Reviews

Visionary writers of Gretna, Manitoba

A.E. van Vogt’s Clane of Linn

BY J.J.S. Boyce

A.E. van Vogt is surely the most famous literary figure in the English science fiction world to come out of the tiny community of Gretna, Manitoba, populated primarily by German-speaking Mennonites during his childhood. Of course this is a comical understatement for a writer spoken of in the same breath as the Big Three of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov, and sometimes wedged, retroactively into the number one or number two spot.

quantum consciousness and self-destruction

QUANTUM NIGHT by Robert J. Sawyer

BY Jonathan Crowe

A book by Robert J. Sawyer is always about something. His latest, Quantum Night, mines much of the same vein as his earlier work; like his next-to-last book, Triggers (2012), it’s concerned with the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. It’s a fast-paced thriller in which a psychologist and a physicist must take their discovery about the nature of human consciousness and use it to save the world from self-destruction. But it goes down some very dark paths.

what it really means to be an astronaut

Rockstars in Space; Astronauts on Earth

BY AE

I’ve never been one to dream about going into space. Packing for Mars and the movie Gravity, while both entertaining, did nothing to make me think climbing into a Soyuz and being shot into orbit was something I’d personally enjoy, even if it didn’t take years of rigorous selection and training to get there. But Colonel Chris Hadfield’s memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, gave me a taste of what it’s like to want that more than anything and an appreciation of what it really means to be an astronaut.

bold and uncompromising future poetry

AE Bookshelf: William Gibson

BY D.F. McCourt

It’s hard to imagine we’ve made it five years without tackling the incredible oeuvre of William Gibson, the author we are so eager to claim as Canadian that we have forgiven his American birth. Gibson burst onto the scene in 1984 with Neuromancer, the novel that launched a thousand terrible imitations (and a half dozen or so very good ones). Since then, he’s given us ten more novels, a wealth of short fiction, and a string of radically political non-fiction. So where to start?