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sSENSOR SWEEP: Prescriptive Judgements, Prehistoric Ignorance, Cultural Pressures, and Final Apocalypse
Wednesday , 30, March 2016 Sensor Sweep Leave a commentGames (Grant Dalgliesh) The Original Star Wars — “In 1977, Columbia Games, then known as Gamma Two Games, published a strategy game called ‘Starwars’. This game had no connection to the movie Starwars, but was a simple space strategy game for 2-4 players that involved exploration and conquest of six star systems. The game was published […]
Conflict Games’ interstellar conquest game Imperium has gone through many iterations and revisions, including retroactively being incorporated into Traveller by becoming its default setting. The 1977 1st edition I have doesn’t come with the various supplemental setting materials but merely a concise explanation that the year is 2113 and a frontier province of an ancient […]
JD Cowen at the Wasteland and Sky blog has been reviewing Cirsova magazine in a series of blog posts (here, here, and here.) Here’s his take on my retrospective that was included there: The last thing to talk about is the essay by Jeffro Johnson on the novel, Toyman, by E.C. Tubb, and comparing the rules […]
Guest Post by Misha Burnett: What Entropy Means To Me by George Alec Effinger
Monday , 28, March 2016 Appendix X 1 CommentPlanet Of Weirdness: George Alec Effinger’s What Entropy Means To Me Lacking the ox-stunning heft of, say, VALIS or Gravity’s Rainbow, George Alec Effinger’s What Entopy Means To Me, originally published in 1972, nonetheless stands as a giant of what might be termed the Literature of the Uncertain. It’s a difficult work to describe without […]
Military science fiction coalesced as a distinct form of fiction in the 1970s. Gordon R. Dickson showed the way with this “Dorsai” stories in Analog in the 1960s. Jerry Pournelle’s “CoDominion” stories in Analog and David Drake’s “Hammer’s Slammers” stories in Galaxy in the 1970s solidified a new genre. The first military science fiction anthology […]
Short Reviews – The Spider Men of Gharr by Wilbur Scott Peacock
Friday , 25, March 2016 Uncategorized 6 CommentsThe Spider Men of Gharr by Wilbur Scott Peacock was the featured cover piece for the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories. The Spider Men of Gharr is one of those pesky little editor-written stories that sometimes find themselves published in whatever magazine the author is an editor for. Fortunately, Wilbur Peacock’s solid taste in […]
WELCOME TO HELL: Abandoning Hope in SF Settings
Friday , 25, March 2016 Fiction, Uncategorized 4 CommentsHell is a nice place to visit. You just wouldn’t want to live there. At least, it sure seems like that in science fiction. Now, in fantasy, the concept of Hell, as a setting, can be florid or grey, medieval or modern, horrific or dull, but, in general, it tends to be a setting that […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Liberty or Death, Pendragon, Falling Sky, and BGG’s Wargame of the Year
Wednesday , 23, March 2016 Wargames 2 CommentsThere is a lot of activity on the COIN front right now. Liberty or Death: The American Insurrection is easily among the hottest new games to hit PrezCon this year. GMT not only sold out in less than hour there, but more than one gamer took an hour or so to work through the example […]
In my last post on Musket & Pike, I talked about the mechanics and play. Now, I’d like to take a look at the scenarios. While it offers an incredibly fun and easy to pick up gaming experience, does it offer much as a historical wargaming simulation? Ultimately, no. My dad and I had the […]
SUPERVERSIVE: Nick Cole On Blacklisting and Ctrl-Alt-Revolt!
Tuesday , 22, March 2016 Superversive 4 CommentsThe Superversive crew is back… and this time they’ve got Ctrl-Alt-Revolt author Nick Cole with them! This show is jam packed! Listen to the whole thing and you will… Find out what part of his novel Nick suspected would be the most problematic– and the context that surrounded his editor’s outrage. Gain SFF enlightenment by […]
This is the final installment of a 5 part series about the Robotech novels. Click here for parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. I’m departing a bit from talking about books here, and I’m going to talk about some TV shows and films today. I waffled a bit on doing this originally, but there was […]
Role-players are a tough crowd. If you make a strongly worded claim about the medium, someone will surely point out that it’s a-okay for other tables to do things differently with just as good results… for them. If you post a negative review of a gaming product, someone will comment with how it was the […]