Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 17
August 9, 2015
An incomplete list of games I made between the ages of 10 and 14
Not this one. But I did own it!
The last podcast I recorded got me thinking about my nascent interest in game design when I was growing up.
It was an…odd hobby, especially because it was nigh impossible to find anyone who’d play my games with me (my sister actively avoided the, in retrospect, pretty unappealing task!) so I could improve them. But that didn’t stop me; I’d spend hours drawing game boards on cereal boxes, cutting out cards from scrapbook paper and gluing together game pieces fro...
August 5, 2015
Episode 21 – Dungeoneering Edition
Larry Elmore’s gonna getcha!
I found a stack of TSR Endless Quest Booksat the dump.After that, this podcast was inevitable.
https://ia601506.us.archive.org/30/items/OLSP21DungeoneeringEdition/OLSP21_Dungeoneering_Edition.mp3Download the Podcast(archive.org page)
Theme song:
Five Armies byKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Episode 21: Dungeoneering Edition
Larry Elmore’s gonna getcha!
I found a stack of TSR Endless Quest Booksat the dump.After that, this podcast was inevitable.
https://ia601506.us.archive.org/30/items/OLSP21DungeoneeringEdition/OLSP21_Dungeoneering_Edition.mp3Download the Podcast(archive.org page)
Theme song:
Five Armies byKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
July 31, 2015
“Better than Under Heaven”
I am on record for not liking Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay’s first outing into medieval China. For that reason, it took me longer than usual to pick up River of Stars, which uses the same setting, albeit a few hundred years later. I shouldn’t have hesitated: River of Stars is a fine novel, carefully structured and hitting just the right emotional pitch in the last portions to keep me reading well past midnight.
An odd swing in taste, since stylistically River of Stars has many elements in...
July 30, 2015
Clockwork Canada’s contents revealed
…at Black Gate.
My story, “Strange Things Done”, among them, in whichthe Klondike holds more than mere gold in its soil.
The anthology will see print in the springof 2016.
July 26, 2015
Episode 20 – Stuff Teenagers Read (Past Tense)
Well, it had a dragon on the cover.
Young Adult literature is a Thing now, but it wasn’t when Marie and I grew up! Join as as we talk about the books we read as teenagers and realize with dawning horror that we had terrible, terrible taste.
Warning folks, this one’s a long one.
https://ia601503.us.archive.org/13/items/StuffTeenagersRead/Stuff%20Teenagers%20Read.mp3Download the Podcast(archive.org page)
Blog post: Underground Reading – Dragonlance Chronicles
Book ment...
<![endif]--><!--[if lt IE 9]>July 5, 2015
Quick Anthology Reviews
One of the advantages of having an ereader is that I can now easily get books from small presses that were difficult to get my paws on in print. I’ve therefore been on a bit of an anthology binge lately, tearing through three anthologies from three small presses, each of them an interesting collection of stories that show how valuable the sf small press scene really is.
Irregularity – Jurassic London (2014)
You’d think there’d be more science fiction about the history of science, but there r...
June 30, 2015
Zeppelins online
A while back I posted about my dilemma after Eggplant Literary Productions shut down: what was I going to do with my novella serial Zeppelins are What Dreams are Made of, which was set for publication no longer?
Turns out I’m going for Option 4: publishing it as a serial online.
As I initially wrote the first short story in a serial-like format, i.e., releasing it in small chunks to my friends, it seems like a natural fit.
Follow the adventures of dimension-hopping assassin Jennifer Asten as...
June 19, 2015
Three Weird Westerns
I’ve read three weird westerns more-or-less consecutively in the past few weeks: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King, The Half-made World by Felix Gilman and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. The first two have far more in common than the last, and deWitt’s novel falls under the description more by its dream-like nature and by evoking cosmic horror rather than any overt supernatural elements.
Weird westerns seem like a natural genre development to me. Westerns evoke an Americ...
June 17, 2015
A Forgotten Scientific Romance
I was browsing the British Library’s Flickr photostream, of all places, when I stumbled across a full PDF scan of the 1895 novel Fifteen Hundred Miles and Hour by Charles Dixon. The title refers to the speed of a spaceship built by a Dr. Hermann which ends up transporting him and three other stalwart individuals, as well as a dog, from England to the planet Mars. Keep in mind, The War of the Worlds wasn’t serialized until 1897. Here we have another example of early scientific romance that I...
