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Caged without Walls is such an appropriate name for this collection of poetry. The poems invite the reader to escape from their fears. Anthony J Langford writes poems about people who have doubts, and who make mistakes and have regrets. They poems are for people who question their existence and want to achieve something rather than just survive. Langford writes about life as he sees it. His honest words create poems with a real   authenticity. But he’s not one to try and pull at the heart strings. He’s more concerned with getting readers to examine their lives.   His writing should evoke a response from most readers. Few of his poems are written with obscure meanings that only the most determined re-reader might eventually find. His poems are like having a conversation with him about what is really going on in your lives.     Most of the poems have at least a few stanzas or phrases that will cause a reader to pause and marvel at Anthony’s use...

  MIT engineers have created a sensory vest that allows readers to feel what a book’s protagonist is experiencing. The vest contains a heartbeat and shiver stimulator, a body compression system, temperature controls and sound. It has some of the elements I imagine virtual reality suits will eventually have.  “Changes in the protagonist's emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations," the engineers told the Guardian newspaper . The Girl Who Was Plugged In. The engineers seemed to have used a very appropriate book for their prototype in James Tiptree Jr's novella The Girl Who Was Plugged in . In that novella, the protagonist is deformed by pituitary dystrophy and experiences life through an avatar. The protagonist feels "both deep love and ultimate despair, the freedom of Barcelona sunshi...

In my last post I analysed 13 science fiction books published in the US in January 2014. In this post I analyse the Goodreads Choice Awards for science fiction in 2013. I am interested to see what similarities there are between what is currently being published and what people are enjoying reading. To create the Choice Awards, the Goodreads operators nominated 15 novels, based on the amount of positive reviews for those books on Goodreads. They also allowed Goodreads readers to add a further five novels to that list. Goodreads members then voted for their favourite from the 20 novels. This is how they voted, with a quick analysis by me of the book after its title. 1. MaddAddam , Margaret Atwood (16,481 votes) Concept: Survivors of a human made plague fight off each other and genetically engineered creatures. Sub-genre: Dystopian Market: Adult Series: Yes, this is the third book in a trilogy Debut novel: No Nationality of Author: Canadian. 2. Dust...