Cotton candy, but delightful.

Better really then it had any right to be if still not a masterpiece. Still I found even as I walked out of the theater I already was forgetting what I enjoyed about it.

Judi Dench is the penultimate Bond girl

Nothing like a mob movie to make you miss Boston

Insufficient jumping.

Gone is the smart political sensibilities and hyper-kinetics of his post-cyberpunk “Fall Revolution” series, or the vast, achingly distant noir universe of “Engines of Light”.

This is golden age science fiction – people in a spaceship, a new world, and a previously unsuspected alien race. Its a small book, with some good moments, but rather then the delicious disassociation that I associate with reading a Macleod novel, here he has worked hard to make the far future seem familiar and mundane.

Long the way you realize that Constantine is actually Heinlein’s Lazarus Long (spiritually if not literally), and then you really start to wonder what Ken is trying for.

The ending actually left me deeply disturbed, perhaps because I expect a Macleod book to have a progressive political vector, if a subterranean one, and yet this ended on a flatly apolitical and seemingly unconsidered note.

Moody, atmospheric, largely pointless, and not nearly as much fun as it should have been. Does answer the question of whether the dreadfully miscast Keira Knightley (no pun intended) - in leather bikini - has breasts. (Not much)

Robin Hobb (sic) is ambiguous. Her books are fantasies in every since of the word, swords and socery, heroes and love, boy done good fables (go west young man!) and deeply escapist.

By all rights, they should be dreadful, and I suppose by some measures they are.

And yet, these ambivalent heroes and their coming of age stories are deeply enjoyable. Much of it is her intentionally drawing on the grand traditions of story telling, and more of it is her lovely world building, that gains more momentum and depth from small details and careful observation then grandoise big ideas.

If Tawny Man let you down, this is more of a return to form to the earlier Farseer work, for the better, with a bit of the exoticism of the Liveship books without some of the Liveships work characters/plotting.

Tristram Shandy as the movie will tell you is an unfilmable book. (perhaps the unfilmable book?) Intellectually daring attempt to out post-modern the original post-modern novel.

Not sure they’ve successfully disproved the unfilmability though.

Lyrical, humane, roving. McPhee wanders all over the map, literally and figuratively—pages on Protopangaea enplaced next to notes on ancient Cyprus, and the California gold rush.

One of those books where you’re tempted to tear off the cover. Trying not to judge a book by its lousy art director.