If you've been reading Simon R. Green's stuff (his horrible horrible yet somehow insanely addictive stuff), you already know that the man never read something he didn't want to put in his books: the Deathstalker Series was Star Wars-Dune-40K-X-Men-Neuromancer, the Eddie Drood books are the genre kitchen-sink setting to end all genre kitchen sink ( Read more... )

Has anyone ever connected the dots between The 27 Club and the Leannansidhe? I'm sure they must have but I can't recall where. Thoughts?

Found in Daniel Suarez' FreedomTM and William Gibson's Zero History respectively, the Ring of Aggys and the Ugly T-Shirt are two - as far as we know - fictional devices that were designed to render their wearer invisible to digital video cameras.

Win Pollard was a spy, period. The Russians at the end of the book described him as “...a brilliant man, an old opponent, supposedly long retired”. I don’t think someone who only designed crowd-control barriers and never actually engaged in espionage would rate such a description.

Latro, though he does not remember it, was one of the mooks Leonidas swatted aside in his failed attempt to get within spear-range of Xerxes. This shit is just *begging* for a crossover.

Why is there nearly no mention of dothé, the practice of deliberately inducing hysterical strength in oneself as portrayed in Ursula K. Leguin's The Left Hand of Darkness? What is wrong with the internet?

Of late, I have realized I don't hate fantasy anymore. It is certtain that I no longer generalize blindly where it is concerned, thanks largely to Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age books (buy Ink & Steel!).

Recently though, I have read in rapid succession Maledicte, Iron Angel and Kushiel's Dart, the latter a book I ignored for five years because I ( Read more... )

Since a gene pattern can be constructed to satisfy the parents’ specific wishes and substituted surgically for the nucleus of a fertilized cell, she is liable to see anything born and often does. Being old-fashioned, all that Megra’s own parents had wanted was a cobalt-eyed doll with the strength of a dozen or so men, so that the kid could take ( Read more... )

Doctor NoSpoilers says that Casanova #14 is the best thing Matt Fraction has ever published - period.

However, unlike say, All-Star Superman #10, it cannot be judged on its own merits because those merits are absolutely predicated on its complete recontextualization of the previous six issues. The balls on this guy! Rereading the preceding issues ( Read more... )

Black Man won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Since this has recuscitated some online interest in putting this fine book to the question, I will link to my Unreview which I think was pretty goddamn insightful if I do say so myself.

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Reread The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks for the first time since 1992. I like to think ( Read more... )