Author Bio: Daniel Wilson

From Wilson's website

Daniel H. Wilson wrote this week's review book: Robopocalypse. He has written seven other books, which all seem to be about robots. This could have something to do with the fact that he got a PhD in Robotics, and Master's in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. So he knows the subject matter pretty well.

Robopocalypse now has a sequel, Robogenesis, plus it has been picked up by DreamWorks and it is rumored that Steven Spielberg will direct. So we have that to look forward to!

Review Me Twice - The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

This is Alex's favorite book, and I do enjoy it.  I mean, Bradbury is a well known writer for a reason.  But, this is one of those times that you realize why Alex and I enjoy such different favorite books.  The Martian Chronicles is a series of short stories that are loosely related.  They're obviously chronological (and would be even if he didn't mark them with the date at the top) and Bradbury takes us through the extinction of the Martian race and then, inevitably, the human race.

Bradbury is a lot like Orwell.  He kind of hits you over the head with the message.  We're industrializing too much.  We don't respect cultures.  There's too much censorship.  We need to just live and let live (I don't know this for sure, but I get the feeling he was a Republican.  And I'm not even saying as a mean thing.  The vibe I get is just very anti-big government, pro-the individual.)  Orwell is very similar in the writing style.  He's really obvious about the message.  Almost like we, as readers, aren't smart enough to figure it out if we're not completely hit over the head with it (remember that conversation about didactic writing?)

That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the book.  There's something about Bradbury's writing that's just... I don't know.  Calming.  It's soothing and enjoyable and like being read a good story by Barry White.  He just has that kind of writing that you can't help but enjoy, so even though it should kind of drive you crazy, it doesn't because he just writes it so well.

So, I liked the book, but I don't LOVE the book, like I know Alex loves the book.

(Why yes, I did write my review two days late... Let's just say it's because I assumed you've picked up on all the clues that I love this book and didn't really need my review.)

You may have heard that this is my favorite book! You may have even heard that I have a tattoo based on it. Both of these things are true.

I love good sci-fi, especially from the 1960s-ish era, I love collections of short stories (related or not), and I love Ray Bradbury's work. So it's kind of like the perfect book for me. I particularly like that all the stories are from very different perspectives. You have the astronauts on the first few expeditions to Mars; you have the Martians themselves; you have people from out in the country, people with the high-tech commodities in cities, families, loners, eccentric billionaires... everyone is a part of the story.

And this is a book that I can carry everywhere (it's short enough that the book fits in my purse... well, the paperback does, anyway) and pick up at any time to read from any point. It comes in very handy in waiting rooms or if you have a few minutes to kill before you need to go somewhere.

Aging Science Fiction

Good science fiction makes up crazy technology and implements it in the story somehow. Great science fiction predicts the future.

...No, I'm serious. Okay, remember when the iPad was released? And it took everyone about a nanosecond to realize, "Hey, Star Trek had these! I'm like Jean-Luc Picard! Awesome!" The reason that happened is because the writers for Star Trek were good at their jobs. They did research into what actual science was working on at the time and reached logical conclusions and wrote them into the show. It's like if someone wrote something now set in a world where all cancer is cured, and someday, when all cancer is cured, somebody reads that and realizes how ahead-of-the-curve that writer was.

That said, nobody's perfect. One of my favorite types of cartoons when I was little was the "house of the future" stuff. They were just as old as Tom & Jerry and Bugs Bunny, but usually those guys are pretty timeless. When you have 1950s and 1960s traditional ideas mixed in with the futuristic technology, it can be really entertaining in a way they didn't expect it to be when they created those cartoons.

This happens with other science fiction, too. Each short story in this week's review book, The Martian Chronicles, for example, has a date on it. We passed all those dates recently. We're both ahead of and behind Bradbury's expectations for us. Our rockets are more advanced than his descriptions, and - despite recent news out of Missouri - as a society, we're more friendly to minorities, and we haven't created a sanitizing society that destroys anything creative or unhappy in the world. But we also haven't put men on Mars (and we certainly haven't terraformed it) and we don't have automated houses.

Favorite Literary Tattoo

So I know we're supposed to pick our favorite, but I couldn't really decide which one I liked better so I figured, what the hell, I'll pick two of them.

The top one is from Alice in Wonderland, the famous line uttered by the Cheshire Cat.  I don't know why I have always liked the line so much, and it is, of course, vastly over used, but I've always thought it was a really good line.  It's in direct response to Alice's comment of, "I don't want to go among the mad people" and Carroll telling us that we're all a little crazy, a little mad.  

The second one is from Narnia, the lamppost from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.  I really love tattoos that are subtle.  If you didn't know about Narnia, you would never know why this person has a lamppost on their arm.  But, as a reader, it makes all the sense in the world and you secretly love it and think it's awesome. 

I'm going to refrain from posting either of my own book-based tattoos, because I feel like I'm probably a little biased toward them, seeing as how they're on ME.

What I really love - and don't have... yet... - is call number tattoos. It's like saying you really love two things: a book or genre thereof, and libraries! My favorite example is this Harry Potter call number tattoo, because she used the lightning bolt font from the series, too:

Can't Beat Kelly

Did you miss my radio writing debut today?

That's ok:  I've got the recording.

BookBub

So I always like to share some good deals with all my book lovers, and this is one of them.

To be honest, I'm not even sure how I tripped across BookBub, but I did.  It's a site that give away eBooks.  Old news right?  Except, they don't all suck.  A lot of times it's publishers trying to get you interested in an author's new book, so they give away eCopies of the old one.  

Not every book on the site is free, but you'll rarely see a book priced above $2.  They're are a lot of good books on the site, there are a LOT of books to browse and, what's more, the don't inundate you with emails (I get about one a day and that's because I've been to lazy to go change it from the default settings.)

I know a lot of us are eReaders around here (though maybe not all of us) and this is a really great site to check out if you're tired of the crap that is Amazon's free books page.


Did you miss my radio writing debut this morning?  That's ok!  We've got a recording and will be posting it soon.


In other news,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY CO-BLOGGER, ALEX!!

Author Bio: Ray Bradbury

This week's review book is one of my favorites (as you've heard before), The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury was born in Illinois in 1920 and died in Los Angeles, CA in 2012. In other words, he was writing science fiction during a truly golden age of science fiction, and lived to see a great deal from his work come true, for better or for worse.

You probably know him better as the author of Fahrenheit 451, especially if you're a banned book enthusiast Cassy and I. Some of his other particularly famous works include Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, and I Sing the Body Electric.

A lot of his great works are in the form of short stories (for example, The Martian Chronicles is a collection of loosely connected short stories about Mars and the human relationship with it).

The New York Times called him the author who most greatly contributed to bringing science fiction into the literature mainstream, and I won't argue with that. There's a reason we all read Fahrenheit 451 in high school.