Customer Comments

I am 1/3 of the way through Knucklehead, and I can't put it down. Adam Smyer chronicles a life beginning about 1991 (the year I got married and began my 'adult' life). I can relate to Adam's protagonist: we were both yuppies, we were both DINKs. We both lived in the SF Bay Area and lived through the same events: The first World Trade Center bombing, Rodney King, Waco, the 101 California Street shooting. I find Adam's perspective to be invaluable, his writing is accessible and exceptional. Like Walter Mosley, Adam freely shares his thoughts about race and living with oppression in our Land of the Free (the actual title of one my elementary school history books). Unlike Mosley, Adam indulges in less fantasy about carving a piece back from the oppressive culture, although his narrator is not above choosing moments to stand tall and measure his self respect against the inherent risk of speaking truth.

When I found Roadside Picnic, I didn't know what a treat I was in for. The authors start with a hard SF premise reminiscent of Rendezvous With Rama: Yes, the aliens have arrived and No, we don't really understand anything else. There the resemblance ends. Arthur C. Clarke's characters are American. The politics of funding and professional rivalry are the only barriers to eager, well-fed scientists grappling with the mysteries of the universe. The Strugatsky brothers' characters are Soviet. The scientists lucky enough to pursue research or exploration combine intelligence and naivete in equal portions, as anyone with an ounce of political acumen has either suppressed all curiosity or been purged. And since all stories must be told by survivors, it's not a scientist but a criminal that tells this one. Strugatsky writes with the dark passion of Harlan Ellison and the political humanism of LeGuin. It's wonderful stuff.

I've been reading Walter Mosley for years, his fiction goes straight to the top of my reading list, his non-fiction takes a bit longer. "This Year You Write Your Novel" doesn't break much new ground, but what is there to say on the topic? If you already write, you don't need it. If you're a serious wannabe writer and your copies of Writing Down the Bones and The Artist's Way are rumpled & dog-eared, you already know that if you want to write you actually have to write. Mosley makes this point well, but the pleasure I derived from reading the book was not in the writing tips, but in that it exposed some of his thinking and his process.

Nothing could dwarf this installment! It now seems a foregone conclusion that our favorite characters are all doomed, so I'm hanging in there to watch the evildoers get their just deserts.