Yesterday I saw the long-awaited and supremely-hyped superhero movie, Avengers: Endgame. It’s the finale of 22 (were there really that many?) movies starring superhero characters from Marvel comics, a cycle that began with Ironman in 2008. Of the six or seven I’ve actually seen, there were various levels of quality from awesome to “meh” but […]
Never trust a “best of steampunk” list (unless it’s one of mine.) The genre is so eclectic and quirky that there are bound to be entries that aren’t steampunk at all. I found Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl in “10 Best Steampunk Novels 2019” on bookconsumers.com. The title sounds right and the cover hints at […]
Adventures in Alternate History When I saw this book on a list of best steampunk novels, I remembered that I’d seen its author, Naomi Novik, on a panel at Phoenix Comicon a few years back. She’d talked about her book series which featured “the Napoleonic Wars with dragons.” What a great idea! It may be […]
I have a confession to make: Steampunk has been my gateway drug to a wider world of literature. It has gotten me interested in the classics, starting with sci-fi pioneers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Recently as I was browsing in Bookmans (an Arizona retail chain specializing in used books) I came across […]
I don’t know how it happened, but Madeleine Holly-Rosing’s “Boston Metaphysical Society” escaped my notice until quite recently. It began in 2013 as a series of graphic novels. Her recent prose adaptation, “Boston Metaphysical Society: Storm of Secrets”, was published just this year. The story takes place in an alternate history in which powerful families […]
Ever since I read his 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson has been one of my favorite authors. He writes in a broad variety of genres, including the “Baroque Cycle” historical fiction series. His 2017 novel The Rise And Fall of D.O.D.O., co-authored with Nicole Galland, is an interesting twist on the theme of […]
I don’t collect as many kinds of things as I used to (no more room!) but I still love to buy signed books, particularly if they’re by local authors. A few years ago, I got a copy of a slim book called Cibola’s Promise at a convention and promptly forgot about it. I rediscovered it while […]
