On Doctor Who, the Celestis and The Eyeless

While Doctor Who fandom this weekend has been preoccupied with questions of predestination and Amy Pond’s flirtatiousness thanks to “Space” and “Time,” the two Doctor Who mini-episodes produced for Comic Relief while waiting for the season debut in five weeks, I’ve had other Doctor Who thoughts in mind, specifically about a two-year-old Doctor Who novel,Continue reading “On Doctor Who, the Celestis and The Eyeless”

Warlords of Utopia

Tuesday I finished Lance Parkin’s Warlords of Utopia, his Faction Paradox novel that recounts the trans-temporal war between the timelines where Rome never fell and the timelines where Germany won the Second World War. Warlords is not a conventional novel. Rather, the book feels like a memoir. The narrator, Marcus Americanus Scriptor, states at theContinue reading “Warlords of Utopia”

Talking Books

Two more books came by mail this weekend. The first, from the Science Fiction Book Club—The Bloody Crown of Conan, the second volume in Del Rey’s new collection of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories. The second, from Mad Norwegian Press—Warlords of Utopia, Lance Parkin’s contribution to the Faction Paradox universe. I’ve only glancedContinue reading “Talking Books”

Sherlock Holmes against the Irrational

Yesterday I received in the mail the latest Faction Paradox novel, Philip Purser-Hallard’s Of the City of the Saved….. The novel takes place in the City of the Saved, essentially a secular heaven after the Big Crunch where humanity in all of its forms, from Homo habilis to post-human intelligences that bear no physical relationContinue reading “Sherlock Holmes against the Irrational”

Move, Countermove, Guile, and Deceit

A few weeks ago I picked up The Complete Musketeers on DVD, a collection of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers as directed by Richard Lester in the early 1970s. (The title is misleading–the collection is not complete in that it does not contain The Return of the Musketeers, the 1989 sequel by LesterContinue reading “Move, Countermove, Guile, and Deceit”

Three happenings

Two Lord of the Rings thoughts. First, The Two Towers video game was released last week for the PlayStation2. For fans anxiously awaiting the Special Edition DVD release of Fellowship of the Ring or the December theatrical release of The Two Towers this game should probably find its way to your video game console. NotContinue reading “Three happenings”

Stones and Glass

I should be worried. I knew the two baseball teams in Gotham City without having to look it up. I even knew which league each team is in. (For those of you wondering, Gotham City hosts the Monarchs, of the National League, and the Knights, of the American League. The Monarchs replaced the Griffins, whoContinue reading “Stones and Glass”