Tim Pratt recently won the 2007 Hugo Award for best short story with Impossible Dreams. The story’s main character, Pete, is a huge movie buff that stumbles across a new video store in his neighborhood. He doesn’t seem to understand how he missed the store before, but ventures in and finds an odd selection of movies which he though had been canceled, or made by different directors with different actors. What follows is an interesting commentary on movies which either were never made, were lost, or simply done differently. This is a truly awesome story with an excellently planned ending. It was a pleasure to read from start to finish. From the writing it either the author is a huge movie buff or his writing is so good that you’d never even suggest he wasn’t passionate about movies. Visit the link above and read the full story at Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt
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This review will most likely contain spoilers for any previous books in the series, read at your own risk.
Humanity starts out with a very brief, and rather insufficient, summary of the events of the series. Derec, Ariel, Mandelbrot, Wolruf, Dr. Avery, and the three learning robots are on their way back to the original robot city. They are in for a big surprise when they enter orbit. As with previous books in this series we get to see a good portion of action, as well as discussion about what is meant to be human.
We do get to see how the whole series is tied together. For my taste, it seems that everything fits together a bit too nicely. Also, I was expecting a bit more closure toward the end. I was left with the feeling that yet another series or at least novel should fill in the gap between this series and the Tiedemann Trilogy (Mirage, Chimera, Aurora) which involves both Derec and Ariel. I’ll discuss this in more detail in my general Robots and Aliens review which will follow as I can’t do this without major spoilers for this last novel.
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Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy ZahnThrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

“HeirToTheEmpire” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.
When I heard about production of Star Wars Episode VII and the ensuing controversy about the Expanded Universe vs canon, I started thinking about reading Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy again. I first read the books almost 25 years ago! I decided that I didn’t really care if the new movies conflicted with the books. I remembered being blown away, so figured they were worth reading again. These books were a very important to me at the time because it was my first real taste of Star Wars outside of the theatrical films. There were other books released before this, but the Thrawn Trilogy marked the resurgence of my interest in Star Wars.
I’ll admit that I’ve been a bad reviewer and powered through the series without stopping to write my reviews. I normally read on my lunch breaks at work and have not had hardly any time outside of work and family life to devote to reviews as I did just a few years ago.
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