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sThis book is terribly and embarrassingly flawed. It’s a shame since it’s otherwise full of great imagery delivered at a brisk tempo. Every chapter seems to have a new shade or tone that contrasts with the previous one, but it ultimately falls apart. I’m impressed that Zelazny could whip up something like this in a […]
Stuart Thaman is an author and German teacher for the Diocese of Covington in northern Kentucky. His debut novel, “Vatican Massacre”, reached #1 on Amazon’s religious fiction best-seller list. His second novel “The Goblin Wars Part One: Siege of Talonrend” is the beginning of a series of fantasy novels that follows Gravlox, a goblin foreman, […]
If you read a short story and you wish it was not a short story, has the author failed? The book’s Amazon page states that it’s just 18 pages long (estimated) and it’s priced at $1.19. This is just one quick science-fiction adventure of a hit man. As soon as he finishes this one last […]
“I’m interested in characters only as each is a locus for allowing certain sorts of sentences to be uttered–by the character or about the character.” – Samuel R. Delany One of the cruelties of the slow subsumation by megacorporations of the two former mom and pop titans in the comics genre is that popular superheroes–at […]
RETROSPECTIVE: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Monday , 4, August 2014 Appendix N 14 CommentsEven as a kid I always understood that there was something portentous about the Barsoom series paperbacks on the shelf at the library. Nevertheless, I’d always passed them over for books by authors that got more credit as being “grandmasters” of science fiction. I just couldn’t take Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books seriously at the time. That’s a […]
Twelve Tomorrows does an excellent, wide-ranging interview with SF grandmaster Gene Wolfe: Which writers have most influenced you? It’s a difficult question. My first editor, Damon Knight, asked me the same thing when I was just starting out, and I told him my chief influences were G. K. Chesterton and Marks’ [Standard] Handbook for [Mechanical] Engineers. […]
Scooter reviews Wool: Omnibus Edition 1-5 (Silo Series) by Hugh Howey Nearly every mainstream review of “Wool”, the Kindle Direct omnibus that made the traditional publishing industry do a double take, has described it as “sci-fi’s answer to Fifty Shades of Grey”. The comparison, thankfully, has little to do with the content and everything to […]