Rosewater Press

           No book has ever made me feel so strongly like I was in a gas station at two in the morning. I actually did read parts of this book at a gas station the first time around, and the novel opens in a gas station, so there’s precedent. But the feeling persisted long past leaving the station; also, somebody on Tumblr made the same observation years back. It’s some memetic property inherent to the book itself, I think. If you handed this book to a caveman he would spontaneously comprehend the entire history of oil. So am I rereading this book in 2026 because I just wrote an essay about the parts of my life I spent hanging out in gas stations? No, ah… unfortunately this book is back in my head for more severe reasons. It was published in 2003, written as the horrors of 9/11 and the War on Terror unfolded. Lawrence Miles’ vision of a future War between a staid superpower and a faceless Enemy was, all of a sudden, not science fiction. Appropriately, he...

I know, I know. I said literally one Little Aimless Library ago that I wasn't gonna cover serialized comics, and then I come back with a standard magazine-sized floppy with “issue one” right on the cover. This sucker isn't a fragment of an ongoing story, though: it's an anthology comic that ran for all of one issue. It ran me four bucks and costs only a little more online, so it's not like I'm asking much of anyone I might inspire to seek it out. All my qualms about comics are void in this case. And how could I not talk about something with this cover art? Jesus Christ, it's a thing of beauty. Artist and co-editor Pat Boyette didn't have to go half this hard; remember, this is issue one of an unproven comic in an unpopular genre from a publisher who seem to have barely existed. There are plenty of reasons to wish industrial society had never progressed past its sunny optimism phase, and for me art like this is a big one. I miss when space felt like our glor...