263 pages, Hardcover
Published July, 2025 by Tor Nightfire
(Full review on the way)
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Book Review: Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Book Review: Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin
196 pages, Paperback
Published August 5, 2025, by Tor Nightfire
(Full Review on the way)
Book Review: The Hospital at the End of the World by Justin C. Key
400 pages, Hardcover
Published February 3, 2026 by Harper
(Full review soon)
Book Review: American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates
American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates
212 pages, Hardcover
Published November 2021 by UCL Press
This review is 200% a victim of my being behind 8 book reviews, and being ass deep with organizing the Global Time Slip/ PKD festival. Normally, this would be a longer, more intense review.
I read this book to prep for the LIVE PKD hangout interview, which I just conducted. And it was great. Yeates is a British-born researcher, and as such, this research about the depiction of American cities in decay is quite interesting. Starting with early SF prose, Radio, movies, and into Video games and streaming TV, Yeates paints a vivid picture of American cities in speculative decay over the decades.
The titles of the chapters give a great overview of the whole book.
1 Urban apocalypse in the magazines
2 Listening to ruins on the radio
3 Cinema and the aesthetics of destruction
4 Urban decay in the transmedia universe of Blade Runner
5 Playing in virtual ruins from Wasteland to Wasteland 2
6 Cities and sanctuary in The Walking Dead
I was really happy that Yeates spent a good amount of time on Jack London’s Iron Heel and The Scarlet Plague. I have read both, but Iron Heel only recently (see my Amazing Stories column about it). The history of the Radio shows was a thing I knew a little about, but was happy to learn more.
Chapter four about Blade Runner and urban Decay was the one I was doing an interview about, so perhaps I paid a little more attention to it. The information that crossed all Blade Runner media from PKD’s novel, the movie, the sequel novels, and video games was excellent.
What was new to me was the information about video games and the Walking Dead Universe. I learned about the extensive fan fiction community of The Walking Dead, for example. What happened in that space was fascinating, and I knew none of it.
This is a great academic book, it was published in 2021 by UCL Press in the UK and is expensive, but on the website there is an open-access PDF available.
PDF of the book here!
Book Review: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
224 pages, Paperback SF Masterworks Series
Published September 9, 1999 by Gollancz
First published January 1, 1959
Literary awards
Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1960),
Seiun Award 星雲賞 for Best Foreign Novel (1973)
(Full Review on the way...)
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Book Review: Tongues of the Moon by Philip Jose Farmer
This is a weird book for me to write about. I need to be writing and reviewing more Philip Jose Farmer in general; he is a classic author, whose award-winning Riverworld books are important works. His 50s classic The Lovers was groundbreaking for the portrayal of sex in genre fiction. He is important, so why did I randomly decide to read and review one of his lost novels from the early 60s.
For one thing, this is randomly the first Farmer book I bought. In the 90s, at a used bookstore in Syracuse, A city he lived in from 1956-58, before moving to Arizona. I picked up this paperback, and it has moved around with me, unread. A few weeks back, I was staring at my books and thought I finally needed to read that one. He likely lived in Arizona when he wrote Tongues of the Moon, but just three years after living in Cuse.
The Farmer family moved to Syracuse, New York to a house on Evaleen Street, and Phil worked as a technical writer for General Electric. That doesn’t matter, but as someone who lived in Syracuse, I was interested.
Tongues of the Moon is not considered a major work like The Lovers or Riverworld. Personally, my favorite PJF novel that I have read so far is the Alternate history novel Two Hawks from Earth. You will not find many long, detailed reviews of this novel, and so I suppose that is one reason I feel compelled to do that. Like many authors of the era, I have read mostly the classics. The authors like PKD, Malzberg and Brunner had super high moments and comically silly moments. Reading their whole catalog teaches you a thing or two about them. I don't have time to read all Farmer, but reaching this little lost gem was insightful and better than I expected.
All the elements that make it a gem are entirely based on the ideas. Farmer has written good books, but the prose and characters are super thin. There is a lack of defined structure, leading to long chapters that ignore natural breaks. The characters are thin and hard to remember. That being said, as a work of cold war speculation, it is both wildly out of date and fascinating in its implications. While Farmer wrote better SF before and after, this novel is almost more fun before of the weak parts.
This novel takes place in a future somewhat far ahead, but not pinned down to a year or a concept of exactly when. The Soviet Union and nations as we know them still exist, and the space race has evolved into various colonies. Throughout the solar system, it has gone on long enough that Mars. Well, the United States and Canada fell to Soviet control.
“America had fallen prey more to its own softness and confusion than to the machinations of the Soviets. Then, in the turbulent, bloody, starving years that followed the fall with their purges, uprisings, savage repressions, mass transportations to Siberia and other areas, importation of other nationalities to create division, and bludgeoning propaganda and re-education, only the strong and the intelligent survived.”
In hindsight, this speculation seems silly, but this was 1961, and hidden in the world-building is an alt-history Red Dawn that the Wolverines did even worse. There are lots of tiny but important details about the various nations, including feared now independent former colonies on Mars, although they are talked about so vaguely, I thought they were actual Martians for a minute.
The defense against Mars colonists becomes a specter that drives the advancement of the story like the Cold War, pushing progress. The drive of the narrative is a destructive nuclear war that destroys most of Earth. Our story is focused on a small number of colonists on the moon. They are suddenly the only survivors left. The driver of the suspense is the small groups from different cultures realizing their only hope is to work together.
