The Peace War by Vernor Vinge 304pp (Paperback) My Rating: 7.5/10 Amazon Rating: 4.5/5 LibraryThing Rating: 3.85/5 Good Reads Rating: 3.80/5 “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” – Vishnu, by way of J. Robert Oppenheimer Vernor Vinge has developed into one of the greatest science fiction authors of the last few decades, despite producing barely more than a half-dozen full length novels in his career. His last three books have all won the Hugo award for the […]

For many years, back before I decided that choosing favorites was a no-win proposition, The Abyss held a rather bizarre distinction for me: it was both my favorite book and my favorite movie. This is bizarre, of course, because novelizations of movies are very rarely good, much less great, and film adaptations of books very rarely manage to capture the full power of an exceptional novel. But Orson Scott Card and James Cameron created such an exceptional pair of complementary […]

Robert Asprin, author of the Myth and Phule series and one of the original editors of Thieves’ World, died yesterday. As I mentioned in my review of Dragons Wild earlier this week, he was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up, and I’ve read and reread his early books probably dozens of times. Though Asprin had a very difficult personal life for many years that was reflected in his professional struggles, he at least was able to […]

Dragons Wildby Robert Asprin368pp (Trade Paperback)My Rating: 6/10Amazon Rating: 4.6/5LibraryThing Rating: 3/5Goodreads Rating: 3.3/5 Dragons Wild is Robert Asprin’s return to solo writing after a long run of co-authored books and marks the beginning of a new humorous fantasy series from the author of the Myth and Phule’s Company books. Though his best work is now nearly twenty years old and many of his recent efforts have been uneven (and that’s being generous), Dragons Wild shows glimmers of Asprin’s previous […]

God’s Demonby Wayne Barlowe352pp (Hardcover)My Rating: 7/10Amazon Rating: 4.5/5LibraryThing Rating: 4/5Goodreads Rating: 3.57/5 Wayne Barlowe’s God’s Demon is a lengthy response to a short, though complicated, question: is redemption possible for even those who have committed the worst sin imaginable? In order to answer this question he presents a sort of case study of a being whose sin goes far beyond any action of which a mere human is capable. God’s Demon is the story of Sargatanas, a seraph who […]