DenebStation SF Book Reviews

         Strange is the night  where black stars rise And strange moons circle through the skies, But stranger still is                             Lost Carcosa        This haunting  poem introduces The King in Yellow,  a collection of weird tales, first published in 1895  by Robert W. Chambers.  The first four short stories reference a forbidden play called the King in Yellow that, once read, drives its reader to insanity.  (Warning, spoilers ahead!)      The first story perfectly sets the uncanny tone of the book by beginning in a New York in that takes place in an alternative 1920, imagined by Chambers in 1895.  After the USA and Germany ended a war over the Samoan Islands , the USA entered a new era of prosperity and beauty under a centralized government. "Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in...

Mild Spoilers :                 In H.G. Wells , The Island of Doctor Moreau , the main character, Edward Prendick, uncovers the horrific experiments of Dr. Moreau who was trying to uplift animals using vivisection . After a disaster on the island, Prendick is stranded for 10 months with Dr. Moreau's beast people, whose animal natures slowly resurface while they lose their humanity. Amid this, Edward finds a loyal and protective friend in the Dog man whose canine instinct drives him to serve his human master. What if scientists in the future could exploit this canine instinct for loyalty for the cause of evil? What if scientists created beast men as weapons of war?  The 2017 dystopian novel Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky explores this issue with updated science using genetics and cybernetics and how this would impact future human evolution.       In the near future, scientists have turned away from AI robots and ...