It’s almost embarrassing for me to admit this: Until a month ago, I had never read any of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. If you find yourself in a similar situation, go to your nearest bookstore, Amazon, even your local library — and find one of Mr. Child’s gritty, funny (yeah, sort of funny) novels featuring Jack Reacher.

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Here’s a little trivia quiz for those of you who read and/or write science fiction: What now-famous science fiction writer portrayed something similar to today’s TASER guns in a 1949 novel? (The same writer, in the 1930s, more or less invented and described the concept of what became modern “water beds.”)

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