So this week I’m continuing my recent spree of reading translated works* with The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin, depending). As you may be able to guess by the author’s name, this is a Chinese science fiction novel.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/11/2019: “The Three-Body Problem””
So this week I’m still reading The Night Watch Collection, by Sergie Lukyanenko. At this point I’m well into the last book of the trilogy, Twilight Watch, which so far is my favorite of the three.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/4/2019: “The Night Watch Collection””
So this week I’m reading the Night Watch collection, the international best-selling dark fantasy series by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. The collection gathers the first three books in the series — Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch — into a single volume. Being that this volume is around 2,000 pages long, I’ll probably be reading it for roughly as long as it takes to resolve a land war in Asia.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 5/14/19: The “Night Watch” Collection”
So over the past several years I’ve posted various scenarios I created for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, featuring such neglected villains as Angel, Dracula, the Gentlemen, Ethan Rayne, and Glorificus (that last scenario having been created by Jeff Dee, with small modifications by myself). But now, like the show itself, we must come to the end of our run of Buffy episodes. Never having written a scenario for the final Big Bad, the First Evil, I’m wrapping things up one season before the show did, with Dark Willow, the Final Boss of Season Six. And what a bad boss she was.
Continue reading ““Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Board Game Scenario: Dark Willow”
So this week I’m reading Railsea, by China Miéville, author of several of my favorite books, including Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Kraken.
This week I started reading Damnificados, by J.J. Amaworo Wilson, in which terrorists attack a Christmas party in a skyscraper and … No, wait, sorry, wrong story. The actual plot is that a group of “damnificados” — defined by the book blurb as “vagabonds and misfits” — takes over an abandoned building and basically turns it into a vertical city. If this reminds you of the Oakland Bay Bridge from William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, then, uh, you may be me. Or you may be Elizabeth Hand.
So this week I was reading Range of Ghosts, an epic fantasy by Elizabeth Bear, which — unlike most epic fantasies I’ve read — is set in what appears to be an analogue of the Mongolian steppes rather than an analogue of Western Europe, which is enough all on its own to make it interesting. Fortunately I also enjoyed the story.
So this week I was reading Threshold, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, a horror/fantasy novel in which a geology studen gets mixed up with sinister fossils. Or something like that.
So recently I came across a long short story (or very short novella) called “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland – For a Little While“, by Catherynne M. Valente. This is officially numbered as “Fairyland 0.5” and could be considered a prequel to her “Fairyland” series, inasmuch as it takes place prior to the events of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and concerns itself with how the missing monarch of that book, Queen Mallow, became Queen Mallow in the first place.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 1/8/19: “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland – For a Little While””
So this week I’m reading Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 12/18/2018: “Mortal Engines””
Viscosity 