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I’ve been thinking about Avatar a lot since I first saw it a couple of weeks ago.  In particular, I’ve been wondering what the moral message might be of arguably the most popular film of the year.  There’s a lot that can be said about Avatar and I’m not going to go into everything in [...]

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I Picked up The Affinity Bridge by George Mann because I was looking for a fun steampunk adventure, and that’s exactly what it is. The novel follows the adventures of Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes. The novel begins [...]

A recent survey that listed MacGyver and Buffy as the top two action heroes ever on tv has prompted a post on Tor.com imagining a cage match between the two.  As a fan of both shows, I found this post irresistable.  My attempt at imagining the match is in the comments.

A couple months ago, I found out about a senryu (something like haiku) contest on spacewesterns.com.  I spent a couple minutes composing a poem and submitted it.  I then promptly forgot all about it, until yesterday.  I went back to the site to see if results had been posted.  Not surprisingly, I didn’t win.  But [...]

I’ve been thinking today about a Neal Stephenson interview where he talks about why he doesn’t answer emails.  I haven’t been able to find the interview that I remember, but Stephenson has apparently written and spoken on this topic quite a bit.  I found an essay that he had written called “Bad Correspondent“, but it [...]

This weekend, the Decatur Book Festival is taking place.  My experience of the festival started yesterday morning at 6:30 when I reported to the volunteer table to help with set up.  My primary task was to help unload cars for exhibitors in the pink zone (the area right in front of the current court house.)  [...]

Tor.com launched yesterday.  Here’s my general impression:

It’s a great collection of science fiction and fantasy art.
It’s the beginning of a great collection of fiction.
It’s a promising blog.
It’s a mediocre discussion board.
It’s a social networking site, which is somewhat annoying.

All of this is not surprising.  Tor is a traditional publisher, so their site works extremely well [...]

I wrote a couple months ago about the Tor promotion “Watch the Skies” and since then, I’ve managed to collect 20 or so free ebooks (of which I’ve read 20 or so pages.)  There has been an interesting internet discussion about whether or not giving away these ebooks has actually helped the sales of the [...]

Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher Tor has been running a promotion for a new web site they will be launching called “Watch the Skies.”  (I believe that this is the name of both the promotion and the coming web site.)  The new site sounds great.  It sounds like Tor is looking to make the premier [...]

Here is my review of the novel, Night Watch.
I read Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch after having already seen the films based on it. The movie Night Watch is more or less a faithful adaptation of the first section of the book with a few embellishments. The movie Day Watch is a much looser [...]