Category: Books
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Godel Operation Minus Two
Counting down now to launch. One early promotional effort: my guest article at the 'blog My Book, The Movie — in which I discuss who would be best to play the characters in The Godel Operation if it ever makes it to the screen. You can read it here. Writing that piece was surprisingly difficult.…
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Publishers Weekly Reviews Godel Operation
The first reviews of The Godel Operation are starting to trickle in as the release date approaches. Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say. Sounds like their reviewer enjoyed it. I hope everyone else does, too. The Godel Operation James L. Cambias. Baen, $16 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-982125-56-1 With this freewheeling story of an…
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Godel Operation Minus 10
Ten days from now is the official publication date of The Godel Operation. The clocks are running, the pumps are powering up, and the gantry has been rolled back. Be sure to get a copy because this launch is going to be spectacular. If you want to read more about The Godel Operation, see my…
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Inception Et Cetera
I recently saw the film Inception for the first time — I'm not sure why I didn't watch it when it came out, but I didn't. It's a great movie, and it helped me to understand a key difference between science fiction films and novels. A perennial gripe about SF in movies is that films…
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Look What’s Here!
I was sitting at home minding my own business on Thursday when the dog started barking because a delivery truck was coming up our driveway. They're common enough nowadays, but this truck had come to deliver something I wasn't expecting for a couple of weeks yet: the first copies of my new novel The Godel…
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Appendix JLC
Everyone who owned a copy of the old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide knows about the legendary "Appendix N," in which Gary Gygax listed all the fictional influences on D&D. In recent years some younger gamers have rediscovered that list, leading to works like Jeffro Johnson's book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons…
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The Songs of Distant Earth and the Roots of Inspiration
For a long time I've enjoyed the music of Mike Oldfield — especially his longer, more complex works. Until a few years ago his stuff wasn't easy for me to get my hands on. Back when record shops existed, they didn't often carry his records. But with the rise of online music he's a lot…
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Notes on The Lost Road
I recently acquired a copy of The Lost Road, an unfinished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited and extensively annotated by his son Christopher Tolkien. The origin of the work is very interesting: according to Tolkien's own account, it grew out of a conversation he had with his close friend C.S. Lewis. "Tollers," Lewis told him,…
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The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the Second
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the exciting discovery in Oxford's Bodleian Library of unpublished notes and drafts by the 18th Century explorer and naturalist Dr. Lemuel Gulliver. That first post included Gulliver's discussion of how the difference in scale affected the architecture and habits of the Lilliputians. This excerpt is concerned with…
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The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the First
Historians and students of literature were tremendously excited by the recent announcement by Oxford University that several volumes of unpublished notes by Lemuel Gulliver had been found in the Bodleian Library. Dr. Gulliver was a little-known 18th-century explorer, the first European to visit Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and other lands of the Pacific. His accounts of…
The Cambias Digression 