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1. | Introduction | |
2. | Why I Re-Read | |
3. | A Deepness in the Sky, the Tragical History of Pham Nuwen | |
4. | The Singularity Problem and Non-Problem | |
5. | Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn't it a classic of the field? | |
6. | From Herring to Marmalade: the perfect plot of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency | |
7. | That's just scenery: what do we mean by “mainstream”? | |
8. | Re-reading long series | |
9. | The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein's Juveniles | |
10. | Happiness, Meaning and Significance: Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes | |
11. | The Weirdest Book in the World | |
12. | The Poetry of Deep Time: Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night | |
13. | Clarke reimagined in hot pink: Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun | |
14. | Something rich and strange: Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine | |
15. | To trace impunity: Greg Egan's Permutation City | |
16. | Black and white and read a million times: Jerry Pournelle, Janissaries | |
17. | College as magic garden: Why Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is a book you'll either love or hate | |
18. | Making the future work: Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang | |
19. | Anathem: what does it gain from not being our world? | |
20. | A happy ending depends on when you stop: Heavy Time, Hellburner and C.J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe | |
21. | Knights Who Say “Fuck”: Swearing in Genre Fiction | |
22. | “Earth is one world”: C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station | |
23. | Space is wide and good friends are too few: Cherryh's Merchanter novels | |
24. | A need to deal wounds: Rape of men in Cherryh's Union-Alliance novels | |
25. | How to talk to writers | |
26. | “Give me back the Berlin Wall”: Ken MacLeod's The Sky Road | |
27. | What a pity she couldn't have single-handedly invented science fiction! George Eliot's Middlemarch | |
28. | The beauty of lists: Angelica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial | |
29. | Like pop rocks for the brain: Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand | |
30. | Between Two Worlds: S.P. Somtow's Jasmine Nights | |
31. | Lots of reasons to love these: Daniel Abraham's Long Price books | |
32. | Maori Fantasy: Keri Hulme's The Bone People | |
33. | Better to have loved and lost? Series that go downhill. | |
34. | More questions than answers: Robert A. Heinlein's The Stone Pillow | |
35. | Weeping for her enemies: Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor | |
36. | Forward Momentum: Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice | |
37. | Quest for Ovaries: Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos | |
38. | Why he must not fail: Lois McMaster Bujold's The Borders of Infinity | |
39. | What have you done with your baby brother? Lois McMaster Bujold's Brothers in Arms | |
40. | Hard on his superiors: Lois McMaster Bujold's The Vor Game | |
41. | One birth, one death, and all the acts of pain and will between: Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar | |
42. | All true wealth is biological: Lois McMaster Bujold's Mirror Dance | |
43. | Luck is something you make for yourself: Lois McMaster Bujold's Cetaganda | |
44. | This is my old identity, actually: Lois McMaster Bujold's Memory | |
45. | But I'm Vor: Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr | |
46. | She's getting away! Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign | |
47. | Just my job: Lois McMaster Bujold's Diplomatic Immunity | |
48. | Every day is a gift: Lois McMaster Bujold's Winterfair Gifts | |
49. | Choose again, and change: Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga | |
50. | So, what sort of series do you like? | |
51. | Time travel and slavery: Octavia Butler's Kindred | |
52. | America the Beautiful: Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain | |
53. | Susan Palwick's Shelter | |
54. | Scintillations of a sensory syrynx: Samuel Delany's Nova | |
55. | You may not know it, but you want to read this: Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin | |
56. | Faster Than Light at any speed | |
57. | Gender and glaciers: Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness | |
58. | Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings: The short stories of Lord Dunsany | |
59. | The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep | |
60. | The worst book I love: Robert Heinlein's Friday | |
61. | India's superheroes: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children | |
62. | A funny book with a lot of death in it: Iain Banks's The Crow Road | |
63. | More dimensions than you'd expect: Samuel Delany's Babel 17 | |
64. | Bad, but good: David Feintuch's Midshipman's Hope | |
