Reviews and Comments

I have a suspicion that I have read this book already, years ago, as an ebook.

I have to remind myself that this book is more than thirty years old, which helps to explain the typecast nature of some of its tropes such as the all-male moon mission. The mutiny-in-space trope also pops up, as well as the disaster-movie vignette of complete strangers coming to a bad end, but nearly at the end of the book rather than towards the start as is traditional. Indeed, the pacing just feels off the whole way through the book, and for a novel which tries hard to stick to real-world physics, the way that spaceships just flit about the solar system like passenger cars undermines it all. At least it is a mercifully short book.

I’ll probably come back to this review in a year and have no recollection of the book at all.

Gribbin and Chown are both names I know from non-fiction science writing. This could be good or it could be dire. Let's find out!

I’ll put this up front: the dog does not die.

When a comedian gets old, they often descend into the “you can’t say anything”/“everyone gets offended” trope. One chapter of this book is this trope, almost unadulterated. It was painful to read.

The theme, that there are things that Lucy can teach the author, feels a bit contrived, and at the end Barry even gives himself a report card and admits that he hasn’t taken Lucy’s lessons on board. So what was the point of this book again?

Dave Barry’s columns, collected into book form, are some of my most cherished memories from the 1990s. Sometimes I would even emulate the structure of his humour in my own writing.

The lesson I have learned from Lessons from Lucy is that I will stick with his classic works.

I regret to inform you that Dave Barry has became That Old Guy Who Used To Be A Humour Columnist.

Thank goodness that's done. A bit turned off Brin as a result of this. Review to follow.

I’m still reading this. I think I hit the 25% mark!

I have no fucking idea yet what is going on in this book.

This edition has unexplained dotted underlines randomly under some words. I can explain them away as faux hyperlinks in the Helvetica sections but they are in the Times New Roman sections too. Is there some clever spy code revealed later in the novel, or did the typesetter forget to turn off spellcheck in their word processor? It’s quite offputting.

880 pages! Could take a while.

Ah ha, almost exactly halfway through this book and it flips from fantasy to science fiction. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

This was mentioned on the episode of Jeopardy! I watched tonight as an early example of queer literature. I know Rita Mae Brown from her whodunit mysteries co-authored with her cat Sneaky Pie Brown.

Please ignore the chuckling. I promise I’ll try to keep it down.