Category: Books
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Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 3
Our Heroes continue along the road, which they now know to be the Road to Oz. (The reader knew that from the book title.) The landscape is pleasant — if you haven't noticed, this journey is considerably less perilous than Dorothy's past exploits. The travelers have spent every night in bed, and aside from involuntary…
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Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 2
Dorothy and Company arrive at a very odd village. It's inhabited entirely by anthropomorphic foxes. The fox-people are initially suspicious of the newcomers, but the power of the Love Magnet quickly turns that to friendship. Our heroes are conveyed to the throne room of King Renard IV, the ruler of the foxes, known to his…
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Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 1
The Road to Oz is the fifth of L. Frank Baum's immortal Oz series, published in 1909. Like its predecessor Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, it follows Dorothy on another difficult journey to Oz with a group of entertaining companions. Sure, by this point it's a formula, but it's a winning formula and Road…
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How I Did It #7: “See My King All Dressed In Red”
This was the first story I wrote for an anthology, as opposed to a magazine, and it's also the only story of mine (so far) which has come true. "See My King . . . " was written for the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, edited by F. Brett Cox and Andy…
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Fantasies of Freedom
I've been thinking about stories lately (actually, I always think about stories), and something has occurred to me. In many stories — especially in genres like science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers — one of the attractions is that the protagonists are more free than the reader. Sure, they may be faced by evil overlords or…
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Lazy Thinking
This past weekend I was a guest at the storm-wracked PiCon convention in Enfield, Connecticut. I had a good time, and I hope others were entertained by my presence. I'll be going back next year if they'll have me. So now I'm going to be exceedingly ungracious. At the various panels I attended, I noticed…
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Genre and Plot
Diane and I went to see Super 8 this past Friday, as one of our mostly-weekly date nights. She was really excited about it — I was less so, but only because I've been cruelly disappointed by movies too many times in the past decade. (Capsule review: The Goonies Meet Cloverfield. Four out of five…
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Soaps Vs. Self-Contained Episodes
I recently joined Brian Rogers and Tom Ladegard to playtest the character creation system for the Smallville roleplaying game. It was an interesting experience. Smallville (the game) is of course based on the TV series Smallville, about the teen years of one Clark Kent and his pals in a small Kansas town, including the angsty…
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Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 2
Science Fictional Worlds I'd Like to Live In This turned out to be a much more difficult list than the previous one. The reason is pretty simple: settings that are interesting to read about are often horrible places to actually live in. I don't actually want to share my neighborhood with alien conquerers, reality-devouring cosmic…
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Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 1
I've been working on revisions for Star HERO lately, and my editor, the brilliant Steve Long, asked me to contribute lists of my favorite SF films, short stories, and novels for the bibliography. As I made up my lists it struck me that a lot of stories take place in settings which aren't very good…
The Cambias Digression 