Books shelved under “Time Travel”

Last week, Atlantis lifted off for the final space shuttle mission ever. The space shuttle program is older than I am, and to be honest, it's overdue for retirement. The Challenger and Columbia tragedies underscored how cantankerous and dangerous this method of low-Earth orbital delivery can be. The numerous delays in the final flights of Discovery and Atlantis emphasized the fragility of the aging shuttle fleet. So we should not be mourning the loss of…

I tend to read books one at a time in quick succession. I have to, for the same reason I am so assiduous in writing reviews: I have a poor memory for these types of details. However, every so often I'll have a "project" book that takes me weeks or months to read, in parallel with my other books. I tend to do this with lengthy anthologies; I've been doing it with the Iliad.…

There is a theory that views all of history as the result of actions by individuals at pivotal moments. These "Great Men" (or, let's be fair, "Great People") are the movers and shakers of historical periods. Leaders like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Elizabeth II, and Napoleon Bonaparte shaped society. Scientists like Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and yes, Galileo Galilei shaped our perception of the world. These are the people whose mark…

I'm ambivalent about this book. The best way to describe my reservation with Woman on the Edge of Time is that I was never comfortable suspending my disbelief. I tried to make myself willing to go where Marge Piercy was taking me but never quite got there. Although the book steadily improved from its chaotic but very dull beginning, it never involved me in the way I require to get much satisfaction from reading. In…

Maybe it's unfair to compare them, but having read this hot on the heels of The War of the Worlds, I liked The Time Machine better. On thematic grounds it's a close battle, but The Time Machine is a far superior story, hands down.

I'm not even going to touch the whole "time travel" concept as Wells presents it in this book, both because it was written in 1895 and because science fiction has…