The Cranky Old Reader

I'm a Goodreads refugee, looking for a new home. Old books for children, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and humor are my main areas of interest. I've little interest in books that were written after 1975 or so, and prefer books that are older still. There are, however, a few still-living authors that I respect.

Time Echo

Time Echo - R.L. (as Robert Lionel) Fanthorpe It didn't take long for me to realize that this was a bad book. I'm not sure which bit of lame dialog first alerted me to that fact, although I do remember that it was a painful redundancy.But when the author told us that his "nightmarish" future dictatorship (which was actually somewhat ridiculous) was "a thousand times worse than Orwell's 1984"...well at that point I realized that life really is too short to waste on some books, after all.This book is a relic of a time when there was some out-and-out crap being published in the science fiction field, primarily (I think) because some editors believed that all science fiction was crap - probably because them themselves never read or couldn't understand some of the classics that were being created in the genre.This is a perfect example of a writer who cannot write.Update: A friend did some research when he read this review, and discovered that the author was, in fact, incredibly prolific - he wrote 89 science fiction books in a three-year period, as I recall. He did it by dictating them into a recorder, which he apparently did while in bed with a blanket over his head - I am NOT making this up!But even so, he couldn't write.

Currently reading

Basic Roleplaying: The Chaosium d100 system (Basic Roleplaying)
Sam Johnson, Charlie Krank
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Rebecca Solnit