Paperbacks From Hell: Book Review
This week I’m starting off my Halloween horror reviews with a review of a nonfiction book about horror fiction.
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Book Review: Piranesi
It’s time for a review of another Sword & Laser Book Club pick.
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Anime Supremacy: Book Review
This time I have a book review of a novel about making anime.
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The Fold: Book Review
I’ve been following the Sword & Laser podcast for a while, but I never really had gotten around to reading along with any of their book picks until this year, with The Fold.
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The Epic Crush of Genie Lo: Book Review
There are some YA novels that I have read that feel like I’m reading an anime. This is, in part, because some of the light novels that have been adapted to anime were aimed for YA audiences. The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is an YA novel that definitely fits that concept, though one with some very different and unique narrative hooks because of the point of view character and setting that make it really worth your while (and makes me wish it would get turned into an animated series).
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The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook: Book Review
I like cookbooks. They are the fusion of my love for cooking and food, and my background in technical writing. I also love fantasy fiction & roleplaying games, with The Elder Scrolls series in particular. So, when I first played Skyrim and found there was cooking in the game, one of my first thoughts was “Man, an Elder Scrolls cookbook would be neat!” So, when one finally came out, I knew that I needed to check it out. Much as with the second Von Bek novel, I should have been looking at the Monkey’s Paw.
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City in Autumn Stars: Novel Review
In my review of The Warhound and the World’s Pain, I lamented that the book felt too short, and that the sexual assault sequence served no purpose. I should have noticed the finger curl on the monkey’s paw.
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The Warhound and the World’s Pain: Book Review
Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series is interesting to discuss. Some stories have direct analogies to and inversions of Robert E. Howard’s work, like Elric. Others, like Hawkmoon, go in radically different directions. The first Von Bek novel probably falls more into the former camp – feeling like something of an inversion of Solomon Kaine, in multiple respects.
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Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle – Time’s Crucible Book Review
Virgin Books’ Doctor Who: New Adventures series was, back in the day, meant to provide fans of Doctor Who the thing they wanted after the show was put on indefinite hiatus after the serial Survival. Time’s Crucible is the 6th book in the series, part of a pair of thematically linked stories under the heading of “Cat’s Cradle”.
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Dragons of Winter Night: Book Review
Dragons of Winter Night, as a novel, runs into the problem of adapting what was we think of it into just a trilogy of books – a bunch of material has to be skipped over. We start off after the retrieval of the Hammer of Karass and the re-unification of Dwarven society (which would later be covered in Dragons of the Dwarven Depths), with that kind of setting the tone somewhat for how the show comes out.
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Almost a year after the film adaptation finished, and almost 35 years after the book came out, I have read IT. Time to give my thoughts.
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Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Book 10 Review
It has all come down to this, as we have the final book in the Legend of the Galactic Heroes series.
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The Electric State: Book Review
The Electric State is very much a different book from Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. Those books had a retrospective narrative – the point of view for those books was from the viewpoint of someone looking back on events with a sense of nostalgia. The Electric State, on the other hand, has a more conventional narrative, while still having significant themes of memory, but definitely without the warmth of nostalgia.
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The October Man: Book Review
The last book in the Peter Grant series of Urban Fantasy police procedurals wrapped up the end of the “Faceless Man” Arc, with the recurring antagonist of that series being taken down, while one of the members of Peter’s supporting cast who had turned to the Dark Side was now on the lam. In the wake of this, author Ben Aaronovitch has decided to, basically, explore a different chunk of this world with the novella The October Man, which moves the plot from the UK to Germany.
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Quag Keep: Book (Video) Review
This week I’m rounding out my book reviews with what might be the proto-Game-Isekai novel, written in the ’70s by Andre Norton.
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Dragons of the Dwarven Depths – Book Video Review
I kick off my August GenCon licensed tabletop fiction reviews with a Dragonlance novel that fills a gap in the original Dragonlance Chronicles.
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Quag Keep: Book Review
If I was going to describe the modern “Isekai” genre in brief, I’d describe it as “Game-based another world fantasy.” It’s not just fantasy where a protagonist is whisked to another fantastic world from ours like with the John Carter of Mars novels, or on the anime front with El-Hazard and Magic Knight Rayearth. This is fantasy where the characters are explicitly in a world that draws inspiration to games from gaming – sometimes by drawing the characters or their psyches into an actual game (ala Sword Art Online or Log Horizon), or a world which uses the language of RPGs like with Konosuba or Grimgar: Ash and Illusions. I would argue that if not the first of these, then one of the first of this particular genre – and was done in the ’70s by a woman.
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Nintendo Power Retrospectives: Part 92
I’m putting the next episode of the show on hold for a month, in the wake of the tragedy at Kyoto Animation and due to the presence of “The Ignition Factor” among the covered games. Instead, I’ll be discussing the second companion book to one of Nintendo’s miniature consoles – Playing With Super Power.
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Dragons of the Dwarven Depths: Book Review
Dragons of Autumn Twilight ended with the refugees from Pax Tharkas having found a refuge in a mountain pass in the hope of (possibly) making it through the winter. The second book in the Dragonlance Chronicles series begins with the Heroes of the Lance having already gone on another adventure, and having brought the refugees to the Dwarven city of Pax Tharkas. In the roleplaying game modules, your player characters would have gone through this story. However, while much of the Dragonlance modules were adapted to the original Chronicles series, not all of them were. In the late 2000s, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman returned to Dragonlance to adapt this missing chapter into novel form.
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The Vinyl Detective – Flip Back: Book Review
Now that I’ve gotten caught up on my reviews of the Vinyl Detective novels, I can give my thoughts on the fourth book in the series, Flip Back. That is because the fourth book has come out since then, and I’ve had a chance to read it.
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Peter Grant Novels Books # 1-7: Book Review
So, I’ve been behind on my reviews of the Peter Grant novels (having only done a review of the first book – released in the US as Midnight Riot and the second novel, Moon Over Soho), so I’m going to do something of a blanket review of the first 7 novels, which effectively make up one massive story arc, which I’m going to call “The Faceless Man Arc”.
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Legends of the Force Part 33: Darksaber
Kevin J. Anderson returns with another novel of the Jedi Academy, picking up after the end of Children of the Jedi.
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Legends of the Force Part 32: Children of the Jedi
This month I’m returning to Star Wars novels with the first appearance of Callista, with the novel “Children of the Jedi” by Barbara Hambly
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Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly: Book Review
There were a couple more Star Wars Novels in 1995, with the first two Callista novels, starting with Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly.
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