Blog Archives
sThe other night I saw Lt. Col. Ralph Peters on one of the cable evening opinion shows talking about one thousand members of ISIS stopping cold 30,000 Iraqi Army, Shiite militia, and Iranian Revolutionary Guards at Tikrit. I have been reading Ralph Peters for 22 years when I bought the paperback edition of War in […]
I have mentioned in past book reviews that I have read three stories by Joe Abercrombie. None of which made me stand up and take notice. Abercrombie is one of the fairly new writers of fantasy fiction to emerge in the past decade. I had been hearing varying opinions for the past six or so […]
REVIEW: Other Heads & Other Tales by Arland Andrews, Sr.
Friday , 20, March 2015 Book Review Leave a commentI expected that the founder of SIGMA, the science fiction think tank, would incorporate a few interesting ideas into his fiction, but I didn’t anticipate that he’d be so funny. When a writer can make a pro-lifer chuckle about abortion and murder (but I repeat myself), you know he’s got a wicked, off-the-wall sense of […]
For St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to really read Fr. Andrew M. Greeley’s The Magic Cup. I tracked down a used copy of the paperback about ten years ago, based on a friend’s comment on the book. I read the beginning, lost interest as I scanned through it and put it away. I pulled the […]
I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve read a novel in one sitting, and I can’t ever recall reading a short story collection without stopping along the way. There’s too many natural breaks for me to keep turning the pages. But Brad R. Torgersen’s Lights In The Deep captured my attention and held […]
An interesting anthology of sword and sorcery fiction is The Barbarian Swordsmen. This was a U.K. paperback from 1981 published by Star Books edited by Peter Haining under the pseudonym “Sean Richards.” Why the pseudonym? L. Sprague de Camp was the first to put together an anthology of sword and sorcery fiction with Swords and […]
REVIEW: War Before Civilization – The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley
Saturday , 7, March 2015 Book Review 6 CommentsI completely understand wanting to turn back the clock. Go back to simpler times. Return to Eden. Flee from the rat race of urban life and revert to a primitive, tribal “state of nature” — where we can be peaceful, wild and free — hunting the buffalos, but as bros, you know? In “War Before Civilization”, Lawrence Keeley not only dispels […]
Dangerous Women is the cross genre anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois that came out in between Warriors and Rogues. This is also the last of the Tor books before the editors moved over to Bantam. Hardback, 784 pages, twenty one stories, nine by men, twelve by women, $32.50, published in […]
Book Review: The Visualization of Quantitative Data
Wednesday , 25, February 2015 Book Review, Games, Tabletop Games, Wargames 2 CommentsREVIEW: The Visualization of Quantitative Data, 2nd Edition, Graphics Press, 2001 Edward R. Tufte, Author. People ask me, after I explain the layers of thought that went into the play aids I design, what kind of books I’d recommend. The first book is this one, by Edward R. Tufte. It concerns itself with the accurate display of statistical […]
Rogues is the latest of the George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois edited cross genre anthologies. Bantam Books is the publisher now instead of Tor. Hardcover, 806 pages, $30.00, twenty stories and an introduction by Martin. The cover is the same sort of minimalist style with the title in big letters as with Warriors. […]
A few years back, I was excited when I heard there was an anthology entitled Warriors edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. It came out in March 2010 from Tor, hardback, 736 pages, $27.99. In the introduction, George R. R. Martin wrote about his youth in New Jersey and buying paperback books […]
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 […]