Category: Books
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 7
When last we left Our Heroes, the villainous Nome King had just transformed the Shaggy Man into a dove, transformed the Rose Princess Ozga into a fiddle (not that anyone really cares), chained up Quox the dragon, and was preparing to force Polychrome to marry him and stay in the underground kingdom forever! How will…
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Retro-Review: Rogue Moon
Imagine there was a novel which combined James Patrick Kelly's amazing short story "Think Like a Dinosaur" with Alastair Reynolds's brilliant novella Diamond Dogs. Imagine that novel was written in 1960 by a respected and influential science fiction author, editor, critic, and teacher with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards to his credit. Now imagine how…
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Going LIVE!
I've finally dipped a toe into the waters of independent e-publishing. My e-chapbook "Outlaws and Aliens" is now live on Amazon! It's an affordably-priced little ebook containing two of my short stories — "The Alien Abduction" and "Object Three." The cover art is by Rob Caswell. You can buy it here. Makes a great way to…
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Kitchen Report: Timballo
The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, is a landmark of Italian literature. There are many reasons to read it, but among others it contains some of the great dinner scenes in modern fiction. The meal in Chapter 2 begins with "monumental dishes of macaroni." But this isn't just a pile of pasta, oh no. Di…
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Inoculating Against Woo
A while back I posted a little joke about why Marty McFly's father George, in the movie Back to the Future, is the worst science fiction writer ever. One of my complaints was that George couldn't bring himself to publish his stories until a midnight encounter with a fake "spaceman" convinced him it was all…
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Nostalgie Du Geek: Hearing the Call
In a couple of earlier posts I've described my reaction to my first two role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller. Those two were followed in the marketplace by a whole wave of other games in a variety of genres: Tunnels & Trolls, Universe from SPI, Gamma World, Chivalry & Sorcery, Metamorphosis Alpha, RuneQuest, Villains…
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Game Mechanics (Part 2): Why They Don’t Matter
In my last post on the subject, I wrote about how important it is for game mechanics to replicate the reality of whatever the game is about. And then I left on a cliffhanger by saying that isn't actually true. It's not true because games depend on the players. A game is not a novel or…
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Sandbox or Quest? Yes.
The style of a game campaign mirrors the fictional genres it is based on. The original Dungeons & Dragons was inspired by two strands of fantasy. The first was the fantasy adventures of Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Fritz Leiber — tales of roguish wanderers more or less stumbling across situations…
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Congratulations Dragon Award Winners!
For several years now I've been telling everyone who'll listen that the major awards for science fiction and fantasy were in danger of becoming too obscure. The Nebulas are selected by the membership of SFWA, but don't get much publicity because (sadly) the organization isn't well-known outside the fraternity of SF professionals. The Hugo Award…
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Greetings, Fellow Cyborgs!
I write science fiction, and one enduring trope of science fiction is the idea of combining humans and machines — "cyborgs," to use the term popularized in the 1960s. The notion is far older, going back to Neil R. Jones's "Professor Jameson" stories, if not to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man That Was Used Up."…
The Cambias Digression 