Reviews and Comments

Look, I'll admit it - I'm a Niven fan from way back when Ringworld blew my teenage mind in the 80s. He is, though, at his best when his character (he only really has one, with a few carbon props moving around in the background) is exploring an artifact.

Here, the artifact is the society of Destiny, settled by humanity long enough for a distinct social order to emerge and individual cities to form their own cultures. Unfortuntely, I couldn't find it in myself to care that much, and when Jemmy did encounter something interesting he'd then go off and be boring for 20 pages.

I reread this as part of a book challenge in Another Place, and it still held up for me lo these many decades later.

James is very much the sort of boy that you usually met in the edgier British children's work, but still rang true to life as he dealt with both his family, indifferent friends and a poltergeist from 300 years earlier. it's the sort of work I'm slightly surprised was never adapted for television (unless it was, I haven't looked).

Fritz Leiber has as good a claim as anyone to being the father of urban fantasy, and this is well worth a read from a historical standpoint even though it's been surpassed by later works.

Interestingly, it seems more dated than "Conjure, Wife" which is almost explicitly set in the 1950s - perhaps the more precise grounding in time exempts it.

I naturally appreciate any book that quotes me. Karnicky's work looks at Olivia Jaimes' Nancy through a media studies lens, and picks it at the peak of its innovation. It's a short read but will worth it

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict: riots are bad.

Street Rebellion: they're cool and good actually.

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict: riots are bad.

This book: riots are cool and good and achieve outcomes, actually.

This book puts forward a fairly convincing case that Arthur was actually a Welsh warlord. I'm not in a position to judge the merits of the argument, but I will always be lost in the romance of being able to read the words of a man from a thousand years ago, and walk the land they may have walked.

This is a children's book, and should be judged by those standards.

I very much appreciated how this captured the interface between Australian mythology and western culture as a farming family deal fairly sensitively with something outside their ken, although there seemed to be a large gap where the First Nation people should be (perhaps excusable given the 1974 publication date, but perhaps not).

I'm a little surprised it didn't make it in as an Australian classic.

Also taking a month to read 140 pages of easy text is not a good look. Do better, Brett.

I started this when I was but a wee bairn, but for some reason I never finished it, and I've been wondering what happened ever since. What's the point of being an adult in 2024 if you can't fulfil childhood wishes?

I got really sick in the middle of reading this -it honestly doesn't take me a month to read a couple of hundred pages.

Vance's world is a dreamy, fin de siècle where the world is ending not with a bang but with a slow and decadent slide. His characters (with a few remarkable exceptions) are horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, speaking the sort of flowery language that make Fritz Lieber seem like he's writing a Norse saga, but somehow it all works and you're immersed in it.

Few writers could pull off dialogue like

“We go in the mental frame of adventure, aggressiveness, zeal. Thus does fear vanish and the ghosts become creatures of mind-weft; thus does our élan burst the under-earth terror.”

or

"Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man’s brightest dreamings they walked, until the concentration of so much fire and spirit and creativity put them into awe. “What great minds lie in the dust,” said Guyal in a low voice. “What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvellous creatures are lost past the remotest memory … Nevermore will there be the like; now in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery.”

(both from the closing novella, Guyal of Sfere)

completely straight-faced and have it work, but Vance manages it. It's pulpy and funny and cynical and reasonably unlike anything else I know of (though I need to investigate M. John Harrison's The Pastel City which I suspect may have the same energy).