The Threat of Celebrity: A Review of Aaru, by David Meredith

Review copy of Aaru provided by David Meredith

Death is a fact of life.  We obsess over it.  We avoid it.  We embrace it.  We have never stopped searching for ways to put it off, to stop it, to cure it.  For as long as stories and fiction have been things in human culture, we have been dreaming up ways around death.  Characters in some stories live unnaturally long lives.  Some are cursed with undeath, the ability to die and die again and never stay dead.  Since the advent of science-fiction, our tales have turned towards technology instead of magic for answers.  Cyborgs, transcendent states of being, and complex virtual worlds dominate the fictional landscape.

Small Announcement

Just a small announcement for City on the Moon going forward.  I’ve received a few requests for solicited reviews, and have now been sent a couple review copies as well.  In fact, this next one, David Meredith’s Aaru is one such.  In the interest of full disclosure, at the beginning of any review where I have received the book for free, I’ll add a little PSA to that effect.  If you don’t see that, then I either bought the book myself or was gifted it by a friend or family member.

Exciting times are ahead for City on the Moon!

The Cannons of Mars: A Review of The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter

Over one hundred years later and the Victorian era has never quite left us.  There is an innate fascination in the West with the fashion, the language, the dichotomy between upper and lower class, and the general scientific aesthetic.  This is the era which brought us Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein’s monster.  This is also the period which launched the alien invasion literary craze with an extraordinarily well-known serialization.  The War of the Worlds was written and published by H.G. Wells in 1897, and later made even more famous by Orson Welles in 1938, believed to have caused a panic in the United States for it’s realistic portrayal of an alien invasion.  All this to say, The War of the Worlds is timeless.