As fortune would have it, I’ve read a number of (non-Dungeons & Dragons) novels lately that have contained clever references to D&D. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is chock full of them. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians has a good number as well. Nerd references are the cool thing these days. But The Magician King, [...]
What a surprise—Michael Moorcock didn’t like Star Wars either when it came out: This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular Star Wars series which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious ‘Force’ which unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian ‘samurai’ again?) and upon [...]
I don’t know if it qualifies as a meme (or if the cool people are even still using that word), but Ken Hite started something nifty with his “Tour de Lovecraft” project. Hite read his way through H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and wrote up a short essay about each one—a combination of critical analysis and personal [...]
I had the chance to catch lunch with Ed earlier this week, and he was kind enough to pass an item from his game library to me: Stormbringer, the roleplaying game based on Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné novels. I’m really glad to get my hands on it; Stormbringer is one of those classic RPGs [...]
In the last few months, I’ve read two riveting books about humanity’s drive to survive (and thus “conquer”) the most inhospitable environments on the planet. First up was The Lost City of Z, a historical account of the explorer Percy Fawcett‘s expeditions into the Amazon. The second was Dan Simmon’s The Terror, a fictionalized (complete [...]
One of my previous jobs exposed me to a lot of different religious websites. Most of these were perfectly respectable websites by perfectly respectful people, but there were a few I came across that were… well, a good ways down the road to crazyland. One of the websites I came across—and I’ll leave it as [...]
Wow, is mankind ever playing with fire. First there was the Skynet thing. Now we’re messing around with Europa despite explicit instructions from omnipotent aliens to the contrary. At this point the natural next step is to create a race of slave robots (that are stronger and smarter than us) to serve humanity; or possibly [...]
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and [...]
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. –Robert Louis Stevenson Michele and I have a road trip coming up soon. It’ll take us through what many people would consider the “boring flyover” states (Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas), but it’s a route we both [...]
I am sure that those of you who follow politics have heard about Mitt Romney’s incredibly significant and newsworthy gaffe. When asked to name his favorite book, he cited Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. Cue a whole lot of snickering and mocking overanalysis by every blogger and pundit in the universe–all of whom no [...]
