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alternative history

The Long View 2008-01-22: Don't Panic; Panic in 2016; Victory with Demobilization; Mahdi Watch

The James Fallows Atlantic piece “Countdown to a Meltdown” from 2005 is an absolutely fascinating bit of political prediction, let’s look at it in more detail, as it combines some of John’s obsessions with some of my own. Fallows wrote the article as advice to the incoming President

Linkfest 2020-10-16: Castle of Otranto Edition

Linkfest 2020-10-16: Castle of Otranto Edition

The Gothic in Sword & Sorcery This is a nice overview of Gothic novels and how they have influenced what we now call fantasy. Gothic novels were an incredibly broad group, containing books in a range from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Amazon link) [the progenitor of the woman with

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen Again

While the review I would write now would be a little different than the one I wrote six years ago, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen [Amazon link] is still a really good story. One of my working definitions of a great bit of adventure fiction is that you can come back

Space Viking by H. Beam Piper Book Review

You couldn’t get any more on the nose with the title Space Viking [Amazon link] than this book, which despite it’s space opera trappings, is a re-imagining of 9th or 10th century Europe, when intrepid men like Rollo secured their domains by wits and force of arms, while

The Long View 2008-06-04: Toward the Courts of the Crimson Kings

This review of In the Courts of the Crimson Kings [Amazon link] is a great excuse for John J. Reilly to indulge in his hobby of metahistory, the way that cultures have a tendency to follow cyclical patterns of development over centuries. The book is fun, and John’s digressions

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 Long View 2007-07-30: Summer Schedule, Beginning with John Lukacs

This isn’t one of John’s usual blog posts. It ends up something like a mini-book review of Five Days in London: May 1940 [Amazon link]. John approached the book as an opportunity for historical counterfactual, using the notes from the British Inner Cabinet. One of the things I