Matter is my first step into the world of The Culture. I’ve heard bits and pieces about it through a variety of other sources, from the absurd ship names, to the concept of Outside Context Problems, to the absurdly high tech level – but I’ve never actually read a novel in the universe. While Matter is not the first book in the series, it is a pretty good jumping on point to the series.
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This week I’m covering a non-fiction book on the history of Dungeons & Dragons, and the various influences that fueled it.
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A while back, on the internet, I stumbled across the work of artist Simon Stålenhag, in what was part of the Tales From The Loop project – though I did not know what it was at that time. So, when the art was collected into a series of books with a narrative behind them – along with a tabletop RPG, I figure it was time to properly check it out.
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We finish up with Jabba with an anthology collection focused on the members of Jabba’s court.
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This time I’ve got the second of the Star Wars short story collections with Tales from Jabba’s Palace.
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This month we start a sub-series of the Star Wars novels following one of the fixtures of the original trilogy of films – fighter dogfights!
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I’ve previously discussed the first installment of Michael A. Stackpole’s Rogue Squadron Comics earlier. Well, he’s not just limited to the medium of comics, this week we get to the first of his Rogue Squadron novels, but with a different lineup of the squadron.
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After Callista was introduced in Children of the Jedi, unlike other characters who were love interests of Luke, she was not forgotten by other authors, with Kevin J. Anderson’s novel Darksaber.
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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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This month I have an omnibus of the first 3 Young Jedi Knights novellas.
Oriental Adventures was a sourcebook for AD&D 1st edition that sort of re-imagined and re-interpreted the game to fit a setting inspired by various stripes of Asian cinema, with varying degrees of success. However, two things that book did moderately well was to present a setting in microcosm that used the mechanics and the book’s non-weapon proficiency system. What it didn’t do well was to create classes and races that were conducive for adventuring, and it didn’t create a setting that a standard adventuring party could be inserted into.
I’ve got a short story collection this month.
I’m continuing to make my way through 1995 in Star Wars with the first collection of Star Wars short fiction.
This week I’ve got a review of a trio of mystery novels, from a former Doctor Who writer. Read more
This week we have the latest installment of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, as Yang Wen-Li’s burgeoning rebellion tries to find its footing. Read more
With the past two installments of the Vinyl Detective series, we’ve had an exploration of vinyl collecting along with the Jazz music industry of the 1930s-50s, and a focus on collecting singles combined with an exploration of the psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s-70s in the UK. This basically leaves one last major type of record album to cover – 78 rpm shellac records, and wartime jazz music. Read more
The Vinyl Detective was an interesting launch to a mystery series, with a mystery novel steeped heavily in 1940-50s jazz music, and in record collecting. The question to a book like that is how do you follow a work like that up and keep the framework fresh? Read more
This week, in honor of GenCon being this month, I’m starting off a short series video of reviews of books based on tabletop games. First off is an adaptation of the plot of one of the earliest sets of Magic: the Gathering. Read more
I now come to the conclusion of the Corellian Trilogy as we get to the bottom of events in the villain’s plan. Read more
Man, this is the year for really interesting SF murder mysteries getting nominated for the Hugo awards. In The Best Novella category there’s “Then There Was (N-One)” – and in Best Novel, we have Six Wakes from Mur Lafferty. Read more
We continue with the Corellian trilogy as we branch out to a larger exploration of the Corellian system. Read more
When I last talked about the Books of the Raksura series, The Siren Depths had wrapped up an informal trilogy of novels by establishing why the court protagonist Moon was from was attacked by the Fell in the first place, and what the reason for the Fell to create hybrid Raksura was in the first place. Read more
I’m beginning a new trilogy of Star Wars novels here, where we finally go to visit Corellia.
This time I’m taking a look at the first published Drizzt Do’Urden novel, and the second Forgotten Realms novel.
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Omnibus – https://amzn.to/2GtQ9Ra
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Audiobook – https://amzn.to/2GumhnL
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