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Adventure

The Long View: The Sky People by S. M. Stirling

Reader Duane Oldsen requested John J. Reilly’s reviews of S. M. Stirling’s The Sky People [Amazon link] and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings [Amazon link]. I’m happy to oblige, even though these reviews were written by John in 2008, which is a little ahead of

The Moon Pool by A. Merritt Book Review

This is another expedition into the past of popular literature. Abraham Merritt, whose byline is nearly always A. Merritt, was a popular author who wasn’t even best known in his own time for his fiction. Rather, he was a celebrity journalist, making enough money to travel widely and pursue

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling Book Review

Normally, I’m not much interested in writing reviews of books I don’t like. I figure I’m just not the intended audience, and since there are so many good books of so many types in the world, I can just move on. In this case, I’m going

What authors like versus what readers like

This week, under quarantine and working at home, I was pondering how any given author’s most popular work is popular for reasons other than what the author was interested in writing it for. The thread provided lots of excellent examples, like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle [Amazon link], which

Someone is Aiming for You and Other Adventures by JD Cowan Book Review

In a bleak, crime-ridden city, masked vigilantes prowl the streets, searching for the source of a corruption far darker and fouler than even the jaded citizens of Summerside can imagine. When I picked up a review copy of JD Cowan’s Someone is Aiming for You [Amazon link], I was

The Long View 2007-05-03: Spam, Spamalot, Spam, Nightfall

This is a pretty good quote about the attractions of sacred or magical objects: he is as aware as Tennyson was that "Grail Questing" is a dark and even sinister enterprise, usually undertaken by dark and sometimes sinister people Much like political office, usually the one who wants

Gemini Warrior Book Review

Matthew White and Jason McCrae are oddly similar. Other than being five years apart in age, they could be twins. Living in Serenity City, they easily could have never crossed paths with one another. Except that a mysterious woman needs test subjects who are as similar as possible to one