a no-brainer for a cool movie adaptation. In fact, when I first read it back in 1994, I fantasized about one day securing the rights to the novel and pitching it to Hollywood. (I still have that fantasy about Lucius Shepard’s GREEN EYES.)
Unfortunately, Hollywood beat me to it with the underwhelming 2008 film, in which they strayed so far from the original plot, it may as well have been an entirely different story altogether. Too bad, really, because the book is so much better than that herky-jerky filmed mess. (Although the movie does have a scene with Rachel Bilson in a bra, but whatever.)
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Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s THE SPACE MERCHANTS has been hailed as a triumph of science fiction since it was first published in serial form in GALAXY magazine back in 1952 (under the title THE GRAVITY PLANET), and then in book form the following year. It’s rarely out-of-print for long, and is among those works generally considered a science-fiction “classic.”
Now, Pohl, the surviving member of the writing duo, has dusted it off, revised it and added a new introduction for this trade-paperback reissue.
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Neal Stephenson’s books are huge out of necessity. In some cases, such as ANATHEM, he needs that real estate to describe a foreign world in which the laws of physics evolved and are described in a way much different from our own. In his “Baroque Cycle” begun in QUICKSILVER, a lot of pages were eaten up in explaining to readers the realities of historical ages.
His new novel, REAMDE, has neither of these requirements: The work is set in modern times, and its vocabulary is straight out of Webster or Merriam-Webster or — well, the words come from a real dictionary. But REAMDE is still more than 1,000 pages long, and none of that space is wasted.
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Thomas Mullen’s two previous novels were basically historical fiction. History also figures prominently in THE REVISIONISTS, his latest. Here, however, he ponders on the significance of history in a speculative manner by employing techniques of science fiction — mainly, time travel.
Zed, the character we are first introduced to, is from a future time and sent back to the present with a mission. Zed’s world is a Perfect Society, free of hunger, war, and despair. But there are those from Zed’s world who would like to see such perfection happen earlier, so they travel back in time to prevent such historical calamities as the Holocaust, the bombs falling Hiroshima, and other such events, large and small.
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