Category: Books
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Retro-Review: The 8th Annual of Year’s Best SF (Part 4)
We're on the final stretch now in our read-through of Judith Merril's 8th Annual of the Year's Best SF, covering stories published in 1962. The 26th story in the collection is Zenna Henderson's "Subcommittee," about the budding friendship between a human child and a young alien while the adults are conducting a tense peace conference.…
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Retro-Review: The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best SF (Part 3)
Picking up where we left off last time, at the halfway mark. "MS. Found in a Bus" by Russell Baker, is a bit of alleged political humor from the New York Times. Baker was a Times columnist from 1962 to 1998. This very short piece is (I think) a satire of espionage thrillers and science…
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Retro-Review: The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best SF (Part 2)
Picking up where we left off, we reach a milestone: the first story in this anthology — published, let us recall, at the height of the Space Race in 1963 — which actually takes place in outer space. Poul Anderson's "Kings Who Die" is an odd blending of swashbuckling space opera action, Cold War political…
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Retro-Review: The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best SF
I picked up a copy of The 8th Annual of the Year's Best SF in a used bookstore a couple of years ago, and recently re-read it. It was published in 1963, so the stories represent the best of 1962 — at least in the opinion of Judith Merril, the editor. It contains twenty-eight stories,…
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An Ancient Dessert
In the course of a recent bookstore raid I got a copy of Arcana Mundi by Georg Luck. The bulk of it is a compilation of writings by classical authors on occult topics. While reading it I stumbled across a passage translated from Homer, describing how the enchantress Circe turned Odysseus's men into swine. To…
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MONSTERS ARE LIVE!
I've got a second ebook out for Amazon Kindle: Monster Island Tales! It collects two of my short stories, "Return to Skull Island" and "The Dinosaur Train." Both of them are gonzo pop-culture alternate history stories orbiting around the idea of a lost island in the East Indies where monsters and dinosaurs roam. The original…
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Island of Lost Games: Dream Park
One could write a whole series of blog posts on the theme of "unlikely licensed roleplaying games," and somewhere near the top of that list (but below GURPS Planet Krishna) you would undoubtedly find Mike Pondsmith's Dream Park: The Roleplaying Game, from R. Talsorian Games. The 1981 novel Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven…
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Book Review: Gravity’s Rainbow
For years people have been recommending Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. So, when I saw a copy on sale at the bookstore a few months ago, I decided to pick it up and see what all the fuss is about. I was prepared to like this book a lot. It's about a bunch of…
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Book Review: Revenger
It's sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between a genius and a crackpot. Both can be geeky, eccentric, abrasive, or just plain annoying. There is, however, one foolproof "tell" for the crackpot: they don't share ideas. If someone comes up to me at a convention or a book signing and starts going on about…
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Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 4 and Conclusion)
At last we've come to the final stories in Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space. Time to wrap up and make a general assessment. By His Bootstraps, by Anson MacDonald/Robert Heinlein: This is a well-known story, but I hesitate to call it a classic. It has a lot in common with Heinlein's other…
The Cambias Digression 