Casting my memory back lo these many years (those of you who know my actual age may snicker) I think I can trace my own fascination with alternate history to an epigraph for a chapter in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Fountains of Paradise. Almost all the Alternative History computer simulations suggested that the
Speaking of Faith is pretty darn awesome as radio programs go. The tag line is “… conversation about religion, meaning, ethics and ideas …” (formerly “… conversation about belief, meaning, ethics and ideas …”, which in my mind scans better). These topics do produce fantastic conversations, and I’ve encountered quite a few of them just by
So I’ve got this friend who, with a few compatriots, is in the beginning throes of a new weblog. And while the writers may be a bit alarmed if we actually turn our attention to them (those of you at Harvard in April 2001 may remember a certain Matt W. response to “neo-fascist refutations of
To begin, Guy Gavriel Kay‘s Fionavar Tapestry, a trilogy comprising The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road. Kay worked with Christopher Tolkien in compiling The Silmarillion, so he learned from the best. (On occasion when I have said this I have been corrected that this only proves Kay learned from the canon. I stand
Today’s topic being Roger Zelazny‘s Lord of Light. I’m going according to my own personal order of precedence: Lord of Light is in my opinion perhaps not the best, but certainly the coolest, thing next to Dune. It’s by far the best of the few Zelazny works I have read (although “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is similar enough),
Because, well, why not? Personally, I am a proper Dune fanatic. Dune is the War and Peace of speculative fiction, and, yes, I say that believing War and Peace is the greatest novel yet written. Dune, too, encompasses everything: War Peace Guerrilla tactics Religion Fanaticism Time Space (tesseracts) Love Death Psychology Compromise Ecology Legend &c…
Appreciations of two great sets of stories/sketches: especially elegant metaphors for the tiny but devastatingly important processes driving the human mind.
On the opening of the new Star Trek movie, I had to make sure you got your dose of Klingons. So here it is: Floris Schönfeld has written a Klingon Opera, which was performed at the Water Mill in New York. NPR did a story on it today and provided a link to the Klingon-Terran
