Welcome to the New Russia, built from the agrarian landscape of the time of the Tsars by the miracle metal groznium!  It has made all things possible, from the robotic lamps that light our street to the robots that undertake the day-to-day work of our cities, and even the miraculous Class III robots that are our dearest companions.  Such is the world of Android Karenina, the latest of the Quirk Classics mash-ups.  This time, the aristocracy of Leo Tolstoy’s 1800’s Russia is married to rayguns, aliens, robots, and conspiracies, to wonderful effect!  I waited for a long time for this book, I’ve been excited since the cover was released, and I’m glad to see I didn’t get my hopes up for nothing!

Ben H. Winters seamlessly blends elements of steampunk and science fiction, gadgets, ray guns, aliens, androids, etc., with the realism of Tolstoy.  After the first few paragraphs, you stop marveling at the technology and simply accept it, as it melds seamlessly into the world of Russia’s leisurely aristocracy.  The only difference is that, instead of the serfs from the original novel, there are machines that do all the work.  It’s a credit to Tolstoy’s characters that their neuroses, idleness, moral ambiguity, and personalities work, no matter how the setting might be tweaked or manipulated by outside forces, and it’s a credit to Ben H. Winters that his additions work with and enhance Tolstoy’s underlying themes, rather than detract from them.

This is another great book from Quirk, gang.  If you’d like to get your hands on some steampunky goodness combined with the worries and neuroses of the Russian aristocracy in the time of the Tsars, head over to Quirk Books’ forum where there’s an Android Karenina prize pack giveaway.  All you have to do is leave them a note here, telling them where you saw the book review and you just might win a gift bag full of literary goodness.  If you’re not one of 25 lucky winners, you can preorder it at Amazon for $7.77 (in legitimate book form or on the Kindle!)

Tags: Android Karenina, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, Ben H. Winters, contests, free stuff, book reviews, Quirk Books, literary mash-ups, androids, steampunk, Quirk Classics, literature

It’s one of the 90’s most enduring pop culture phenomenon.  It spawned a whole miniature empire of spin-offs and remakes, made Tori Spelling into a household name, carried the Fox Network’s non-animated programming banner, and somehow remains an incredibly popular show to this very day.  It’s Beverly Hills 90210, and today is officially 90210 Day [...]

Samsung has decided to take its competition with Apple right into Apple’s living room.  When Apple unveiled the iPad, it stormed into the tablet computer market and shook things up, mostly by making people actually pay attention to tablet computers.  However, while the iPad is basically two iPhones glued together but without the ability to [...]

Todd Magill, a struggling actor and wannabe writer and/or editor, wasn’t having much luck in the real world.  After his graduation with an English degree from Fordham University, he went through the same problems most former English majors go through as he struggled to find a real-world application for his basically useless English skills.  Unfortunately [...]

Those British sure do love their tea.  Anywhere they are, when it’s tea time, then it’s time to have a nice hot cup of tea, with the emphasis being on hot.  With any hot beverage, you have to be careful because you might burn yourself.  That’s exactly what happened on a Ryanair flight, when a [...]

James Jay Lee, the protestor seen above, has had a long history of having a grudge against The Discovery Channel.  The network, Lee believed, wasn’t doing its part in promoting environmentalism.  Specificially, James Jay Lee’s extreme brand of environmentalism, zero population growth, which says that humans are a scourge on the earth and that people [...]

Once upon a time, Facebook was the elite social networking website.  Anyone could hop onto MySpace, but only people enrolled in certain colleges could get on Facebook.  These days, any fool with an email address can be on Facebook, and that, along with a lot of other issues involving the company’s privacy policies and heavy-handed [...]

When Taylor Lautner needed a new trailer to use as a dressing room during the making of the latest installment of the Twilight series, he turned to custom RV dealer Brent McMahon’s shop, McMahon’s RV in Irvine, California.  When the $300,000 RV didn’t show up on time or in the promised condition, Lautner’s people took [...]