dogpoet

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.

If you think it was bad then, you should see the way it's gone down the toilet since Andy Cox took over as editor.

Going through a book of essays at the moment, but I have another bid fantasy epic waiting for me when I've finished that one: a collection of Lisa Smedman's House of Serpents trilogy. This is one of the D&D sharecrops that was plugged in the back of the Drow books I was whittering about two or three years ago, and looks interesting because it's about a sinister Yuan-ti conspiracy. The Yuan-ti are one of my favourite D&D monster races, so I've been after this one for a while.

Then once that's out of the way, I think I'll see if I can find some more Glen Cook...

Finished The Tower Of Fear, and frankly, I'm a bit angry I didn't read this back in '91 when it appeared in a UK edition.

Fucking Interzone probably had me reading some dimwitted mind numbing shite by some wankstain like Jeff Noon instead of them talking this up...

Boom!

There is that, true enough. Mind you, crap as it is, Rowling's epic seems to have had the same influence on the '90s generation that Star Wars did on ours, so it might be a little uncharitable to dismiss it out of hand, even if it is a third rate paste up of The Worst Witch, the most obvious bits of Tolkein and a load of E Nesbitt.

Rather enjoying the Glen Cook so far, btw: it's surprisingly non violent for a fantasy novel with a dark lord so far, but I suspect it's slowly building up to some sort of splattery climax. I have an idea that the occupied city where the plot is taking place and everybody who isn't part of the resistance is trying to keep their head down might be modelled on Palestine, but the occupants seem to be cod Romans rather than Israelis. Cook's doing a good job of juggling a large cast about as well, and at least one of them seems to be a deliberate parody of one of the traditional fantasy archetypes who's doing his thing because he enjoys acting like a total shit rather than shitty behaviour being a burden he's reluctantly accepted for the greater good. I rather suspect that the main reason there's such a big cast is because there's going to be a substantial death toll before the end.

Chill, Tigger: it's easily done and we've all pulled that one on somebody without thinking about it.

It's not like you shouted "Snape kills Dumbledore!" at a queue of children waiting outside a cinema, after all...

I wonder if this'll lead to the same sort of online shitstorm there was the last time they failed to cast a blonde rather than a brunette?

On a less spoiler-y note: a Glen Cook novel turned up in the post yesterday, so I've started in on that. It's one of his one off novels, rather than part of one of the big epic series,, but it's reading very well so far. He's no Moorcock, Vance or Leiber but the characters are nicely drawn, he's put some thought into his setting, and he's avoiding using the sort of absurdly overwrought language some people immediately resort to after typing something like "Tower of Doom" at the top of their manuscript's first page.

Just gone through Jake Arnott's Long Firm trilogy. One of those weird three layered narratives where real people (who are dead and career criminals widely covered in the media, so safe to put in novels), roman a clef type fictional characters who are obviously based on real people (who aren't dead and so might sue, but I doubt Arnott would be so blatant about that if he was worried about that happening) and fictional characters who presumably are supposed to look more credible and realistic over the presence of the first two groups.

I think we might be getting into spoilers here if Jason has only just finished the first volume, so maybe best not get into examples? There's a staggering amount of discussion about all three of the Sun series online, and it might be a good idea not to get into that on here as well until he's finished it.

A big part of the ambiguity about Severian's statements (which is set up in the first book, so should be safe to mention) is that he possibly spends a fair chunk of the series in a state of outright denial: he really feels that he's betrayed everything he believes in and stands for by helping Thecla die a quick death and it's rather messed him up.

5 hours ago, hagren said:

How's life treating you dogpoet?

Not too bad, thank you.

Awesome news, hagren. Glad to hear that life's going well for you.

Wolfe's really good on unreliable narration and does some very clever things with it.

IIRC: most of that in the Book of the New Sun is down to Severian misunderstanding stuff rather than him deliberately misrepresenting any of it, but when somebody starts a first person narrative by saying that they remember everything and nothing has escaped their notice, it's always a fair bet they're wrong about that..

That's a rather good one. It was published in the late '80s as a direct sequel to the Book of the New Sun, rather than a related series like the Long Sun or Short Sun books, but for some reason seems to always get left out out of the discussions and is rarely mentioned when the New Sun series is reprinted. I don't know if Wolfe thought it wasn't quite up to scratch or what, but I rather like it myself and think it deserves a bit more attention than it tends to get.

(I probably don't need to tell you this after you've gone through The Shadow Of The Torturer, but the Book of the New Sun is one big fat novel in four volumes rather than a series, and you're best off going through the whole thing in one go than reading other stuff around it.)

It gets better as it goes on, iirc.

Are they including The Urth of the New Sun in the current reprints?

Thank you, Tigger. You're a scholar and a gentleman, and that definitely sounds every bit as interesting as I'd hoped.

(And I'm definitely going to have to remember that "grim before Grim first publicly grimaced" line as well.)

Currently fishing about online for my next epic fantasy read, and wondering if anybody on here is familiar with Glen Cook's stuff?  The magic PI series doesn't look all that interesting (even with titles that obviously reference Travis McGee), but the Black Company books sound interesting, and those look a lot like an early forerunner to the malazan and Game of Grimdark franchises that are now seen as defining the genre more than Tolkein or Howard, and he's apparently written a one off novel that looks a lot like it's intended as a hatchet job on Moorcock as well.

It seems weird he's not a bigger deal given all that, to be honest. Are the books unreadably badly written or something?

McFarlane, Lou: that's how he rolls. We're probably just lucky that he's limited himself to the ripped strides and has refrained from sculpting John shirtless under his coat...

All of this whining from the hard right blogsphere about his son being gay is probably getting to him.

To be honest, if it was Hilary Clinton or a failed real estate developer and multiple bankrupt who was only standing for the presidency because he was furious that Barack Obama had mocked him at a press call and who had to buy off a rape allegation during his election campaign, sitting on your hands and refusing to vote because you think that she stole Bernie Sanders' nomination is so pathetic it deserves a lot more contempt than any of the idiots who stood back and let this happen are getting.

(And don't even get me started on those "I voted for Gary Johnson not Trump" idiots: Tor Johnson stood a better chance of becoming the American president in 2016 than Gary Johnson, and he died in 1980...)

On a (slightly) lighter note:

The thing that really depresses me Tigger, if that when the republicans have finished abolishing Roe vs wade and banning abortion on a state level, the ERA is probably going to be their next target.