Category: Books
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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…
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Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 3)
We're about two-thirds of the way through the book. Did the editors front-load the good stuff, or save the best for a boffo finish? Let's find out. Asylum, by A.E. Van Vogt: Space vampires! One of the first discussions of what SETI researchers call the "Zoo hypothesis!" Identity games worthy of Philip K. Dick! Unconvincing…
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Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 2)
This post continues my look at the ground-breaking 1946 anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond Healy and John McComas. It's probably going to take at least four entries to cover the whole book. Last time I got through the first seven stories, and so far the collection has been…
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Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 1)
American literature doesn't have an official "Canon." There's no equivalent of the Academie Francaise to decide what is and what is not Literature with a capital L. But we do have some approximations: high-school or first-year college course reading lists, better-late-than-never Pulitzers, adaptations in Classics Illustrated Comics or Oscar-bait films . . . And of…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 8 (whew!)
Having finished the story several chapters earlier, Mr. Baum piles anticlimax on anticlimax by cutting away from the adventurers in the Nome Kingdom to the magical fairyland of Oz, where Ozma has been watching the whole thing on her Magic Picture. I have to say Ozma is a little uncomfortably voyeuristic here. It's one thing…
The Cambias Digression 