FerretBrain

at 01:10 on 10-03-2018 link Robinson L - well, there's never a surfeit of plot in the books; things do happen, of course, but the atmosphere and the mystery and the language are more salient to what the books are trying to do. I'm not sure whether audiobook is a good way to read them, either - the beauty of the prose seems like it might get lost with a bad narrator? (But i don't like audiobooks all that well to start with, so i'm definitely not necessarily a great judge.) But in any case - yeah, i expected to hate th...

at 02:58 on 09-03-2018 link Holy shit, i just finished Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy and i am dying for people to talk about it with. I didn't even expect to like the books, but they were amazing. I feel broken open by the experience.

at 20:41 on 27-02-2018 link As someone who loves basically all the Hainish novels, despite their myriad flaws -- i am all for there to be more stuff about them here, Arthur, and i look forward to your reviews! (I haven't been around much recently for many reasons, but one is that i think Star Wars is fashy and terrible. But i'm glad y'all are having fun discussing it here!)

at 07:14 on 23-05-2017 link Yeah, i thought it was a good obit, and shed a lot of light on how difficult shit was for her. I wish she were better-known in her own right (i haven't read her writing at all, but her jewelry is also spectacular).

at 08:20 on 22-05-2017 link Anne Dick has died. She was a writer in her own right, as well as having been Philip K.'s badly-mistreated third wife.

at 21:45 on 04-04-2017 link OMG OMG EVERYONE. Ruthanna Emrys' first novel is out. It's a follow-up to a novella she wrote for Tor, "Litany of Earth", which is one of the finest pieces of fiction I've ever read. It's Mythos fiction informed by the Holocaust, and the Jewish diaspora in general, and it is amazing. The book is called Winter Tide and i don't actually know if it's released in the UK yet. Anyway, read Litany if nothing ...

at 00:18 on 02-03-2017 link I'm kind of a compulsive proofreader, i'm afraid. If Arthur or any of the rest of you ever want a quick proof of something pre-posting, let me know, i'm always happy to help if i have the time.

at 23:33 on 01-03-2017 link There's a couple other errors in there too, including that i think you mean Kuttner in this sentence:

This is the first of Price’s stories of the alien city-state of Bel Yarnak.

at 23:29 on 01-03-2017 link Hey Arthur, i'm just catching up on the last couple months of FB stuff, and i noticed you seem to have accidentally a word in the Bloch/Kuttner review. Specifically, you're missing a verb somewhere in here:

...though the strange hybrid creatures that a renegade Egyptian priesthood supposedly do seem to riff on some of the monsters seen in Lovecraft’s Under the Pyramids.

at 00:26 on 25-10-2016 link Arthur, you seriously need to hire yourself out writing titles for people who are bad at them. Your titling game is ON POINT.

at 08:19 on 21-08-2016 link Yeah, me linking the essay does not constitute 100% agreement with all its points or anything. I thought it was hilarious, and had some insight. But at this point i'm definitely done with this conversation, you folks have fun without me.

at 00:35 on 21-08-2016 link In re Tolkien vs Mein Kampf - Tolkien does posit certain classes or species of beings as uniquely and irredeemably evil? And the world has to be restored from a Dark Age by an Anointed King? I mean, I wouldn't make the comparison myself but i also don't think it's as much of a stretch as you're making it out to be.

at 07:26 on 20-08-2016 link Bill - Arthur B can certainly speak to Moorcock's oeuvre better than I can, but afaik, while his novels are mostly about how some people have Special Destinies, those people are neither (necessarily) aristocrats nor AT ALL exalted in any way by said destinies. Having a Special Destiny in a Moorcock novel is generally a recipe for grinding efforts toward getting anything done at all. Moorcock has a lot of problems -- not least of them that his name is, as Metafilter would say, eponysterica...

at 07:41 on 19-08-2016 link I had totally forgotten about this Moorcock essay, which may be of interest to some other folks around here. :)

at 08:28 on 01-07-2016 link James D: I wasn't communicating clearly, i think. My position is that there's PLENTY of both action and "whoa awesome" moments in the book; they're just things that the book shows you on its own terms. (Or in your case apparently didn't, which makes me sad! But i know that no book is for everyone.) There's a couple books i need to read before i try to write a review of Shockwave Rider, but once I am moved I plan to do that, and then write the thing and hope Ferretbrain will publish it. :D

at 08:23 on 01-07-2016 link Cheriola, Robinson L : Thanks for the congrats! I certainly never expected, at my age, to find someone i was interested in marrying, much less someone who was interested in marrying ME!