Marginalia

[coalescent]

One for immortalradical and snowking both, I think: Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century. "Welcome to New London. The time is 2103 to 2104, and the game is afoot!". WITH ROBOT WATSON. Other Holmesian fun: a story at BBC Cult written by Kim Newman. EDIT: Jonathan Strahan points out that there are other Holmes stories on the site by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Paul Cornell, Christopher Fowler and Dominic Green.

karentraviss writes about respecting the reader: "Dissing popular and media fiction isn't just insulting to writers: it's actually contemptuous of the readers who buy it. Sneering at their choices tells them that they're too stupid to know any better.  If they were smarter, they'd know they should be reading Literature, or maybe they've tried and just couldn't manage it, poor sods." Charles Stross debates: "Every media tie-in book published is potentially one less book set in a universe of their own imagining by the author who wrote it.". matociquala has further comments, with reference to the geek hierarchy, here.

The mass market paperback edition of City of Saints and Madmen has a different cover to the hardback/trade edition. I don't like it so much.

24 season 4 has started: "Who will the really big bad be? I don't know, but I'm hope hope hoping it's aliens. Jack Bauer vs aliens." I think we can all agree, that would be cool. There's a preview/trailer/mini episode thing set between seasons 3 and 4 to be found here. [via tomburnell]

The Guardian reviews Graham Joyce's new novel, The Limits of Enchatment. "The Limits of Enchantment is an intricate, involving dramatisation of a battle in English history that still continues today, just about, although there now seems to be hardly any doubt about the winner: the conflict between folk wisdom and modern science. [...] This remarkable novel should scoop Joyce out of the dusty corners of bookshops and introduce his work to a much wider readership." Also in review, less favourably: Belle de Jour's book.

An article about 'Feral Cities' from the Naval War College Review. "Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power..." [via Matt Cheney]

The best thing to come out of the great LJ blackout of 2005.

Comments

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Huh. I always thought the Legends trilogy was the better of the two, if only for the creepy as hell alternate future where Raistlan had killed all the gods. Brrr.

Then too, those six books are the Dragonlance origin stuff, so they are essentially original world-creation (even if a lot of it came from gaming). It's the umpty-zillion books that came after that are the sharecropping. :)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Raistlin, I think I meant.

[ajr.livejournal.com]

Ah! I nearly forgot about the Legends trilogy. Though I tend to think of it as being the Twins trilogy, personally. Yes, that was good too, though I still give the edge to the first trilogy.

Of the umpty-zillion books that came after that, the only one I recall anything of now is Richard Knaak's The Legend of Huma, though I couldn't trust my memory to say whether it was good or not.


Come to think of it, your point about the Dragonlance books I cited being the origin books could also apply to the ShadowRun book I cited. And I got the title of it wrong too. Oops. It's Never Deal with a Dragon, actually. Along with Choose Your Enemies Carefully and Find Your Own Truth it made up the trilogy that launched the ShadowRun line of books. And as I recall, seemed a thoroughly decent mix of cyberpunk and magic. Of the later books in the series, again I remember little of them other than one called Burning Bright, and again, I couldn't trust my memory as to how good it was.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I think The Legend of Huma didn't suck (although there was a sequel about a minotaur I didn't care for much). Er .. I remember some of the 'origins of the companions' type books, including the really not good one where Sturm and Kitiara GO TO THE MOON.

Oh! But I liked the trilogies about the history of the elves (Griffin cavalry!) and the history of the dwarves. Can't remember who wrote them. There must be a website somewhere.

[ajr.livejournal.com]

I think The Legend of Huma didn't suck (although there was a sequel about a minotaur I didn't care for much).

Ah, excellent. I wasn't sure if I was remembering The Legend of Huma because it didn't suck, or if I was remembering it because stories of knights and their derring-doing seemed jolly good when I was that age, what what. :) Shamefully I can still recall that the oath of the knights of Solamnia is "Est Sularus Oth Mithas". Why can't I recall more useful things?

Don't think I ever read the sequel, which I think I should be thankful for.

I remember some of the 'origins of the companions' type books, including the really not good one where Sturm and Kitiara GO TO THE MOON.

Oh lordy. That's bad. That is bad. I think I read the 'origins' books (were they collectively named the "Preludes" or something like that?), so it's quite possible that I read that but have totally blocked it from my mind as I don't recall it at all.

But I liked the trilogies about the history of the elves (Griffin cavalry!) and the history of the dwarves.

I'm pretty sure I never read a trilogy about the history on the elves. And the only drawf-specific book I recall reading was Flint the King. Which, again, I recall nothing detailed of.


Google throws up a scary number of Dragonlance websites. Scary!

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Preludes sounds familiar, yeah.

Look! Raistland!

[ajr.livejournal.com]

... oh my god. It has a "Mission Statement." And you can buy t-shirts! O.o

Sometimes people scare me.

[talvalin.livejournal.com]

Admittedly I haven't read it for about 13 years, but from what I remember The Legend of Huma was utter bollocks. It flatly contradicted events described in the Chronicles (eg: where was the fucking stag? And don't tell me that it was just a metaphor. :P), and wasn't all that exciting.

This was the man who forged the Dragonlances and single-handedly (all right, maybe not) fought off Takhisis, and Richard Knaak managed to make it boring.

Oh yes, the Preludes. More utter arse, the lot of them. I read the Heroes I, Preludes I and II, the Tales and the Elven Nations trilogies. Nothing ever came close to the Chronicles and Legends (also my favourite of the two).

I think I wasted so much time with TSR and Forgotten Realms stuff that I went solidly off fantasy for about 6 years.

[ajr.livejournal.com]

The Legend of Huma...

I can only plead that I was young when I read it and that my critical facualties were clearly undeveloped, as I don't recall noticing that it contradicted the Chronicles or anything else. Ah well.


I think what finally made me get shot of Dragonlance and move on to something else was one of the books which collected short stories by different people (was that the Tales?). One of the stories in it was nothing but a retelling of one of the earlier fights in Dragons of Autumn Twilight... from the point of view of a knife. To this day I still think that story was some of the biggest wank I've ever read.

I think what ended up putting me off the whole fantasty genre for many years, though, was reading David Eddings and discovering that every single bloody book was exactly the same. And they were all stupidly long too. It didn't take a genius to see that SF books were generally shorter, and most importantly there were plenty of differences between books.

Since then I've restricted my forays into fantasty to authors like Leiber and Moorcock, for the most part. Nice short books. Oh, and Zelazny's first five Amber books. Then there's Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun books I intend to read some day.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Your memory of Huma is clearly better than mine. Stag?

I think I wasted so much time with TSR and Forgotten Realms stuff that I went solidly off fantasy for about 6 years.

"Me too." I think I gave up after the fifty-sixth Drizzt Do'urden book.

[talvalin.livejournal.com]

Your memory of Huma is clearly better than mine. Stag?

Huma gets wounded in a battle and is feverish. He stumbles around in a forest until a white stag (Paladin) appears before him and guides him to a castle in the forest where he convalesces and forges the Dragonlances, the same castle that the Chronicles group stumble upon somewhere in the second book.

The lack of a white stag in The Legend of Huma was such a glaring omission it ruined the rest of the book for me. I'm sure there was another mistake or several in there as well, but that was the most blatant one.


I think I gave up after the fifty-sixth Drizzt Do'urden book.

Good character, but Salvatore took the piss with the constant sequels. He brought back Wulgar from the dead, and Artemis Entreri refused to stay dead. I got fed up to the back teeth with it all, but the original trilogy was really enjoyable.