I guess I just don’t like Libba Bray’s Diviners series.  It should be awesome, a Prohibition era X-Men of sorts.  But two things just kill it for me.  One, the goddamn slang.  She douses it like a teen girl mixing cocktails.  It’s like James Joyce if everyone were talking like Mr. Burns.  I can’t handle it.  Two, she checklists everything like she’s filling out a Which Wich bag — Asian, black, gay, sexually assaulted, social anarchists, interracial relationship.  If there were depth, it’d be one […]

Apparently, McClellan wrote six OTHER short stories about the Powder Mage series.  Whoops!   Each covers one of the major characters, or fleshes out the histories.  The best two are the ones that deal with Erika, Tamas’s wife who was murdered by Duke Nikslaus, Forsworn and Servant of the Crown.  As they get closer to the actual series, they get less involved and less intriguing.

If there’s one thing that can make fantasy better, it’s throwing in a bunch of gunpowder-snorting wizards who use muskets and flintlocks.  An excellent entry in a pseudo-colonial world, where magic users blow people apart whether with arcane energies, or with a ball and powder.  It’s a gory-ass series, and it has so much promise.  The Girl of Hrusch Avenue is a prequel that kind of puts a nice layer behind the heroes of the series.  I highly recommend this to fans who want less […]

When the missus says read this, I read this.  Religion and spirituality and betterment should be like a buffet.  Take what you’d like from everywhere and leave what you hate until you’re satiated.  So Grout kind of touts her Law of Attraction/positive intentioning as science.  In the form of experiments you can perform.  It’s not nearly as dumb as The Secret, and hey, there’s no harm in it. 

From page one, hell from the first line, I was pretty much hooked on The Martian.  It lived up to it’s hype.  A marooned story — like Castaway or 127 Hours — only here I genuinely liked the character.  I didn’t think he was an idiot.  You root for him because he MacGyver’s billions of dollars of tech to survive.  Or as he puts it, “I’m gonna science the shit out of this planet.” Easily one of my favorite — if not THE FAVORITE — books […]

I adored Ready Player One.  It was this nice blend of Willy Wonka and Wargames.  Easter eggs abounded.  It was every ironic t-shirt I’ve ever sweat in playing 8-bit games in a barcade.  Here, Cline tackles the world of space invaders ala The Last Starfighter, Ender’s Game and to some extent Iron Eagle.  Only here, I felt like the story was overburdened with too much nerdstalgia to retain it’s structure.  I didn’t care much about the characters and I felt like I was getting fois grased with references.  It […]