Blog Archives

Last time, I sung the praises of  Warship, a novel about people fighting aliens while tensely staring at computer panels onboard a warship. Today, I move on to the next two books in the trilogy to see if the author can keep us on the edge of our seat while those characters stare tensely at […]

This book is the talk of the town right now, but before we get into it I’d like to clear one thing up. The narrative that’s emerged this past week is of a plucky writer running afoul of an editor just because of a blatantly pro-life message in the opening chapter. Now, a lot of people commenting on this […]

The internet has given us new venues for fiction. The publishers had turned their back on the genre but fans brought it back in a new electronic form. I can remember some early sites in the late 1990s. One had the name of “Temple of the Scarlet Salamander” or something like that. In the 00s, […]

Formula for Conquest by James R. Adams appeared in the Fall 1945 issue of Planet Stories. James R. Adams is not very good at writing dialogue.  By the third page, narrator Tod Mulhane had thrice referred to himself as a “soldier of fortune”, and when he gave his background speech that spent a paragraph more […]

I’m sure we all know that being a reader means you have piles of books sitting around that you’ve been meaning to get to. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that you stop getting books. The pile just keeps getting bigger, and you, being the avid reader, just keep grabbing more books.  Why am I talking […]

Current fantasy by the big publishers can be roughly divided into either estrogen or scatology. Estrogen is female oriented and about getting in touch with your feelings.  See Carries Vaugn’s “Strife Lingers in Memory” for a prime example. Scatology is the obsession with body fluids and functions with the idea that it is “keeping it […]

The Bubble Dwellers by Ross Rocklynne appeared in the Fall 1945 issue of Planet Stories and was one of two ‘novels’ in this issue. The Bubble Dwellers was definitely one of those fantastic stories that makes the pulps worth checking out.  An evil hypnotist, strange humanoids with a mystic connection to their once glorious past, […]

I’ve read a lot of science fiction in my life, and there tend to be some words I love hearing to describe a book I’m about to pick up. (“Space opera” ranks high among them.) On the other hand, there are also some words I dread hearing attached to a scifi novel. Words that, really, […]

Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World in 1990 was the beginning of the era of the big, fat fantasy. That era continues to the present with George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which may or may not ever be finished (like Jordan). The term “epic fantasy” is sometimes used for […]