
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Heavy Metal Spring 1988

Saturday, April 5, 2025
Book Review: Berserker Man
Thursday, April 3, 2025
At the Green Valley Book Fair
Monday, March 31, 2025
Playboy March 1975
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Book Review: Nameless Places
Monday, March 24, 2025
The Last Frontier
Via Castalia House > the Worlds Between Wasteland and Sky blog, I've learned that over at the 'Fictional Influence' Substack, which is maintained by Kristin McTiernan, there is a lengthy interview between McTiernan and Beau L'Amour, the son of the western writer Louis L'Amour.
The interview touches on L'Amour's efforts to maintain his father's legacy by issuing new editions of selected titles, as well as unpublished novels. L'Amour must contend with perceptions by people in the publishing industry that 'men don't read.'
Beau L'Amour has some interesting observations about how boys learn to read, and what sort of content appeals to them:
I really started reading compulsively with Lester Dent’s amazing (though today probably dated) Doc Savage series. This was considered adventure fiction for a general audience, adults and kids, in the 1930s. I read the Bantam reprints in the 1960s and 70s.
If you crossed a down-to-earth “superhero” like Ironman’s Tony Stark and injected him into the mystery, political thriller and science fiction genres, that’s pretty much who Clark Savage Jr. was. It was very male oriented, with lots of action, exploration and gadgets (Dent, along with writing hundreds of short stories and magazine novels invented telephone answering machines, garage door openers and mine detectors for the US navy). I also devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, and later Larry Niven. A lot of kids of my generation read Ray Bradbury, a real poet. He might be kind of underappreciated these days … certainly he was under appreciated by us when we were youngsters.
All of this was hard hitting, fast moving, and relatively short fiction. Great stuff! Today the material for kids and young people is too careful … or too transgressive! It’s too inward looking, too slow paced, and not technical enough to really activate a boy.
Personally, I don't have high hopes that the industry is going to make any concerted effort to engage with men. All I have to do is walk through my nearest Target store and see the shelving for books, either in the dedicated book section, or in the 'impulse buy' racks at the checkout line: titles by, and for, women. Like the novels of Sarah Maas and Rebecca Yarrow. That's where the money is.
The sci-fi novels I review here at my blog are artifacts of the popular culture as it was forty to sixty years ago, when there was no internet, no smartphones, no podcasting, and no social media. TV had maybe 15 - 30 channels, if you paid extra for 'cable.' And a video game console meant an Atari system, with 8-bit graphics rendered on your 25-inch, picture tube color TV. Nowadays, there's simply so much more content that is available at the press of a button, or a swipe across a screen...............
Friday, March 21, 2025
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Music from the 21st Century
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Book Review: The Second Sleep
‘The Second Sleep’ takes place in the UK, some 1,500 years after a vaguely described cataclysm that occurred in the 2020s propelled the country to a quasi-medieval level of civilization. Life is nasty, brutal, and short, and the church the sole arbiter of learning. The upper echelons of the clergy are intent on prohibiting any revivals of ancient technologies, as these are seen as challenges to the supremacy of the church. The violators of church edicts are eligible for summary prosecution, and execution, for ‘heresy.’
As the novel opens a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is traveling to the village of Addicott, in Wessex, there to see to the funeral of the village parson, one Father Thomas Lacy. Fairfax learns that Lacy tread dangerously close to heresy, possessing forbidden books about the ancients, and prone to digging for artifacts in the middens scattered around Wessex.
While Fairfax is callow, he also is curious, and his inquiries into the manner of father Lacy’s passing, and the information presented in the deceased man’s collections of texts and artifacts, lead him into attitudes and beliefs that will contradict all he has been taught by the church. Fairfax makes a fateful decision to extend his stay in Addicott, and in so doing, joins a clandestine project to learn more about the ancients. A project that could earn all its participants the scaffold……
As I mentioned earlier, ‘The Second Sleep’ certainly is not the first novel to take as its topic a post-apocalyptic Britain, where the awareness of the destroyed past keeps percolating up into the consciousness of the present-day population. Edmund Cooper visited this trope in his excellent novel ‘The Cloud Walker’ (1973), Richard Cowper with his 'Road to Corlay' trilogy (1978), and Keith Roberts in his novel ‘Kiteworld’ (1985). Like those novels, ‘The Second Sleep’ focuses on the conflict between humanism and religion, and between orthodoxy and innovation.
However, while ‘The Second Sleep’ is a well-written novel, with smoothly flowing prose, it lacks the imaginative power of the novels from Cooper, Corlay, and Roberts. The plot of ‘Second Sleep’ takes its time unfolding, and is subordinate to characterization, setting, and atmosphere. And the denouement has a desultory quality.
While I certainly wasn’t expecting Fairfax to discover a Vault, access its armory, grab some Power Armor and a Gatling Laser, and lay waste to Wessex, I was anticipating something more impactful than what occupies the last 15 pages of ‘The Second Sleep.’
If you have the patience for a small-scale novel that unfolds at a very slow pace towards a rather underwhelming ending, then you might like ‘The Second Sleep.’ But if you want something a little livelier, you’ll want to look elsewhere.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
The Eternals the Complete Collection
