Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In Toronto, a few hundred protestors took to the streets. I can remember when it was thousands. Four years after the start of the war, the resistance, unlike the conflict, is dead. It's important to ask why.

Perhaps without intending to, "Loyal to the Sky" by Marisa Handler asks that question. It is the globe-spanning memoir of an activist, starting in apartheid South Africa, where she grew up, moving through Israel, Asia and South America, finally winding up in the United States.

She finds much common ground and many differences between these varied cultures. Reading it, I was often struck by the depressing commonality of our vices. It is our virtues that make us different and, ironically, unite us in a deeper form.

"Loyal to the Sky" is both personal odyssey and adventure story. Its structure actually reminded me of the monomyth that Joseph Campbell described as "the hero's journey". This book could be read and enjoyed for its interesting environs, its likeable writer, the political insight it offers or its striking and elegant prose.

There's a type of science fiction that is philosophical, examines human relationships to technology or couches social problems in metaphor and thought experiments. And then there's sci-fi. "Section K" by Toronto's Timothy Carter is sci-fi.

In it you'll find ghosts, cults, invading aliens and time travel. There's alcoholic cops, gun-crazed Americans, wacky old ladies and plenty of sex and violence. Did I mention that it's a comedy?

It's about the RCMP's Section K. (Think of the X-Files and you'll start to get the idea.) No one takes Section K seriously, least of all the misfits who have been forced to work there. But then a cult starts stamping 666 on people. Armageddon is imminent and aliens, who have been drastically misinformed about Section K's importance and competence, make contact. Our heroes then stagger, seduce and fight their way to the story's conclusion.

I was surprised when I saw Cory Doctorow speak about Digital Rights Management at Ad Astra. He's a man with a lot of passion, humour and smarts. The smarts and humour, I knew about. It was the passion that surprised me.

When he was introduced as someone who wanted to "keep an eye on the DRM" he said it was more like he wanted to destroy it. And through his speech and the panel he was on, he did just that. It was a four-pronged approach. He attacked the philosophy of intellectual property, the economics of it, the legal ramifications and the technical issues.

I should have known that I was in trouble in December. That's when I bought a Star Trek calendar. Next thing I knew, I'd lost my girlfriend, quit drinking and got a bad haircut. But this weekend made it official. I went to a science fiction convention. I am no longer the cool sort of geek. I am the geek that those geeks laugh at. A common nerd.

There's a lot of cliches in book reviews. People have tossed around terms like "major accomplishment" and "laugh out loud funny" until they've become meaningless. So it is with some trepidation that I write that Minster's Faust's "From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain" is a major accomplishment that is laugh out loud funny.

This is the most revolutionary work of SF since William Gibson's "Neuromancer". Faust has invented a whole new genre of writing and rendered it in some of best prose in any genre. He's basically given birth to the future. And it's one good looking baby.

Ostensibly, "From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain" is a self-help book for superheroes written by their psychiatrist. But once you look beyond the humor you find a novel about America and September 11, an actual self-help book that works on the political and personal level, and a careful examination of our cultural myths and gods. It's funny, insightful and very serious.

Neil Smith's "Bang Crunch" is a surprising and strange book of short stories on the themes of love, absence and, most often, the confusion between what we feel and what we think we're supposed to feel. The suspense in his stories is created by this confusion, just as much of pleasure of reading them comes from his prose.

There were times in "Bang Crunch" when I was amazed by Smith's poetic eloquence. But this sort of writing is not without its perils, and there are times when he becomes too clever. An example would be in the title story, written in the second person, where he briefly discusses the narrator making the choice to write in second person. This added a gimmick as opposed to depth in an otherwise fine tale.