Fred Cleaver reviews new books by Linda Nagata, Arthur C. Clarke, and Brian Lumley. Michael Dirda contemplates becoming a movie critic. More and more, the movies even validate our books. Fiction is now so fast-paced and scripted that you know the book is merely the larval stage of the movie.
Kids prefer novelizations to novels.
A Daughter's Life with Autism , noted because the book's author, Clara Claiborne Park, is SF writer Paul Park's mother. For readers who admit to picking up a good genre book from time to time in order to get away from it all, which means a chance to peer into the heart of darkness without too much fear of getting lost in it, it does. I ve never claimed that Dick was, strictly speaking, a great writer. In fact, the writing per se is often lousy. PKD novels contain some of the largest and most glaring plot holes and clunkiest dialogue I ve ever seen in fiction that actually got itself published.