Scott Graham

I will admit up front that I have not read any Brandon Sanderson prior to this short story amd novella collection. That being said, I found Tailored Realities to be an entirely engaging collection of scence fiction based narratives with some fantasy injected where appropriate. After all, doesn’t every science fiction tale involve a little fantasy to get it going?

The strongest selections are the long novellas that bookend the collection, although Snapshot, the first, does seem a bit derivative of the Dennis Lahane novel Shutter Island. But it uses a different modality in creating the world and ends with an Inception-esque result. The last, longer novella, Moment Zero, looks at a wormhole created apocalypse, multi-universe theory, and a little fantasy planted in the form of the true menace. It was compelling and I found it to be the strongest piece in the collection. All the remaining stories are varying levels of good, but that undersells some of them to refer to them as “good”. The world building ranges from adequate for the tale, to lush and full, generous for a short story or novella.

The postscript for each story is a welcome touch. Brandon Sanderson indulges the reader with the germ of the story and/or some information about its publication if it appeared elsewhere in the past.

I wholeheartedly recommend the volume to any fan of imaginative literature and look forward to dipping my second toe into other Sanderson worlds. I think I have the forst volume of The Stormlight Archive in my stacks somewhere. Wish me luck…

This anthology of popular Christian belief topics examines the Biblical source texts for support. As you would guess from the title of the book, the author, popular social media scholar of ancient Hebrew and Christian texts Dan McClellan, finds shaky evidence for some of the beliefs, but argues against God inspired sources for such as the virgin birth, the condemnation of abortion and homosexuality, Satan as God’s enemy, and Hell as the place of eternal punishment. If this was already your bag*, there isn’t much new here, but the running citations are an invaluable reference. The book loses a point for its dense prose, and lack of almost any definitive answers. Mr. McClellan provides a verdict for each questionable belief, but the justification is rarely absolutely convincing. Believers will walk away believing and doubters will leave the exercise continuing to doubt.

*with apologies to Mike Myers as Austin Powers