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s“Dunk barely knew these new players at all. If it weren’t for the fact that their names were stenciled across the backs of their green and gold armour, he didn’t think he’d have been able to pick them out from each other in the game. Still, they were on his team, and he expected them […]
RETROSPECTIVE: Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp
Monday , 9, February 2015 Appendix N 18 CommentsIt’s a perfectly reasonable impulse to want to have your own favorite volumes of iconic fantasy literature retroactively included in the Appendix N book list. Indeed, it was not surprising to see a few glaring omissions addressed in the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons.¹ That said, I’m generally flabbergasted when the discussion turns towards who […]
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology
Sunday , 8, February 2015 Book Review, Fiction, Uncategorized 7 CommentsA couple of years back, if you searched for Tachyon Publications’ The Secret History of Fantasy on Google Books, this is what would come up: “Tired of the same old fantasy? Here are nineteen much-needed antidotes to cliched tales of swords and sorcery. Fantasy is back, and it’s better than ever!” The lure of […]
The Word Made Flesh: On the Nature of Book-To-Film Adaptations (Part 1 – Literary Infidels)
Friday , 6, February 2015 Uncategorized 6 CommentsIn the previous post, we looked at a few different book-to-film adaptations and answered the age-old question: which was better, the film or the book? One of the common criteria for evaluating the success or failure of a film adaptation is its fidelity to the source material. The truth is that fidelity, whether in the […]
Kickstarters need videos, and in the particular case of my Kickstarter, I’m in an unusual position: I’ve got a functioning piece of software that I can show features from. Rather than be a talking head staring into a webcamera and feeling like a dork, I’ve used a program called Screencast-O-Matic to record a video of […]
Lord Dunsany wrote a story about the devil and the game of cricket, so science fiction and sports go way back. In fact, general (non-science fiction) sports fiction – at least as it is known in America – has its roots in the exotic. In the 1890s, modern organized sport was exclusive to preparatory schools […]
On the Table: Car Wars Fourth Edition, 2nd Printing
Monday , 2, February 2015 Tabletop Games 8 CommentsMy review of the latest iteration of the Car Wars franchise was billed as being EPICALLY COMPREHENSIVE over on the Castalia House Twitter feed, but it was lacking something absolutely critical: an account of what it’s like to play the game just with what’s included in the new box set. Hopefully this post will rectify this […]
If you go to Tachyon Publications website, this blurb is at the web page for The Secret History of Fantasy: Fantasy is more than just sword-and-sorcery novels of epic adventures. Here are innovative tales where mythology, fairy tales, and archetypes are re-imagined into a new style of storytelling. This header is present at the Tachyon […]
I was discussing Blue SF with a Worldcon gentleman who is fairly neutral as such things go, and he mentioned that it might be useful if there was a list of what we Blue aficionados consider the top 10 Blue SF/F novels of the last 15 years. I can think of a few contenders, I […]