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I enjoyed Earthsea, although the first three books and the last one are clearly pitched at a young adult audience (numbers four and five maybe are as well). _The Left Hand of …
26 Nov 2008, 19:12
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Indubitably. I may feel outgunned when discussing Wolfean hermeneutics, but I am quite confident on this particular matter. Adam…
26 Nov 2008, 19:08
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Michael Moorcock: "Behold the Man." Adam…
26 Nov 2008, 19:04
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Did he have a lobotomy before "Battlefield Earth," then? I suffered through it in high school sometime, and even *I*, who would read ANYTHING, could tell it sucked. Adam…
24 Nov 2008, 22:29
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Noooooo! That's not true! That's IMPOSSIBLE!…
24 Nov 2008, 03:54
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Are you my mother? Adam…
21 Nov 2008, 16:57
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Someone will probably end up with his or her throat torn out. It's not a Wolfe story without at least one werewolf. Adam…
17 Nov 2008, 21:08
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I always *thought* this was the vial full of the alzabo memory-drug that Severian will have to drink in _Citadel_. The phallus....well, it is one of the two active principles …
13 Nov 2008, 14:54
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I don't think that association is considered canonical. Adam…
09 Nov 2008, 17:12
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Oh now. Now I've done it. I have this *image* in my head I can't get rid of. So I'm going to inflict it on all the rest of you, because misery shared is misery lessened. It…
09 Nov 2008, 17:06
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That happens easily when you're a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Adam…
09 Nov 2008, 16:57
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Well, I do like the trinitarian aspect with Malrubius's ghost as Father and Thecla's as Holy Spirit. I hadn't looked at the relationship *that* way before. Adam…
09 Nov 2008, 16:21
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I can promise you'll get almost exactly your money's worth. Adam…
09 Nov 2008, 04:52
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"Someone hit the big score. They figured it out, That we're gonna do it anyway, Even if it doesn't pay." Ah, Gillian Welch. That's a gorgeous and bitter song there. "Eve…
07 Nov 2008, 18:06
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I just like saying "D??gie Hauser." Adam…
07 Nov 2008, 03:41
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If you can whip up hissy mp3s, I can use Audacity to make them less- hissy at the expense of some loss of brightness. On the other hand, since there are actual musicians on the l…
06 Nov 2008, 22:30
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This might be true. It is certainly what _Expanded Universe_ says. But it does not appear to be what the text of _Starship Troopers_ says. There's an excellent essay by David Gi…
06 Nov 2008, 21:50
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The movie was an excellent adaptation of a cover of a book by Robert A. Heinlein! Adam…
06 Nov 2008, 21:46
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But he was a man[*] of convictions! Adam [*] Technically, ex-man.…
06 Nov 2008, 19:14
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I thought it did. I enjoyed it a lot. Adam…
05 Nov 2008, 15:31
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Aw, you're just saying that because my name's Thornton. Adam…
04 Nov 2008, 19:17
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I haven't seen it, but one could argue the novella suffers the same flaw. Well, *most* of Lovecraft does. The reveal is much less scary than the build-up, most of the time. T…
04 Nov 2008, 18:12
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One can make the argument that "The Dunwich Horror" is like that precisely *because* it is a Machen pastiche, and Arthur Machen was a Christian who did not share the Lovecrafti…
03 Nov 2008, 21:11
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If it helps, I'm quite hairy, and I've always imagined Severian as a body-hairless metrosexual skinny white boy. Adam…
01 Nov 2008, 18:22
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Well, I liked it, but then I'm a GURPS player. Adam…
29 Oct 2008, 22:52
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"Bats with Baby Faces" -- anyone fancy having a go at the Eliot connection? Adam…
29 Oct 2008, 21:31
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Note that "The Dunwich Horror," one of the finest HPL tales (S.T. Joshi, usually quite good, totally misses the mark here; Ken Hite nails it in his "Tour de Lovecraft"), is som…
29 Oct 2008, 04:21