65. | Subtly twisted history: John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting | |
66. | A very long poem: Alan Garner's Red Shift | |
67. | Beautiful, poetic, and experimental: Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand | |
68. | Waking the Dragon: George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire | |
69. | Who reads cosy catastrophes? | |
70. | Stalinism vs Champagne at the opera: Constantine Fitzgibbon's When the Kissing Had To Stop | |
71. | The future of the Commonwealth: Nevil Shute's In the Wet | |
72. | Twists of the Godgame: John Fowles's The Magus | |
73. | Playing the angles on a world: Steven Brust's Dragaera | |
74. | “Jhereg feeds on others' kills”: Steven Brust's Jhereg | |
75. | Yendi coils and strikes unseen: Steven Brust's Yendi | |
76. | A coachman's tale: Steven Brust's Brokedown Palace | |
77. | “Frightened teckla hides in grass”: Steven Brust's Teckla | |
78. | “How can you tell?”: Steven Brust's Taltos | |
79. | “Phoenix rise from ashes grey”: Steven Brust's Phoenix | |
80. | I have been asking for nothing else for an hour: Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards | |
81. | “Athyra rules minds' interplay”: Steven Brust's Athyra | |
82. | “What, is there more?”: Steven Brust's Five Hundred Years After | |
83. | “Orca circles, hard and lean”: Steven Brust's Orca | |
84. | “Haughty dragon yearns to slay”: Steven Brust's Dragon | |
85. | “Issola strikes from courtly bow”: Steven Brust's Issola | |
86. | What has gone before? | |
87. | “The time about which I have the honor to write”: Steven Brust's The Viscount of Adrilankha | |
88. | “Dzur stalks and blends with night”: Steven Brust's Dzur | |
89. | “Jhegaala shifts as moments pass”: Steven Brust's Jhegaala | |
90. | “Quiet iorich won't forget”: Steven Brust's Iorich | |
91. | Quakers in Space: Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day | |
92. | “Locked in our separate skulls”: Raphael Carter's The Fortunate Fall | |
93. | Saving both worlds: Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt)'s The Interior Life | |
94. | Yearning for the unattainable: James Tiptree, Jr.'s short stories | |
95. | SF reading protocols | |
96. | Incredibly readable: Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer | |
97. | Nasty, but brilliant: John Barnes's Kaleidoscope Century | |
98. | Growing up in a space dystopia: John Barnes's Orbital Resonance | |
99. | The joy of an unfinished series | |
100. | Fantasy and the need to remake our origin stories | |
101. | The mind, the heart, sex, class, feminism, true love, intrigue, not your everyday ho hum detective story: Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night | |
102. | Three short Hainish novels: Ursula Le Guin's Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions | |
103. | On reflection, not very dangerous: Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions | |
104. | Why do I re-read things I don't like? | |
105. | “Yakking about who's civilized and who's not”: H. Beam Piper's Space Viking | |
106. | Feast or famine? | |
107. | Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, the play of Samuel Delany's Dhalgren | |
108. | “Not much changes on the street, only the faces.” George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails | |
109. | History inside-out: Howard Waldrop's Them Bones | |
100. | I'd love this book if I didn't loathe the protagonist: Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr's Household Gods | |
111. | Screwball comedy time travel: John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice | |
112. | Academic Time Travel: Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog | |
113. | The Society of Time: John Brunner's Times Without Number | |
114. | Five Short Stories with Useless Time Travel | |
115. | Time Control: Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity | |
116. | Texan Ghost Fantasy: Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle | |
117. | The language of stones: Terry Windling's The Wood Wife | |
118. | A great castle made of sea: Why hasn't Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell been more influential? | |
119. | Gulp or sip: How do you read? | |
110. | Quincentennial: Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth | |
121. | Do you skim? | |
122. | A merrier world: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit | |
123. | Monuments from the future: Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths | |
124. | The Suck Fairy | |
125. | Trains on the moon: John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless | |
126. | Overloading the senses: Samuel Delany's Nova | |
127. | Aliens and Jesuits: James Blish's A Case of Conscience | |
128. | Swiftly goes the swordplay: Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword | |
129. | The work of disenchantment never ends: Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge | |
130. | Literary criticism vs talking about books | |