At Webomator, Bradley W. Schenck reviews James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship in context of the recent Locus roundtable conversation between Morrow and Daryl Gregory, author of Afterparty and We Are All Completely Fine.

I’m very fond of Henry Kuttner’s humorous stories. The Madonna and the Starship is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a modern work in the vein of Kuttner’s Gallegher or Hogben stories: Morrow gives us bizarre aliens with bizarre intentions, and frenzied protagonists who have to find a way to deal with them. The book is straight out of Kuttner’s era, too, since it’s set in the live television studios of the 1950′s. It is about the most fun you can have in a philosophical novel, with or without big blue lobsters.

And that’s really what it is: a story about warring philosophies. If “warring” sounds like an exaggeration, I have two words for you: death rays.

Read the rest of Schenck’s article (which also includes a review of Afterparty) at Webomator.

For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.