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Oh, there's a whole Lovecraftian thread on how Old Wizards Never Die...see "The Thing on the Doorstep," for example. But it wouldn't be exactly a shock to find that Gideon was a…
28 Oct 2008, 15:18
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Hm. I took that as an ironic "mysterious disappearance." As in, "the landlord took everything, sold it on eBay, and then lied about it and said he had no idea, none whatsoeve…
25 Oct 2008, 17:37
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I imagine the lining as red, but that might be from one cover or another. I never imagined the exterior as ornamented. For some reason "red embroidery on the cloak" makes me th…
24 Oct 2008, 17:28
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In no particular order, off the top of my head, *I* think the really good stuff is: _The Call of Cthulhu_ _The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath_ _At the Mountains of Madness_ "Pick…
15 Oct 2008, 03:30
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That certainly gives the watch another dimension, doesn't it? Adam…
14 Oct 2008, 03:34
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For some reason, this reminded me of the conversation between Marlowe and Sternwood in _The Big Sleep_. You know, "Orchids remind me too much of dead men's flesh." Also, of c…
13 Oct 2008, 02:55
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Yeah, that was it. Adam…
10 Oct 2008, 15:49
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A-HA! Now I need to go back through _EG_ and see if I can find the passage that made me jump and say "Wait, isn't that 'Memorare'?" because there *was* one. Adam…
10 Oct 2008, 15:39
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Sure. Which is why all the color focus has to mean something. Has she? Why yes. Yes, it is. And the first scene *makes no sense* as a framing device. Right? I mean, *The P…
07 Oct 2008, 04:06
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I'd say they were an essential ingredient in a Render Unto Caesar salad dressing, myself. They give it its characteristic gold color. Adam…
05 Oct 2008, 22:17
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.... Huh. And here I'd always assumed that eating someone's BRAAAAAAAIN and taking over their memory and personality would simply be a competitive advantage in eating their f…
01 Oct 2008, 21:42
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I don't think it's in _Master of the Curators_. I'm not convinced it's even in the New Sun books, actually. But the passage you quoted: Here's Wolfe messing with us again. Of c…
01 Oct 2008, 14:22
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Somewhere--and I don't remember where--Severian also recoils when seeing a particular book, because it seems to him like he's suddenly run across a rotting corpse. Can someone…
30 Sep 2008, 14:55
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This scene establishes Nessus as Buenos Aires. The blind librarian is Borges. I believe that Cyby is a Gary-Stu. Mostly, I think it's a big tip of the hat to Borges and his …
29 Sep 2008, 15:45
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In my younger days. Oh. That question wasn't directed at me, was it? Adam…
23 Sep 2008, 04:17
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Yeah, there are a few D&D kids here. Gary Gygax did die a few months ago, and the earlier editions were pretty clear about where the inspiration came from. A lot of people, s…
21 Sep 2008, 05:46
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If you want Pynchonesque Stephenson, it'd have to be the Baroque Cycle: really really long, full of awful puns, and dotted with occasional non-sequitur musical numbers. Seriou…
16 Sep 2008, 04:33
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One question. Does the ending suck? Stephenson can't write endings. That's a lot of why I liked the Baroque Cycle. 3000 pages of fun, so the 30-page crap ending wasn't too ba…
16 Sep 2008, 04:27
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Throw it in a deep pit. That always works. No one ever escapes from deep pits. Adam…
14 Aug 2008, 23:26
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I could never decide whether it was meant to remind us that this was not really Latin and that translations (including, of course, the one from Severian's tongue into English!)…
21 Jul 2008, 16:29
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Free bullets at Brunians' house! Adam…
21 Jul 2008, 05:19
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At the risk of being really snarky, have you ever held a real job? Adam…
17 Jul 2008, 03:29
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is it actually a permitted doctrine in Catholicism that faith in non-Christian religions can have salvific power? Doesn't that explicitly contradict John 14…
16 Jul 2008, 18:17
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