Category: Books
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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A couple of weeks ago I posted about the exciting discovery in Oxford's Bodleian Library of unpublished notes and drafts by the 18th Century explorer and naturalist Dr.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…
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Post-PhilCon Report: Oceans of Space
Last weekend's Virtual PhilCon went very well, and gave me a couple of 'blog post ideas. This is the first. On Saturday the 21st, I moderated the panel on "The Oceans of Space." Moderating was easy because there was only one other panelist, the brilliant and charming Kelli Fitzpatrick. We had a pretty good audience,…
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Godel Operation Now Up at Amazon!
My first Tale of the Billion Worlds, The Godel Operation, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The official publication date is May 4 of 2021, but it's always a good idea to get at the head of the line. If you want a sneak preview of The Godel Operation, tune in to my reading…
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PhilCon 2020 Goes Virtual
This year's PhilCon — the venerable Philadelphia-era science fiction con now in its 84th year — is going to be all-online. On the plus side that means no New Jersey traffic and mall food; on the minus side it means no spontaneous conversations in the hotel lobby, no room parties, and no basic human contact.…
The Cambias Digression 