For many years, back before I decided that choosing favorites was a no-win proposition, The Abyss held a rather bizarre distinction for me: it was both my favorite book and my favorite movie. This is bizarre, of course, because novelizations of movies are very rarely good, much less great, and film adaptations of books very rarely manage to capture the full power of an exceptional novel. But Orson Scott Card and James Cameron created such an exceptional pair of complementary […]

Nancy Kress’s Beggars Trilogy (Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride) is an exploration of the world she created in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella, also called Beggars in Spain. All three books are among my favorite reads of all time, full of interesting ideas and unique characters, but I don’t believe they always get the recognition they deserve in the science fiction community. This trilogy follows the path of a near-future United States–and by extension, […]