Category: Books

In the Mail: Fieldwork.

Fieldwork is a novel by Mischa Berlinski that is not science or other genre fiction (it’s about hill tribes in Thailand; I’ve yet to get more than three chapters in), was a National Book Award Finalist, and does have a Stephen King blurb on the front cover.  Yes, normally that would be three strikes and you’re out, but I was sufficiently intrigued by somebody on Twitter raving about the book that I thought that I would give it a try anyway.  It is surprisingly readable, so far!  Not something that I would expect from non-genre fiction, to be honest, but I suppose that it’s unreasonable to assume that they’re all substandard.  I suppose that I am, in the end, a bit of a literary snob — so this should be a lesson to me. Continue reading In the Mail: Fieldwork.

Choose the form of the Destructor: the new Vampire: The Masquerade is up for preorder.

[Expletive deleted].

[Expletive deleted], [Expletive deleted], [Expletive deleted]-y [Expletive deleted]. This is bad, man.  This Vampire: The Masquerade preorder has tiers.  Tiers are dangerous.  You start off at the lowest one, and you figure that this is fine — and then you start looking at the higher tiers, and realizing that all you need to do is put in a little more to get a good deal on something that you’re going to get anyway.  And there’s your new baseline, neighbor.  It all ends with you trying to explain to your wife why you spent eight hundred bucks on a limited edition hardback with leather covers and hand-written pagination.

I’ll tell you the answer. It’s because you are weak. And because this version of VtM is Ken Hite’s baby, and it’s going to help feed his book habit.  And, yeah, because it looks so very, very pretty.

RIP Harlan Ellison.

Harlan Ellison was an acid-tongued, verbal bruiser of a reviewer and critic who used to flense his opponents before he defenestrated them.  He was not a fighter who liked the taste of his own blood in his mouth; he liked the taste of other people’s blood in his mouth, and was happy to indulge himself in getting some whenever possible.  There are a lot of people out there who will be happy to give their true, unvarnished opinion of Harlan Ellison — but only because he’s now safely deceased, and thus won’t show up at their front doors with a broken-off stop sign and the unnatural grin of the Undead.

None of this should be taken as a criticism, because absolutely none of it is.  I might not have watched the classic Doctor Who if it wasn’t for this man. Rest in Peace, Harlan Ellison.

Moe Lane

New over at Atomic Robo: the Nicodemus Job.

I am absolutely grooving to this Real Science Adventures story from the Atomic Robo folks. The Nicodemus Job is set in Constantinople during the beginning of the First Crusade, and it’s a revenge caper.  You got the Dried Out Investigator, The Wise Older Rogue, The Young Hotshot Rogue, The Forger With A Heart Of Gold, And The Philosophical Bad-Ass, all coming together for One Last Job to take out the Big Bad who they all have history with. It is all very tropy, but as TV Tropes itself has said: Tropes Are Not Bad.

Check it out. I’m finding the ongoing story very appealing.

Book of the Week: The Black Chamber.

SM Stirling’s The Black Chamber is coming out in a couple of weeks: it’s an alternate history where President Taft suffered a fatal heart attack at just the right moment in 1912 to ensure that Woodrow Wilson would lose ignominiously to Teddy Roosevelt in the Presidential election.  From what I’ve read so far on Stirling’s site, the results from that are going to make a lot of people’s teeth grind. But there are fights on zeppelins and spying against perfidious Imperial Germans and high tech (by 1916 AD standards) and whatnot, so it’s all going to be good, hopefully. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Book of the Week: Certain Dark Things.

It’s weird: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican vampire novel Certain Dark Things has been on my Kindle for over a year, only I never got into it.  Which is weird because: Mexican vampires.  This is the sort of thing that I would read.  And now I have gotten into it, and it’s all about Mexico City and different kinds of vampires and the drug trade and yeah, this is pretty good stuff. It could be ported into a Night’s Black Agents campaign, which is why I got reminded of the book in the first place.

Book of the Week: The Magic Goes Away.

Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away is an extended metaphor for resource depletion, seen through the lens of 1970s-1980s environmental pessimism, of course.  This much is known. But it will still be taught in literature classes a hundred years from now, while other suchlike metaphors have been justly exiled to the dusty hells of graduate thesis footnotes, because Larry Niven can in fact write.  Not to be impolite, but there are authors out there who seem to favor other qualities above the ability to write well.  Not as many as I might like*, but they’re out there. Continue reading Book of the Week: The Magic Goes Away.

Come read the story I used to lose the Secret World Legends writing contest!

It’s on Patreon (for free).  I kind of felt bad that ‘Downtime’ didn’t win, until I remembered that the story is about Secret World Legends crashing to desktop, only viewed from the inside and from the point of view of my character’s Agent minions.  Yeeeeeaaah I can see why FunCom might be a little leery about rewarding that one with a free T-shirt for my main character.

Still, I thought that it was all right for a 750-worder.

Book (well, Novella) of the Week: The Flowers of Vashnoi.

Hey did you know that Lois McMaster Bujold had written this novella called The Flowers of Vashnoi: Vorkosigan Saga yeah no neither did I there’s the link it’s downloading now it’s all about Ekaterina Vorkosigan and oh hey the download’s done see you later.

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I SAID, new Vorkosigan saga novella! It’s OK! Go!