Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerTo a certain extent, I’ve always wondered why Guns, Germs, and Steel caused such a huge splash. The main premise boils down to ‘differences in geography cause differences in societies and their history’, which belongs to the club of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I know of Barbara Hambly for her various epic fantasy stories, so a historical murder mystery was a bit of a surprise for me. As a historical story, it’s great. It’s obvious that Hambly spent a lot of time and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Basques is by an author who has impressed me in the past, and was also a chance to look at The Peoples of Europe series. The book (and presumably others in the series) is a little under 300 pages[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The final volume of Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars series has a lot of work to do. The cast has grown enormous, multiple threats are coming at the main characters from completely different sources, and the political situation is a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It often seems to me like Sicily doesn’t get a lot of attention, now or in the ancient world, even though it’s a very prominent land-mass that dominates the middle of the Mediterranean. This is more an accident of our[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In origin, this is half a book. Each volume of the Crown of Stars series was longer than the last, and here at the end it finally got too long to put under one cover. It’s also hard to figure[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As the Crown of Stars series nears its end, this book loses its individual identity. There’s no real ‘spine’ overtly holding this book together as a unit. No new characters to speak of. As a result, The Gathering Storm does[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The cover of H. Paul Honsinger’s first book promises grand old-fashioned military SF. And he delivers on this. The general setup is familiar: officer with his first command of a warship gets a ship with a troubled, low-morale, crew and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This isn’t quite an Arthurian book in the usual sense. Set in post-Roman Britain, The Winter Prince adapts from the Welsh versions of Arthurian legend, taking the general situation to tell its own story. The entire story is told by[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
If you study the history of the Middle Ages, it doesn’t take long to realize the Normans were involved in a lot more than England and northern France. However, while I’d become aware of the Norman state in southern Italy,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…