Chernow does an exemplary job of capturing the personalities of his subjects: he brings to vivid life such individuals as Junius Spencer Morgan, George Peabody, and of course, John Pierpont Morgan himself. The account is full of little details that highlight that these people were human: Peabody’s vindictiveness and miserliness towards specific individuals while pursuing grand acts of philanthropy, the way that Junius Spencer Morgan had all his son Pierpont’s letters on political and economic conditions in America bound and set on his shelf, Pierpont’s attention to appropriate attire (a bowler in winter, a Panama hat in summer), and Jack’s retainers snipping Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s photos from Jack’s morning paper, in deference to his high blood pressure and hatred of Roosevelt.…

In The Lions of Al-Rassan, Kay crafts a fictional world inspired by al-Andalus and the Spanish Reconquista, one poised on the brink of its own reconquest. When we begin the novel, the Asharite (Kay’s Muslim analogues) Khalifate of Al-Rassan, which had conquered the lands once known as Esperaña from the Jaddites (Kay’s Christian analogues) three hundred years ago, has fallen and splintered into a patchwork of city-states ruled by petty kings.…

I have learned a lot about thinking about the future through reading (and to a much lesser degree writing) science fiction. Science fiction, particularly “hard science fiction”, is principally about extrapolating the future from current scientific knowledge. It cultivates in its practitioners an awareness of potential avenues for future development. To write good hard science fiction one must be aware of the state of current science, and the ways in which such science could be expressed in technologies and how such technologies might affect individuals and societies.…