2. The Terror – Dan Simmons: Dan Simmon’s “The Terror” is to the Franklin Expedition what “Pan’s Labyrinth” is to Franco’s Spain. That is to say, the book is as much a mix of history, horror and fantasy as Del Toro’s film is, and achieves this pastiche with an equal level of success. The premise is simple; Simmons imagines the doomed expedition, trapped not only by the elements of the Arctic, but by something more elemental, a physical monstrosity which is killing the men off. I have likened it to John Carpenter’s The Thing, but with Kurt Russell in the role of Captain Francis Crozier of the H.M.S. Terror, a role Russell would be sufficiently aged enough to play at present. I’m not implying the “thing on the ice” is an alien. I’m not going to say anymore about the nature of the beast, and have betrayed no spoilers in revealing its presence in the book. The book’s jacket liner will tell you as much, and the first chapter makes several references to its presence and malevolent nature. I will warn you that you’ll need to read the whole book to find out exactly what “it” is, and that many might find the journey too long and arduous, although I’m of the opinion that this was Dan Simmon’s intention.

3. The Road – Cormac McCarthy: I avoided this book simply because of it’s popularity. I assumed anything as acclaimed as “The Road” must be garbage. I’m also pretty suspicious of books which get lumped in genres like science fiction but are written by mainstream writers. It’s just a personal bias. But this dystopic post-apocalyptic piece is my recommendation for all fathers out there who enjoy stories about the end of the world, and need to be reminded that there are portrayals of fathers in popular culture which aren’t “American Dad”,”Family Guy” or any number of deadbeat losers. That fathers can be heroes, and that, as McCarthy writes early in the book regarding his son, “If the boy wasn’t the word of God, then God had never spoken.” Poignant, powerful, and paternal speculative fiction.

Three Kickass Genre Books for Teenagers Who Refuse to be Condescended to by this Twilight Crap.

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is a brilliant extrapolation of our humanity-numbing reality-TV-obsessed culture and the way we allow ourselves to be ground down by our “leaders”; what I loved about this one was that the protagonist is not a brilliant beautiful revolutionary, but a normal teenage girl who’s just too stubborn to give up and stumbles across her strategy. This is the first in a series.

2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. This got my thirteen-year-old interested in tech and hacking, and the appendix full of resources was a happy bonus. Hey, she grew up under a Bush presidency – DHS has always been the enemy.

3. How To Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier. Less revolutionary, more just plain fun. Posits a world where everyone has their own fairy – the great hair fairy, the parking fairy, et cetera. And really looks at that concept and says “Y’know… this system could be abused.”

All three of these are teenage-girl-approved. Said teenage girl says “Enough with the vampire stalkers and Mary Sues, give me a *story*!”