Posted by Os Davis | 0 Comments
For the glory of Empire: Reviewing Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians”
With the XXX Olympiad currently in full swing, BuckBokai today pimps a favorite science-fiction sport story, Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians.”
Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012, “The Olympians” serves as the seventh chapter in Resnick’s Birthright: The Book of Man
Posted by Os Davis | 0 Comments
What if, Babe? A review of Harry Turtledove’s “The House that George Built”
Nowhere do the seemingly mutually exclusive entertainments of sport and science-fiction come closer than in that simple musing question “what if…?”
In sport, the question is often lamentably formed of second-guessing the decision of manager, general manager, umpire or player. To wit:
Posted by Os Davis | 0 Comments
Moe Better Blues: Alexander Irvine’s “Agent Provocateur”
“I was Moe Berg’s biggest fan in 1940, even though he’d sort of officially retired at the end of the ’39 season. Like him, I loved baseball, and like him, I loved to read – a combination unusual among twelve-year-olds as it is in major-league clubhouses.” – from “Agent Provocateur” by Alexander Irvine
Seriously, how cool was Moe Berg? Perhaps the most incredible life-story of the 20th century never birthed as a formal biography (though an independent documentary on Berg was produced in 2007, it is apparently without distribution yet), Berg’s life was the stuff of 1940s childhood daydreaming: From playing professional major league baseball to traveling the world as a World War II secret agent was a multilingual misfit who blended in everywhere, a 13-year veteran of professional baseball who died couch-surfing in obscurity.
Now is it believable that Berg was/is a fulcrum point for the lever of the spacetime continuum itself as he was/is in Alexander Irvine’s “Agent Provocateur”? Absolutely.
Read More