Lucas Stoffel

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Book Review: The Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent, a thoroughly ordinary Englishman who was having a thoroughly terrible Thursday, escapes because his best friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — a sort of electronic encyclopedia for budget travelers. From that point on, absolutely nothing makes sense, and absolutely everything is hilarious.

Percival Everett retells Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, revealing the code-switching and survival behind every scene. Pulitzer winner. Five stars.

Dune is the book that every other science fiction book is either descending from or reacting against. Frank Herbert published it in 1965, and sixty years later it still feels like the most complete world anyone has ever built in a novel. Every detail — the ecology, the religion, the politics, the economics, the technology, the biology — connects to every other detail with a precision that borders on obsessive. This isn't worldbuilding. This is world-engineering.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books that gets classified as a children's novel because the protagonists are children, but Madeleine L'Engle was writing about the nature of evil, the structure of the universe, and the terrifying power of conformity, and she wasn't simplifying any of it. Meg Murry is thirteen, angry, brilliant at math, and terrible at fitting in. Her father, a physicist, has been missing for over a year. Her mother — also a scientist, also beautiful, whi