His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.

It's an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.