So this week I was reading Burnt Worlds, a science fiction novel by S.J. Madill, in which the spaceship Borealis tests out a new hyperspace jump drive by leaping 35,000 light years away from home, whereupon said jump drive promptly explodes, leaving the ship facing a multi-year journey to get back. Of course, they only packed enough supplies for a day trip. Whoops.
So here we are this week with the second and final post involving Thunderbolt and his sidekicks, as we present the final four members of the Slayers. These are the nominally more important ones, insofar as when the team got adapted for the Marvel Mania storyboard in college, they’re the four who didn’t get killed off pretty quickly; in fact, one of them eventually switched sides and joined the good guys. Read on to find out who!
Continue reading “The Early Years: The Slayers, Part 2 ― Menta As Anything”So as previously threatened promised, this week, I reached into the pile of old papers from my younger days and pulled out the Villains & Vigilantes character sheets for The Slayers. There are a lot of them (seven in all), so I decided to split them across two weeks*, starting this week with Starburst** (a flying energy projector and the leader of the group at first), Throttle (the speedster), and Monstrus (the brick).
So this week I decided to dip into my big pile of old papers that aren’t rejection letters, and as it happens, I’m still in the section that’s full of old Villains & Vigilantes NPC character sheets, and there at the top was a fellow will be familiar to anyone who used to participate in those games I ran, or who was writing on “Marvel Mania” at college back in the day: Magneto! Thunderbolt!
So this week I was reading The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis, a low-technology steampunk adventure where they fly around in zeppelins, but shoot at each other with muzzle-load muskets, cannons, and flintlock rifles. Because why not?
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: “The Guns Above””So this week I was reading Valley of the Lesser Evil, by Carl Dane, which is not (gasp!) SF, fantasy, or (despite the title) horror, but is, in fact, an honest-to-God Western. It’s even set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, as Westerns should be.
So this week (well, probably several weeks ago by the time this post appears) I was reading Way Station, a classic SF novel from the 1960s by Clifford D. Simak:
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: Clifford D. Simak, “Way Station””So this week I was reading Perhaps the Stars, the final book of “Terra Ignota”:
So this week I decided to ask the Gods of Randomness to pick a folder and position in my vast trove of rejection (and a few acceptance) letters, and lo! They told me I should look in the folder labeled “W” and find the seventh item therein, which, as it turns out, was in fact two items stapled together. Here’s the first one:
Continue reading “Random Rejections: Welsh Publishing Group”So in the past few weeks I’ve read a couple of books where I decided to snip things for a Teaser Tuesday, even though, technically, on Teaser Tuesday, you’re supposed to take two sentences from whatever book you’re reading on that very day and use that as your teaser. But hey, you know how it is …
Viscosity 