Nearly two years ago, I sat in Chicago’s beautifully ornate Music Box theatre at the peak of the venue’s 70MM film festival eagerly waiting for the lights to dim and for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to begin. Next to me sat Ian Simmons, a friend, a coworker, and a movie critic/superhero capable of…
Tag: Science Fiction
Broken Stars – Wholeheartedly Good
I recently decided to treat myself by purchasing Broken Stars, a collection of contemporary Chinese speculative fiction curated and translated by Ken Liu. The collection had been showing up a lot on my Amazon queue, and while I was out at the store I decided “why not?” I had never really read a collection of…
Luna: New Moon – It’s No Twilight
Hot off the heels of Gunpowder Moon, I just couldn’t help myself when it came to reading another book about the moon. There is something so fascinating about that big, grey, dusty rock as it hangs in the sky. It captures me whenever I see it, so I will always look for a book to…
The Electric State – The Lonesome Empty West
I have never really felt comfortable talking about visual art. While I took art classes in high school, I was never particularly adept at being creative in a visual sense. Up until recently, I could not tell you how I felt about a piece beyond “I like it” or “what is happening here.” With that…
Continue reading ➞ The Electric State – The Lonesome Empty West
The Neutronium Alchemist – Hotter Than A Dying Sun
I am back with installment two of our collective journey through the strange abyss that is Peter F. Hamilton’s The Night’s Dawn Trilogy. If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, the staff of QTL is doing a collective read and discussion of this iconic sci-fi trilogy. However, the discussions have a…
Continue reading ➞ The Neutronium Alchemist – Hotter Than A Dying Sun
Perihelion Summer – Maybe Some Will Like It Hot
Climate change is an issue that has plagued me ever since I walked out of the theater after seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I was always a bit of an environmentalist, having been exposed to Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest as a small child, but this felt bigger than my seventeen-year-old brain could comprehend. The documentary…
Continue reading ➞ Perihelion Summer – Maybe Some Will Like It Hot
The Luminous Dead – Dark, Bleak And Lively
I have not engaged with a lot of horror on the written page. I enjoy watching horror movies, good or bad, and sometimes play survival-horror games, but I rarely read it. I have Edgar Allan Poe’s collected works and got turned onto Laird Barron by our resident horror reader Will, but beyond that, I am…
Continue reading ➞ The Luminous Dead – Dark, Bleak And Lively
The Reality Dysfunction – Patience Is A Virtue
The writers of The Quill to Live are undertaking a small project this year - we are reading a book series as a group and recording an audio discussion for each installment. The series in question is The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton. The books, starting with The Reality Dysfunction, are absolutely massive, clocking…
Continue reading ➞ The Reality Dysfunction – Patience Is A Virtue
Umbrella Academy – A Blunderous Bumbershoot
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, created by My Chemical Romance frontrunner Gerard Way and brought to artistic life by Gabriel Ba, sits at a unique crossroads both within the current cultural zeitgeist and on my bookshelf. With the Netflix adaptation premiering tomorrow as of this writing, I can only imagine the book’s sales have received…
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A Man Of Shadows – Stay In The Dark
Jeff Noon’s A Man of Shadows practically bursts with promise, from the intriguing cover design to a captivating back-cover summary (despite the latter being plagued by a typo...more on that later). The distinct story elements scream off the page like a paperboy shouting headlines on a 1930s street corner: “It’s got noir! It’s got murder!…