dogpoet

Got a book which looks a bit disappointing.

Night's Nieces, edited by John Kaine was released as a tribute to the late Tanith Lee in 2015. I was hoping for a collection of essays on the woman's work, but it looks like a collection of fiction of by Lee wannabes with brief introductions crediting her for their cruddy rip offs and (Christ help us!) shitty poetry as well.

Not really the book I was hoping for, if I'm honest...

(ETA) Though it has one, excellent, story by Freda Warrington that makes it worthwhile. The rest are pastiches of Lee's fiction, set in some of the settings from her novels, and mostly just serve to demonstrate that the author isn't Tanith Lee and never will be. Warrrington, on the other hand has some interesting comments to make about the palliative role of escapism and how all of the bottomy in Lee's fiction might be encouraging for adolescents who are confused about their gender identity. It's a pretty grim read, though.

I hear you, John. That's definitely what caught my eye about it.

There's a lovely story Eddie Van halen came out with about working on Thriller. Supposedly he turned up at the studio to record his guitar parts, and he sees that Quincy Jones is already in the recording studio, and is kicking something. He lets himself into the recording studio and sees that Jones is actually kicking Michael Jackson, while shouting "I said no squeaks! No squeaking on this song!"

Probably apocryphal, but wouldn't it be great if it wasn't?

Small mercies, as they say. I really don't think the lad would have wanted to watch that.

I'm really sorry to hear that, Lou.

Word.

I'd be surprised if there'd even been a single school shooting in Japan this century.

If so, is it any good? Does it have anything going for it besides the SB Davis artwork, or is it just as godawful as every other horror story 2000AD has done this century that wasn't Cabalistics Inc or Cradlegrave?

12 hours ago, GottaGetAGrip said:

Most bizarrely, his killer wanted him dead so badly they made their own gun to do it with.

Care to hazard a guess as to what sort of person has been blathering all over the internet for the last day or so that it's proof that gun control doesn't ever work, and where the sort of person who's saying this lives?

(Hint: I'd like to see one of these mouthbreathers trying to build their own gun rather than buying something that looks like an M16 without undergoing a cooling off period or check that they have a firearms license. Some of them probably wouldn't even have the smarts to fire up a 3D printer to make one of those daft zip guns there was a big fuss about a few years back.)

My pleasure. Let me have your current address and I'll get it in the post for you.

Jonathan Pie kicks Boris when he's down, and enjoys doing so:

I'm thinking that either the people who bought them kept them or they weren't imported into NZ in number by either DAW or any of the UK publishers.

If you're interested, I could send you this one so you can have a look? I owe you a book or six, I'm sure. 

Better late than never: Johnson finally resigns...

I'm dubious that Dominic Raab will be any sort of improvement, to be honest, but at least the interim leader is unlikely to be Gove or Rees-Mogg.

I'm not sure all of the overlaps quite make sense, but it's still a great gag.

At some point I'll remember to name names when names need naming. 

Transit to Scorpio is the book I'm talking about

It does the sword and sorcery thing a bit more blatantly than most of the post ERB novels but it's completely unlike the John Carter books: Dray Prescott is an eighteenth century British naval ensign rather than an American civil war officer who served in the cavalry, so it's obviously completely different.

Looking at Wiki (which has a spoiler laden plot precis, so be careful) it was first published in the states by DAW. It's not something I've ever seen any used copies of on market stalls or in a second hand book shop either, which is why the copy I saw online attracted my interest.

Just gone through the first of the "Alan Burt Akers" (Kenneth Bulmer, apparently) Dray Prescott series. There are shitloads of these (at least fifty) so I'm not even going to try to read the whole lot, but it does a nice job of updating Edgar Rice Burroughs, even if it isn't Leigh Brackett or Jack Vance. There's also a lovely aside in one chapter mentioning one of the world's continents called Gah that nobody ever goes to because the locals are all unpleasant idiots with an overdeveloped taste for S&M and a weird attitude towards women. Can't imagine what other writer who was also ripping off ERB in the early '70s that might be a dig at...

The other thing that's occurred to me about this fiasco is nearly as worrying as a blatantly and openly partisan supreme court with elections looming. The Republicans have, since Reagan handed the party over to them in 1980, kept the religious right on their side by promising to repeal Roe vs Wade. Now that's finally been achieved, what else will they have to offer to keep the talibangelicals on their side?

I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop: remember the state wide voting recount that was illegally stopped in 2000?

The republicans might not need to stage an insurrection if they lose the electoral college in '24.

Just started in on a collection of three Garrett P Serviss novels, the first of which "Edison's Conquest of Mars" is an unofficial quasi sequel to The War Of The Worlds, done in a gosh wow style that would be described as space opera if it had been published twenty years later. The recent history and the Martians described are somewhat different to the ones in Wells, apparently because it sequels a slightly dodgy newspaper rewrite of WOTW that was published in the 'States rather than Wells' novel.

I find it very easy to believe that the Edison herein might have been an influence on EE Smith's Richard Seaton, though a bit stranger for the modern reader is that Edison is constantly talked up something rotten and there isn't a single mention of Nikol Tesla thus far.

Just read a band biog which it seems perverse to mention as everybody here who likes the band in question seems to have split the forum long since but...

Paint My name In Black And Gold by Mark Andrews is a biography of the early days of the Sisters Of Mercy (that is: up to half of the band leaving to form the Mission). It gives the best account of the whole issues around the Sisterhood record I've yet to see (and explains what the Gnome of Darkness actually got that twenty five grand for), but doesn't go any further than that. Andrews takes the traditional bigging up one band member massively and dissing everybody else and opts for Gary Marx as the good guy, so Wayne Hussey, Craig Adams and the Gnome don't come out of this account very well at all.

If gothicness doesn't turn your stomach it's a great read, and if you like the early SOM EPs and the first album, it's better still. Probably not recommended for Mission fans, though...

One thing that has occurred to me is that I might be enjoying the Smedman more were the fantasy novel I'd read beforehand not the fine Glen Cook number mentioned up the page a bit. Unfortunate timing if so, but not something I can really rule out.

A lot more entertaining than all of these sparkly whining gits, no question.

That's a rotten shame. I'll have to dig out my copy of The Long Halloween later. Whatever you think of the script, that art is magnificent.

Maybe this is the excuse I've been waiting for to buy a copy of Spiderman: Blue as well...

Smedman's Yuan-ti series is proving to be a bit less sinister culty- than I was hoping for, sadly. It's set in some city in the Forgotten realms that's openly ruled by the Yuan-ti, so the cult thing is just factional bickering, which makes it a bit less interesting. It's not as dull as one of the White Wolf sharecrops that are all vampire conspiracies in shouting matches, at least.