House of Leaves is a great experimental novel, in fact I would say one of the very few experimental novels that succeeds at not being an weak assertion of style over substance. That being said, it gets weaker as it goes along, the house itself is incredibly creepy, but the lead up to the climax dilutes the creepiness…

Damn, I did mean "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and not "The Man Who Sold the Moon" when elevating a work of Heinlein's for notice and praise. I got my Moon titles by Heinlein confused, but there is no excuse, really.

Heinlein is not a great writer, but "The Man Who Sold the Moon" puts him way above a boatload of bestselling hacks (S.M. Sterling, John Ringo, David Weber, the list just goes on and on). There are reasons to recommend Heinlein to people (some folks are just wired to love "Stranger in a Strange Land" and it is iconic…

I have always been disappointed with PKD adaptations to film, not because I want his dialog preserved, or minor plot points, but it would be nice if directors/writers actually tried to capture some of the mindbender elements that made PKD's work so interesting. "minority Report" was especially disappointing in this…

while I appreciate that rape is a very underreported crime, and it is likely that a person who rapes once will do so again especially if it is in fulfillment of a socially unacceptable sexual compulsion (pedophilia, for example), these are just factors that influence hypothetical likelihoods. I don't see anything that…

I can't speak to Polanski's actual intentions, but if they were to make an enjoyable or coherent film he failed; even if his goal was to make a movie that encouraged repeat viewings he failed. I have no problem with a level of erudition being required to fully understand a work, but in the case of "The Ninth Gate" I…

Good point, I was really disappointed int the lack of plot coherence in "The Ninth Gate." It was a cobbled mess, but if Mr. Rabin is accurate in his description of "What?" I don't think there is much competition, the former being a plot that seemed to have been cut to fit time and then lengthened to fit formula, while…

That was one of the reasons I was chagrined to see Mattin booted from the show early on - his gateau Basque is just amazing. If he had been in restaurant wars I would have expected him to do something along those lines (since the dough has to set overnight).

alurin: However, just because a book satisfies (your) requirements for science fiction doesn't mean that the book solely belongs in that category. Distinguishing between what a book is and what it is marketed as is fallacious in this case: Atwood writes literature with science fiction aspects and it is ridiculous to…

The argument is not that only hard science fiction counts as SciFi, it's that when books are strongly literature but with SciFi flavor/elements it is more than fair to consider it as literature rather than SciFi. Jules Verne wrote SciFi but sits in Classics in most book stores, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote mysteries…

When trying to pigeonhole a book into a genre it is fair to place it in the most rarefied category that it qualifies for. It would be dissonant to see Atwood or Vonnegut or McCarthy shelved in the SciFi section of bookstore (especially at the exclusion of being shelved in the literature section). It is true that by…

I don't think that it is fair to reduce the literary exploration of the post-apocalyptic as an excuse to write SciFi. Apocalyptic events have been a significant medium of expression for a long time. Millennium ago cults routinely sprang up around apocalyptic prophets (not to say that they still don't, but there was…