Extinction Blues: A Review of Highfire, by Eoin Colfer

When once there was a single genre of fantasy, now there are many.  Fantasy used to mean dragons, orcs, epic adventures, battle between good and evil, among other such literary tropes.  But you can only tell the same story so many times, in the same setting, before it begins to get stale.  Luckily, fantasy has proven itself to be a versatile genre, in that it is not a single genre anymore.  Rather, it facilitates the mixing of multiple genres to create something new.  Now, traditional fantasy can be more commonly known as high fantasy.  It’s counterpart, though not its opposite, is low fantasy.  The transplanting of traditional fantasy elements, such as dragons, into an otherwise mundane setting, such as rural Louisiana.  Highfire is one of the latest in a heritage of low fantasy.

The Omnipotence Paradox: A Review of The God Game, by Danny Tobey

Artificial intelligence has become one of the most common staples in science-fiction, the embodiment of human concerns with being replaced.  Our collective worry about creating machines smarter and stronger than us crystallized into its own genre.  Artificial intelligence, or A.I., is all over fiction, yet very difficult to get just right.  For every successful A.I. story, there are piles of unsuccessful ones.  Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, and Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell all come to mind as stories about A.I. done right.  Unfortunately, The God Game by Danny Tobey never quite reaches the heights its predecessors achieved.