Sorry the blog’s been quiet! Not because nothing’s been going on… just that it’s been going on in other forums. One day I’ll get around to updating the bibliography and other pages, but in the meantime they’re like a peek back. Hard to believe the first posts are nearly 10 years old, moved here when I switched to WordPress all the way back in 2008!
RSS supporting our friends at Black Gate- Crisis and Mystery at the End of the Universe: The Divide Series by J. S. DewesThe Last Watch and The Exiled Fleet (Tor, April and August 2021). Cover art by Shutterstock As days get shorter and nights get longer, my reading ambitions begin to grow. Recently I’ve been on the hunt for a more substantial reading project, and I think I’ve found it in J.S. Dewes debut series The Divide. The opening book The Last Watch received plenty of br […]
- Fantasia 2021, Part XXXXIV: The Righteous“Katu” is a 16-minute short from Sweden’s Oskar Johansson. It opens, as a title card tells us, five years after humanity lost its language. More precisely, after mysterious visitors took language from us; human beings can now only mutter syllables unintelligible to each other (in a nice touch, the nonsense words spoken onscreen are ‘translated’ by subtitles […]
- Roleplaying in the World of The ExpanseI have heard it said that a number of the central ideas in James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse series were first developed for a tabletop RPG campaign (a series of adventures that usually tell a coherent story arc). I have been unable to validate this, but one find any number of chats positing the game they were playing. And the Foreword for The Expanse RPG does […]
- Fantasia 2021, Part XXXXIII: Stanleyville“Anita McNelson,” written and directed by Canadian Luke Whitmore, is a 15-minute suspense film about an elderly woman who finds hints that her husband is having an affair. It’s nicely shot, apparently a period film, and unfurls with minimal dialogue. It’s effective because it gets across not just the emotional situation of the characters but also a history t […]
- New Treasures: The Conductors by Nicole GloverThe Conductors (John Joseph Adams Books, March 2021). Cover art by Elizabeth Leggett. Click for bigger versions. As we near the end of 2021 (thank God!), I’m already starting to look back at the big fantasy releases and debuts of the year. One that surprised me was Nicole Glover’s The Conductors, the opening novel in her Murder & Magic series, which foll […]
- Fantasia 2021, Part XXXXII: Circo Animato 2021Each year Fantasia dedicates one of its short film showcases to animation. The 2021 edition was playing on-demand throughout the festival, and when a hole in my schedule opened up, I was happy to plug it with this year’s Circo Animato, a selection of 13 films from 7 countries. “Ouroboros,” from France, led off. Written and directed by Chloé Forestier, it’s a […]
- Nazi A-Bombs, Alien Invasions, and Monsters Under the Bed: September/October 2021 Print SF MagazinesSeptember/October 2021 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Eldar Zakirov, Kurt Huggins, and David A. Hardy The September/October print magazines are still on sale for a few more days, which means there’s still time to grab them before the November/December issu […]
- Killer Dolls and Murderous Dimensions: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories I (1972), edited by Richard DavisThe Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW, 1972). Cover by Karel Thole The first Year’s Best Horror Stories, DAW No. 13, published in 1972, was edited by British author and editor Richard Davis, who would go on to produce many more horror and sci-fi anthologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He also edited the next two Year’s Best Horror Stories for DAW, but he p […]
- Fantasia 2021, Part XXXXI: CollectorsCollectors (도굴) is a slick heist movie with lots of action, and it comes from South Korea courtesy of director Park Jung-bae and writer Hwang Dong-hyuk. Released last year in Korea, it was a significant hit, sitting at the top of the box office for three weeks and finishing as the 11th biggest Korean film of the year. It’s a crowd-pleaser, to be sure. It fol […]
- Future Treasures: Swashbucklers by Dan HanksSwashbucklers (Angry Robot, November 2021) Dan Hanks’ first novel was Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire (Angry Robot, 2020), which the author admits was “all about my love for Indiana Jones.” His follow-up features an ancient pirate ghost, supernatural battles, and 80s video games, which makes we wonder why no one has tried that combo before. I’m d […]
- Crisis and Mystery at the End of the Universe: The Divide Series by J. S. Dewes
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