Positive4ColumnsOne revelation provided by Underland is just how many types of subscapes there are ... the new book...is a lexical delight in its own right, a feast of terms for underground spaces ... In all his writing, but particularly strongly here, Nature provides for Macfarlane and his readers a form of religion for the godless, stirring sensations of awe, gratitude, and humbling insignificance. There is comfort too in the idea of all this weird beauty outlasting us; its imperishability offers a secular substitute for Eternity. Underland is an exhilarating read, but it’s not flawless ... There are two chapters set in Greenland that...[are] anticlimactic ... it’s here, in the frozen North, that Macfarlane most explicitly addresses what in earlier chapters had only been touched on: the limits of the written word ... For once, his mystic-materialist impulse to animate the landscape, to recognize it as a living thing and thus a relative to the human, founders in the face of its eldritch indifference.
Jason Heller
Positive4ColumnsComing at his subject, the interface between popular music and science fiction, from an unusual angle—as a practitioner of both s.f. and music, rather than rock critic or historian—gives Heller a fresh perspective ... Strange Stars provides a brisk and entertaining tour through terrain that has not been mapped at book length before. The briskness does have a downside. Strange Stars is structured as a year-per-chapter arc through the seventies, which means that the same figures keep cropping up, but often in a glancing way before we hurry on to the next example ... At other times the book can feel like a hectic and overly wide trawl.
Ben Ratliff
PositiveThe New York TimesIf Every Song Ever has an overarching theme, it is an injunction to open your ears! Music, or a component of music like repetition or pitch, is around us all the time, even 'the distinct blasts of the commuter train whistle down by the river.' In his smart, provocative introduction Ratliff reminds us that we live in a different musical universe now, at least as regards the multitude of digital delivery systems and platforms along with the fact that 'every song ever' is downloadable: total access around the clock.
