Joseph’s Comments (group member since Oct 24, 2012)

Joseph’s comments from the Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" group.

I started Fearsome Magics, edited by Jonathan Strahan -- I read his Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy a few years back. Not sure how much actual S&S it'll include, but it does have a good lineup of authors.

Finished Sagas of Conan. My review. Short version: Not actively terrible, but not all that necessary either.

As I mentioned in the group reads thread, I'm currently reading Sagas of Conan, a collection of three relatively late de Camp & Carter (I assume mostly de Camp) Conan volumes originally published by Bantam. They're ... competent?

Slight correction: Turns out that Sagas of Conan is not taken from the Lancer series -- it's a reprint of Conan the Swordsman, Conan the Liberator and Conan and the Spider God, all of which were published by Bantam years after the end of the original Lancer series.

Started Sagas of Conan, which extracts some of the completely original stories by L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg from the original Lancer Conan series. So far, not great literature, but sufficiently entertaining -- I think it's hard for many people to divorce their evaluation of the stories on their own terms from their opinion of de Camp & Carter's meddling with the Conan series as a whole.

I've actually been rewatching Record of Lodoss War recently, which I highly recommend -- it's very much a D&D-inspired high fantasy story (possibly based on the creator's D&D campaign?). Bonus points for the pronunciation of "elf" and "dwarf" in the original Japanese audio.

Greg wrote: "As for my own reading, I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes yesterday and One Piece, Volume 02: Buggy the Clown. While there was sorcery in the former there was much swordcraft and a touch of sorcery in the latter, but neither would be your typical S&S books!"

I haven't read any One Piece (my mind still can't handle reading manga right-to-left) but I've watched about 300 episodes of the anime.

Am I the only one who kind of wants to see Captain Jack Sparrow meet Monkey D. Luffy?

Greg wrote: "Sounds like you're experiencing some nice Star Wars saturation there! ..."

It's one of my favorite saturations.

Greg wrote: "Unless you have a good book to read on the bus?"

Fortunately, my Kindle is never far away.

And fortunately, the snow didn't actually start until late afternoon, so I was able to get to the theater & back for a second screening without difficulty. (And on the way there & back I was reading Battlefront - Twilight Company, which is shaping up to be much better than I would've expected, given that it's ostensibly based on a first-person Star Wars shooter that doesn't even have a single-player campaign.)

Greg wrote: "How was the movie?"

I liked it a lot -- thought it was better as a movie than Force Awakens, although from a character standpoint I might still prefer Rey, Finn and Poe. Am hoping to see it again tomorrow, but that'll depend on the weather -- if we get all of the snow &c., that makes the thought of sitting on a bus to the theater & back much less attractive.

Richard wrote: "Joseph wrote: "Richard wrote: "I'm reading Children of the Lion by Peter Danielson. This story is historical fiction and is about Abraham leading his people out of Egypt to conquer and claim lands ..."

Have you read them before? I generally enjoyed them as historical novels (although I have no idea how well-researched they were. The one thing I remember that really rubbed me the wrong way (somewhere in one of the early books, I think?) was (view spoiler)[a "magician" who was able to use mass hypnosis/the power of suggestion to make crowds of people think they were seeing literal flying demons; at that point, you might as well just shrug your shoulders and make him a real magician summoning real demons, which is just as plausible. (hide spoiler)]

I remember there were a number of similar series (family dynasty/romance, right down to the same style of cover), but most of them were more colonial/Western or early 20th Century in their setting, which wasn't nearly as appealing as ancient near east and Egypt.

Richard wrote: "I'm reading Children of the Lion by Peter Danielson. This story is historical fiction and is about Abraham leading his people out of Egypt to conquer and claim lands in Canaan. Even though the char..."

Wow, I read the first ... dozen? of those back in the day. Mostly really enjoyed them at the time. Have sometimes been tempted to pick up the last five or six volumes and go back to them.

I fell down the Star Wars rabbit hole again -- just finished Catalyst - A Rogue One Novel (in preparation for seeing the movie tomorrow) and started Battlefront - Twilight Company by Alexander Freed.

Raoul wrote: "Wow my To Read list has just tripled in size. I better get to it! Just one question about Clark Ashton Smith, and I suppose it applies to Weirdbook and others as well: How can I separate the more p..."

For Smith, if you want the more sword & sorcery-inflected stuff, I'd recommend trying the stories set in Zothique (far, far, far future where all of the continents have merged into one and magic & demons abound), Hyperborea (lost continent) or maybe Poseidonis (the last bit of sinking Atlantis).

Someday I need to revisit the Lumley books, even if he is a proponent of the Derlethian Heresy.

Myself, I just started River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay, which I'm very much looking forward to.

No, looks like it's just UK at the moment. Sigh.

Edited to add: "Coming to America in January 2017." Reading is hard.

And here's hoping that they include a fair amount of back catalog, and that their pricing isn't ridiculous. Which, it's GW, so ...

Greg wrote: "It would be a very alien earth to us by the sounds of it! ..."

It is! That's one of the things that's always drawn me to the book.

Greg wrote: "Yeah I'd agree that Reynolds would probably take a more technical/scientific approach. Does the moon still orbit the earth in Dark is the Sun? ..."

I don't think so. I'd have to check the text (which I can't because I don't have the eBook) but I think that at one point in the past the moon might have been turned into a mini-sun? And there have probably been multiple moons at various points over the past fifteen billion years.

Oh, and it's also mentioned that the Earth's orbit has been shifted multiple times as the Sun went through various stages of stellar evolution and decline.

Greg wrote: "OK. So the light is coming from other galaxies that are now much closer to Earth while our own galaxy is collapsing in on itself so that our star system is much nearer to the brighter core of the galaxy - or something like that? ..."

Yeah, something like that. Also, Earth's rotation is now 142 hours, so people wake & sleep multiple times in a single "day". There's at least one part of the sky that's dark, so there's something approaching night when the place you're standing is rotating to face that, but I'm not sure whether it's actually dark or just "2:00 a.m. Alaskan summer" dark.

(Edited to add: And I don't think Farmer gave a lot of thought to the actual physics or anything -- he just described it in a way that seemed cool and appropriate to the story. Would be interesting to see, say, Alastair Reynolds' take on a similar setting.)

Greg wrote: "Joseph wrote: "Ahhh, Gamma World! It's been ages since I played it! But Dark is the Sun is intriguing for its 15 billion-year future earth! It seems unlikely that humans will be around then as the cover art seems to suggest, though advanced sentient life might exist in another form. And if the planet is 'sunless' what provides the earth with daylight? Sorry if I'm being a bit picky on this! :P "

Yes, it's one of those futures where somehow humans have managed to survive more-or-less in their present form, although currently sunken into barbarism and roaming a world littered with the ruins of past civilizations (from which they frequently scavenge, although some things are just flat-out incomprehensible). Plus genetically-engineered cats & dogs and the odd race of photosynthesis-using centaur plant-men. Hence Gamma World.

If I'm understanding the setting correctly (it's a bit challenging because it's mostly being filtered through the perceptions of the aforementioned primitive humans), most of the light is coming from the sky at large -- this is one of those universes where expansion eventually slowed and reversed itself, and now everything is coming back together into what will eventually be a new singularity.