Category Archives: Books

What You Want To Read

Posted on by Henry

I have been moderately derelict in my duties: I’m in the throes of a book.  1636: The Devil’s Opera caught me late yesterday and hasn’t yet let go.  I am also partway through two others (Hide Me Among The Graves, The Quiller Memorandum), but I don’t have a review of any of them ready for you.

I’ve been making progress on the next Jerome short story, with several thousand words down already and a good number more to go.  I’ve been having some trouble with this one, but it’ll come around eventually.

What I want to know, though, is what you next want to read from me.  Specifically, are any of you interested in seeing more material based on that flash fic piece which I wrote?  I’ll include it past the break so that you can refresh your memory, but here are a few questions to get things started:

  • Do you want to see more in this setting?
  • If yes, whom should I follow?  Who and what seem most interesting to you?  How long should I make it?
  • If no, what sort of thing would you like to see instead?  Do you have any ideas that you’d like to see explored?

Please put any responses in the comment section.  Once again, the flash fic piece in question follows the break…

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The Escapist Nature of Superhero Works

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

What do your favorite superheroes say about you? Superhero literature — and really the speculative fiction genre as a whole — are a genre rooted in escapism. Superheroes are a way of conceiving of the world as we’d wish it to be, but in a roundabout sense. While a utopian novel may define our perfect world, superhero works define the one-man struggle to make a perfect world. Have you ever heard somebody say ‘man, if I were in charge…’. That is the defining idea behind super hero works: one person trying to change the world dramatically by sculpting it to their personal ethos. It is my opinion that our favorite superhero works indicate (to some degree) how we see the world.

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Master of the Cauldron, by David Drake

Posted on by Henry

I think David Drake might have access to a time machine.  You see, I’ve written my reviews of his books years after they were published, and yet he has consistently moved to address my concerns.  He doesn’t get it exactly right every time, but he’s clearly heard me and has responded to the points that I make.  He’s even usually fixed things within a book or two.

Master of the Cauldron is the sixth book in the Lord of the Isles series, the last book before the final trilogy which is supposed to wrap up all of the adventures that our heroes have been having.  It continues with the excellent setting which I gushed about in my earlier reviews, still delivering on that sense of diving into a world made up of an Atlantean amalgamation of our past.  In fact, much of it is very familiar.  If you’ve paid attention while reading the previous books, you’ll probably be able to call most of the scenes here as they happen, or at least know the pattern of the flow as you read.  So the question is, do I still like it?   Continue reading →

Cartozia Tales

Posted on by Henry

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Quick disclaimer: I received my copy of the first issue as a review submission, and am friends with Lucy Bellwood, one of the excellent artists on the project.

Cartozia Tales is the collaborative creation of a group of indy cartoonists, with two issues out and another eight to come pending a successful Kickstarter project.  It explores the world of Cartozia by offering stories from all over the map… literally.  One of the central conceits of the project is that each of the artist teams will create stories from a randomly chosen location in the world of Cartozia, with the eventual goal of having every artist tell a story from every section of the world.

The world itself is filled out in promising detail on a map in the center of the first issue (like that pretty one up above).  Your initial introduction to the material is offered by a young cartographer named Shreya, who travels around the world of Cartozia mapping it out and collecting stories.  These stories are all designed to be accessible to young readers, and as such they are short, move quickly, and don’t require an extensive background vocabulary.  But leaving it at that doesn’t do full justice to the content; a number of the stories were just as deep and engaging as I would hope something aimed at an older audience to be, and the stories that didn’t quite hit that note felt like they promised to do so within the next few episodes.

The art changes from one story to the next as different artists take the reins, offering a wide variety of styles in a medium that is more often denoted by much larger uniform chunks.  I am of course quite partial to Lucy’s work, but I found several new artists that I expect to look up once I’ve finished writing this post (never mind, I couldn’t resist and already looked them up).  Simply put, I quite like this project and I’m looking forward to reading the next issue.  I highly recommend that you check it out, and contribute to their Kickstarter if you like what you see.

Getting Motivated to Write

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

I live in Portland, and as such, everybody I know is a ‘writer’. I imagine it’s like being an ‘actor’ in Los Angeles; people use the word as a catch-all for their hopes and dreams. But wanting to write and doing it occasionally doesn’t make you a writer any more than playing pick-up basketball every once in awhile makes you a basketball player, or playing with Legos makes you an engineer. And so most ‘writers’ I know are actually baristas, with most ‘actors’ being waiters/waitresses.

As with most things, success is hard, and most success will be measured in degrees. So what is a writer? Well, I’d struggle to define ‘writer’. My first attempt would be:

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Prologue + Chapter 1: Memories

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

Well, it’s not complete done yet, but I felt it better to post it than to tweak it forever; here is the first chapter of a slowly building novel! I really want to call this a first draft, and many changes may be made yet, as there is one character I want to rework (too tropey), two scene I want to re-conclude (awkward ending), and one scene I need to re-write (just all around too staccato and not flowing well enough). But overall, I hope it’s enjoyable :)

But with that glowing endorsement, here is Chapter 1 of Book 1 of The Steam Wars, “Memories” (and the Prologue as a bonus!)

I’ll be updating formatting over time, and will keep the final version of each chapter here, with the most recent update date at the top.

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The Books We Love to Hate

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

If you cast a wide net across my book list, you’re bound to come back with some controversial books: Wheel of Time, Way of Kings, or Game of Thrones (less controversial in the post-HBO era, I suppose). And I’m not going to lie, when people ask me why they should read these books, I sometimes struggle.

It’s not that these books aren’t good, but they have certain qualities which can make them…unpalatable. And these qualities come out immediately if you talk to anybody about these series. It starts off simple; you ask them about the books and they say ‘oh, it’s like Lord of the Rings, but‘ (oh, not everything is actually like Lord of the Rings, but if you’re explaining a fantasy novel to somebody who doesn’t know fantasy, that’s a pretty good starting place, but then the list of ‘but’s starts to grow longer and longer until you’re not even sure the book is fantasy anymore).

And they start getting excited, they say:

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Ironskin, by Tina Connolly

Posted on by Henry

Ironskin, by Tina Connolly, is almost exactly what is promised on the cover.  No silly, not the illustration; the cover blurb on the edition that I picked up says, “A steampunk Beauty and the Beast tale, beautifully and cleverly reversed.”  And while I would say that “steampunk” is not the appropriate description for the setting, the book certainly delivers on all of the rest of that, and then some.

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Popcorn Literature

Posted on by Henry

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MJ loves his popcorn.

My recent reading has reminded me of a category of books that I read when I was much younger.  There was a while when I would pick up a book around noon and be done with it by the evening, often already moving on to the next one (I’m looking at you, Animorphs).  I went through such books so quickly, and those books had so little additional substance, that my mother started to call them “popcorn books.”  They were tasty, and could be consumed compulsively with little to no thought required.  They were appealing without being nutritious, and I would quickly turn to them if given the option.

I hadn’t really thought more about those books.  But recently…

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By Heresies Distressed, by David Weber

Posted on by Henry

There’s an obvious joke or three to make here about being distressed by David Weber, but he doesn’t really deserve them.  The fact is, I continue to like his Safehold series, even if it is pretty predictable at this point.  Like I mentioned last time, Weber is serving up a recipe that is tried and true, and despite being well known and familiar it still tastes pretty good.

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