The Passage I’d never heard of Justin Cronin before picking up The Passage; he’s won awards for previous work, though I’m given to understand that this latest work represents something of a departure for him. It may be new to Cronin, but it’s certainly not (or shouldn’t be) new to most readers, as The Passage is an overly-long pastiche of well-worn horror and sci-fi tropes, with a lot of solemn navel-gazing as filler.
The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson novels are always a treat. It would be inaccurate to say they are formulaic, as each one is uniquely and wildly creative; however, they tend to share some characteristics, for better or worse. Last year I read Snow Crash, and prior to that I read his Cryptonomicon, and can’t help but notice, as others have, that though Stephenson expends considerable energy setting up a complicated plot and a tremendous, realistic world in which it occurs, his plot climaxes are so short and unexpected that one isn’t quite sure if it happened or not.
A Case of Conscience Science fiction has a tendency to ignore religion; this may have stemmed from its early Enlightenment-style emphasis on rationality, or it may have been sheer laziness, since predicting how some of our oldest cultural institutions would fare years into the (often dystopian) future is difficult at best.
There are notable exceptions to this, and the situation has gotten better as the years wind on and the genre refines itself. Writers aren’t always nice to religion, but they’ve generally stopped ignoring it as a force for (or resistance to) change. But even in scifi’s early days, there were some writers who not only included organized religion in their stories, but actually centered the plots on it. Most frequently cited is Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But just a scant year before Miller published his first and last novel, another titan of the early science fiction scene, James Blish, published A Case of Conscience, whose protagonist(?) is a Jesuit priest.
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Though I don’t listen to altogether too many comedy albums, I’m a fan of Patton Oswalt, who I think is one of the smarter mainstream comics working today. To the best of my knowledge, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is his first serious attempt at a published book, and while it’s short and somewhat inconsistent, I think it’s shows a great potential for grander works.
2001: A Space Odyssey The cinematic version of 2001: A Space Odyssey is widely considered one of the best films ever made, and certainly one of the high points of Kubrick’s career; slightly less known—or perhaps just as well known by a much different demographic?—is Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name. Uniquely, one was not a novelization or screen adaptation of the other, but rather were written at the same time in a partnership between Kubrick and Clarke. The differences between the two have more to do with changes made by Kubrick for budgetary or stylistic reasons.