Sea of Rust – Get Your Tetanus Booster First

Robots in fiction are intriguing, but except for a few rare cases, they almost always disappoint. They usually feel tacked onto a story, as if to frantically say “Look! There’s A.I.! This must be science fiction.” Alternately, they are the all-consuming antagonist, playing into current anxieties about a robot apocalypse.  By no means am I…

Persons Non Grata: More Like Short Stories Really Great-a? I’m sorry, I’ll be going.

I was having a conversation with the other QTL staff the other day about how hard it can be to sort out the proper cosmic horror from the remainder of the “weird fiction”, and how frustrating that can be for someone who likes cosmic horror so much more than weird fiction. We came to the…

Player Of Games vs. Use Of Weapons – Culture Clash

Last post I talked about Consider Phlebas, the first book in the Culture series. You should check out the review if you haven’t, but the general gist was: a kind of boring book, written by an incredibly talented author, that primed me to dive into Phlebas’ sequels. After finishing Plebas I immediately jumped into books…

Consider Phlebas – An Exercise In Pointless Excellence

We have been talking about a lot of great new releases recently, so let's take a step back and talk about a classic I just got around to reading: Consider Phlebas, by Iain Banks. Everyone has a number of classics that they mean to get around to reading. For me, one of the big ones…

A Veil of Spears – Unbe-veil-ably Point-iant

Sand. It’s coarse, irritating, hot, encumbering, and all around unpleasant. I have spent a lot of time in sand, both in reality and in fantasy books. However, despite sand’s difficulties, it often provides settings of profound beauty and wonder. When it comes to books set in the desert, I have been championing one series in…