The final installment in Cixin Lius trilogy is long. And strong. We begin in the deterrence era, in which humans and Trisolarans enjoy a truce enforced by mutually ensured destruction. But all thin

The boys carve through the second half of Cixin Lius sprawling, imaginative, and haunting The Dark Forest. Bagg has questions about how much we can trust our author and the characters he uses to make

The premise of the Dark Forest, that Humanity must make a secret plan stored in our hidden thoughts to defeat an enemy that can spy on our every move, is wonderful. But the lads find the action in the

The lads host their first UMB Official Sports Update as Jesse manages to survive a weekend of ultimate frisbee before getting into the second half of Cixin Lius sprawling and ambitious The Three Body

Jesse Dukes offers a quick review of popular science fiction writer John Scalzi's newest novel, "When the Moon Hits Your Eye". While he initially put the book down after reading the first chapter, due

The Three Body Problem begins with an inexplicable series of tragic mysteries, most notably, that physics as we know it has stopped working. Slowly, the reader is given enough clues to start to suspec

The boys wrap up their discussion of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, and come away somewhat ambivalent: this is clearly a work of importance, imagination, and invention, but it feelsunfocused. We posit

Friend of the show Justin shares another update, as well as his foray into what he terms Contemporary Victorian Episolary Short Travel Non-Fiction. Justin is paddling a solo canoe (and often carrying

We reach Upper Middlebrow education expert Justin Reich on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, at the edge of mobile phone reception. He gives us a dispatch, mid journey, from a rather literary setting.

Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein, which many consider the first science fiction novel. Over the next twenty years, she revised the book several times, and the version she left