Blog Archives

The Expanse didn’t initially thrill me, although it’s hard to remember that now, six books later. Leviathan Wakes— the series first book– didn’t really impress me until about a two-thirds of the way through. The first two-thirds followed a boring character (Holden) in an interesting plot arc, and an interesting character (Miller) in a boring […]

An annoyance of mine are illustrations of stupid weapons, generally for book covers. I enjoy reading history. I enjoy reading fantasy fiction with pre-gunpowder settings. Over the years, I think most frequent readers of fantasy fiction read non-fiction works on weapons and tactics from the days of cold steel. The Osprey Men at Arms booklets […]

As we saw in part one, Japan’s rich literary history had prepared Japanese writers for the influx of European style speculative fiction in the mid-1800s, and by the end of the century the flow of imported work had reached firehose rates as the literate public scrambled to learn as much as they could about the […]

Today is the 111th birthday of Robert E. Howard. Born in Peaster, Texas and lived in Cross Plains for his adult life. He died too young at age 30. There are three transformational writers for fantasy fiction of the 20th Century: Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Almost all fantasy […]

Short Reviews will return next week with George Antonio Wetter’s “Too Smart to Die”. I backed the Starship Grifters Universe Kickstarter for a signed copy of Starship Grifters and some Big Sheep drink koozies on the strength of Robert Kroese’s shitposting alone. Seriously, if you’re not following that guy on Twitter, you’re missing out. Starship […]

These days, no-one really questions Japanese influence on modern science fiction – from the dark Orientalist fantasies of Japanese corporatism as a symbol of oppression in cyberpunk near futures, through Japanese industry’s place as a signal for “high tech”[1], and on through the ongoing anime and manga boom Japan seems almost omnipresent in modern science […]

As I think I’ve mentioned before, the miracle that is the Overdrive app and library audiobooks has let me be highly indiscriminate in terms of what I’m listening to at work. All caution essentially goes out the window, and unless I’ve got something on my waitlist available, I’ve made a habit of just picking up […]

I think I’m going to do a series on the Disney Renaissance. The logical starting point would be its beginning – which is semi-officially “The Little Mermaid”, but has seeds being laid as early as the underappreciated “The Great Mouse Detective” – but I had a lot of this written already. So, we start with “Hunchback”. […]

The Hundred Worlds have withstood invasion by the relentless Hok for decades. The human worlds are strong, but the Hok have the resources of a thousand planets behind them, and their fleets attack in endless waves. The long war has transformed the Hundred Worlds into heavily fortified star systems. Their economies are geared for military […]