“Unfortunately, there are other matters to be cleared up before we can discuss that. The main thing is, which base is the leader?”
A leader is one thing, but it becomes a matter of agreement to follow one culture and one language. Each of the cultures argues for its language and culture. Of course believes it should survive. Being the one agreed-upon language of the moon is the center of debate.
“Remember, the situation is not the same here as it was on Earth. There, even a secondary tongue had many speakers to hand it to children.”
There is an excellent version of this story to be had; the execution leaves much to be desired. Still, as an SF concept, it is there. So the title of the book comes from the expert who decides it is time to create a blended language.
Tongues of the Moon started life as a high-concept novelette. The story didn’t really have the room to expand the ideas, and the novel didn’t do much to expand them. There are moments of genius, but if this was the only Farmer I ever read I would not have believed he had classics in him. I am glad I read it, but I would not be quick to assign or suggest to anyone. It is interesting but certainly not canon.
Book Review: Inter Ice Age 4 by Kobo Abe
Inter Ice Age 4
228 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1959
I have a couple of intense interests that collide here. First of all, I love Asian Science Fiction, I love retro science fiction. I understand that Abe has a readership besides this novel, more for surrealism than SF, but he was a new author to me.
Abe became famous for a surrealist novel that he wrote and published five years after this work of genre fiction. It was most fascinating for me to read an SF novel written by an author who was a child in Imperial Japan; he only avoided serving and probably dying in the war by choosing to study medicine in college. This is of course, an influence on this work.
His life story is interesting for sure. He was deeply affected by the death of friends in the war, and after the conflict, joined the communist party. He organized in the poorer neighborhoods of Tokyo while starting his career. He considered himself a pacifist and helped organize workers. In 1951, he won the Akutagawa Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in Japanese literature. So it is cool that this well-regarded and yet radical dude wrote a super bizarro SF novel.
Yeah, he moved away from Communism, not impressed with the Soviet way of doing things, and that is clear in this text with the Moscow II machine. There are a couple of different plots that blend together. It is science fiction, and I wondered a few times if the translation was influenced by Western SF as much as the author.
The plot on the surface seems simple: a scientist builds a machine, similar to modern AI, that is meant to predict the future. Using this machine leads him to uncover a conspiracy to engineer transhuman animal hybrids.
The predication machine, as Abe saw it in the late 50s, is not that far off from the large language model programs that we see happening today. The machine in this novel learns and predicts, but Abe views it as a tool of social control. As the superpowers race to control the technology, his strong feelings about the Soviet Union are clear in this passage…
“Repercussions from America came the next day. “Prediction and divination are fundamentally different. In the 1st place, only that which has a moral basis can rightfully be called prediction. Putting such power in the hands of a machine can only be denial of humanity. Here in America, the forecasting machine was perfected early, but we followed the voice of our conscience and avoided political application of it. The present course of the Soviet Union is to attempt to threaten the liberty of men and jeopardize international friendship by betraying their own claims for peaceful coexistence. We consider the Moscow II predictions to be a kind of violence against the mind; we advise early abandonment and revocation. In the event our statement should go unheard, we are prepared to petition the United Nations.”
It seems a bit idealistic to think America would respect the freedom of the people with the Prediction. The push and pull of prediction vs freewill in this future is much of the power of the first act. The idea of predestination of predication operates in a way not that different from PKD’s story, Minority Report. Tanomogi feels compelled to prove his machine correct, but he also truly believes that it cannot be wrong.
“Tanomogi lapsed into silence. But he didn't seem all that disturbed. He had been working with me for five years and could read me like a book. I would never give up this pursuit. Whatever, I did not intend to offer excuses for it. If the machine ordered murder, I would doubtless commit murder, however reluctantly. The ordinary middle-aged man walking now before us, who had something just a little mysterious about him, would be stripped clean of his skin, his past and future laid bare. When I thought about it, I experienced a pain as if my own skin were being peeled off. But turning my back on the prediction machine was at this juncture much, much more frightening.”
Where the novel becomes even more Dickian is when the machine begins to take on feelings of life.
“Not at all. Actually, you're not a human being. You're the personality equation of a man by the name of Tsuchida Susmu, that has been committed to memory by the machine.”
“Don't make me laugh. And stop this ridiculous deceit. Damn! All my sensations seem to be gone but where's Cheeto? Say, what about turning on the lights?”
“You're dead.”
“OK, drop it. I've decided not to be afraid.”
This narrows the cosmos down to this experience of the machine, and it is a powerful moment in the novel. We think of the universe as cosmic and vast, one of the ultimate horrors of finding out you are artificial, is it narrows that cosmos down to your experience, nothing can be trusted.
That is not the end of the weird elements, but the start…
“Seven thousand yen... Three-week old fetuses… development outside the mother's womb... Mice with gills... Aquatic mammals.
The progression of the novel goes weirder and weirder; the machine seems to think humans need to be partially aquatic, and considering the way climate change is changing the dynamics of life today, this seems like better speculation than many surrealist fictions. Much like PKD Abe can be seen to be predicting better than some authors who actually try.
Inter-Ice Age 4 is fantastic SF. The cultural context and view into time and era it comes from make it even more fascinating. I ordered a used copy, and while it wasn’t expensive, there were not many copies. The one I got was ancient, stained, and smelling of deep storage. It also added a certain otherworldly feeling to it.
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