Retrospective, and, I fear, prospective:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, ( Read more... )

I have seen at least three fundamentally different analyses of what "happened" with Trump's win on Tuesday night. Each of them has some element of truth to it, but they give rise to very different models for response.

1) The first is well-represented by this Crooked Timber discussion around Ta-Nehisi-Coates argument that American democracy is ( Read more... )

Actually, two bones. One small one with the author and a much larger one with the current publisher's marketing department ( Read more... )

Trump's latest speech seems to me to read as though it were lifted from Senator Morgan's speeches in the campaign in First Lensman.

I keep hearing the statement that Hillary Clinton is "the most qualified presidential nominee ever ( Read more... )

Glenn Beck has effectively endorsed Clinton.

I was in Law School at the University of Toronto when The Summer Tree came out; I remember being amused by one of the central characters who is persuaded to come along by a promise of notes for his Evidence class (with Schiff, though Kay leaves the teacher's name out; but Kay went to U of T and would have deliberately chosen that course because of ( Read more... )

( Review with Spoilers )

The Nightmare Stacks is, I think, best approached as a generalization of the previous Laundry Files novels. Although the novel is about Alex, it's not about his reactions in the same way that the early novels were about Bob's reactions (usually for humorous effects). This is about the role of the Laundry as a whole in a world shifting towards ( Read more... )

The following is the CBC's capsule summary of Tigana from its list of 100 great Canadian novels from last July (they had a list of nonfiction this year, about which the less said the better):

Peninsula of the Palm is a cursed country. Warrior sorcerers have taken control of most of it, destroying as much culture and infrastructure as they can in ( Read more... )