C.T. Phipps's Blog, page 65

Exploded View by Sam McPheeters review

    EXPLODED VIEW by Sam McPheeters is a neo-noir cyberpunk detective story which tales place in that delightfully sunny and depressed city of Los Angeles in the year 2050. The skyscrapers have been converted into government housing for the poor, television is completely interactive, and everything is watched at all times by the police.

    LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka is a lesbian and single mother who is suffering a mild case of depression due to the fact her w...

Dex (video game) review

    One of the elements which often gets ignored in modern gaming is the indie game. With so much focus on the Triple A games being released every year, those created by smaller studio are impulse buys and "until I have something else to play" at best--at least for most gamers. That means some surprising gems have been overlooked. One of these gems is one I'm going to take a moment to talk
about.

The combat isn't too far from Double Dragon.    Dex is a side-scrolli...

Assassins Creed: Origins review

    ASSASSINS CREED: ORIGINS is a bit of a late review because I've been taking my time with this game. I often have very positive first impressions of video games, only for my opinion to start to go down in the long haul--especially if they botch the ending. Fallout 4 is a game I really enjoyed but the sheer staggering number of half-measures ruined the experience for me. I also loved Deus Ex: Mankind Divided but the ending was a crash-landing on what was previously a great ri...

The United Federation of Charles 2017 Book Awards

Hey folks,
  It occurs to me that I have reviewed a staggering amount of stuff here on my blog but never was so arrogant to give out my own personalized awards. Well, I've decided to be every bit as arrogant as that decision deserves. This is going to be a collection of awards presented to those works of media that I feel like stood above the rest this year.

You may wonder why I'm presenting a bust of H.P. Lovecraft as my award. Well, for two reasons, the first is the World Fantasy Awards...

Covers for Winter of 2017 and all of 2018's books

Hey folks,

When you're commissioning new art for your books, it's sometimes better to buy in bulk or you can potentially get caught with your pants down. The artist for The Bright Falls Mysteries, Lucifer's Star, and Wraith Knight (Alex Raspad) has retired for instance. Thankfully, at least Lucifer's Star has all of its covers taken care of!

I thought I'd share some of my upcoming works' art, though, which gives you something of a sense of what's in the pipeline.

AGENT G

I've finished the manuscr...

SCPD: The Case of the Claw by Keith DeCandido review

     SCPD: THE CASE OF THE CLAW by Keith Decandido is an excellent work that I wish I'd known about earlier. The reasons are three fold. The first is that I'm a fan of Keith Decandido's writing with things like his work in Star Trek and World of Warcraft being ones I've often enjoyed. The second is that I was a big fan of Gotham Central which this series superficially resembles. Readers of both my reviews and novels will also know I'm a huge fan as well as producer of pros...

AGENT G: INFILTRATOR Kindle giveaway and ESOTERRORISM re-release!

Happy Black Friday, folks!

The first bit of good news is Amber Cove is having a HUGE sale on their books from November 24th to Monday 27th! Numerous novels of theirs are going to be available, free of charge, on Amazon Kindle including Agent G: Infiltrator!

“Black Technology has made murder a billion dollar industry.”

The International Refugee Society has twenty-six cybernetically enhanced “Letters,” and for the right price, they’ll eliminate anyone. They’ve given up their families and their me...

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline review

    READY PLAYER ONE is a combination of Willy Wonka and Snow Crash. It's kind of funny that this description appeared in a review of the Washington Post, except this was "Willy Wonka and The Matrix." I don't blame the Post for getting this wrong because there's not that many well known cyberpunk works in the mainstream media.

    However, the similarity to Willy Wonka is strong: an eccentric billionaire leaves his vast fortune to whatever child can solve his myst...

Politicizing genre fiction and why it bothers me

    I've been debating whether to do this blog post for a long time. Basically, I didn't think it was an issue and didn't warrant discussing but I've seen a lot of the sentiments I strongly disagreed with being echoed without argument. Basically, it's the argument of fictional conspiracy theories being dangerous, reactionary fantasy, or the idea of superheroes being a right wing power fantasy. It seems like three separate ideas but they both relate to the idea of a certain, let...

Valerian and the City of a 1000 Planets

    I really wish this movie had succeeded and this is one of the few times I'm writing a review because I'm encouraging people to give it a chance. It's not a film which I think is going to have quite the same staying power as The Fifth Element (which we'll get into below) but it probably should. It's entertaining throughout and while I can definitely see they shot the money, it's a beautiful world and I wouldn't mind Luc Besson having another crack at the series.

I like the mo...