Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerOverall, The Weapon Shops of Isher was enjoyable, but it has a number of problems. Some of this is structural leftovers from being a combination of three short stories, but some run deeper. The novel starts with a prologue that’s[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The structure of Red Mars is in eight parts, with each one using a different viewpoint character (with two of them repeating earlier viewpoints). They cover about 35 years of the early colonization, settlement, and early terraforming of Mars. The[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As a one volume history of the American Revolution, The Glorious Cause is nicely complete, but seems to assume some prior knowledge. Now, as there’s plenty of ‘everyone knows’ bits about the American Revolution, that’s not awful here, but this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This… is pretty classic Zelazny. Well-written stories with a somewhat overpowered protagonist, and often a zany twist to them. Not to say that Dilvish has it easy. Most of the stories put him in real danger, and he gets pretty[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hexwood starts off conventionally enough. Earth is an unwitting backwater in the galaxy when an ancient device activates, and the ruling junta’s efforts to stop the problem fail. Life on Earth continues normally, except for our main character. She observes[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Patricia Wrede’s novel is basically a farce of fairy tales; this is something that’s been popular to do over the last few decades. There’s kingdoms in a land with magic, and fairy godmothers and curses and the like are part[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Crowley’s book on Venice is about the Stato da Mar, and as such, is exactly one of the things I’ve been on the lookout for. The first section starts with Venice’s mercantile rise, and then goes into the story of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is less a novel, and more a fictional memoir. There’s no real plot, and a barebones structure. The entire story is told first person by a young German soldier in WWI who describes the horrors of the Western Front[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Effectively, the full title of this is “Against Stupidity, the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain”, a quote that is spread out across the three sections of the novel. I was a bit worried at first, as the book starts with[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Clavell’s Shogun is certainly a very good book, but it doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. It’s a historical novel, but instead of presenting historical personages doing what they historically did, and then filling in a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…