Starship Fonzie

If you're in a mood to read about nice, friendly monsters instead of brutal, bloodthirsty ones, then Travis Baldree's book Legends & Lattes is for you. It's a very pleasant read, and time well spent. Meet Viv. She's a gigantic orc who has grown tired of pillaging and killing. Her one heart's desire is to hang up her sword for good. And then? Why, she wants to open up a coffee house! Wait, what? You read right. She finds a suitable place in the town of Thune and, with a little help from an industrious hob named Cal (short for Calamity), converts it from a livery stable into a cozy place, complete with kitchen. Then she gets her coffee making machine, and her first shipment of roasted beans. As she constructs her place of business, she meets others who share her dream of self-sufficiency. A succubus named Tandri agrees to be her first employee and, a little awkwardly, possible business partner. A ratkin named Thimble comes on board as a baker, and proves to be a ...

  The word is out that there will be a new convention in Milwaukee, and I'm leading the charge to make it happen. There will be a virtual option, and I've been forewarned by many that having a virtual con is difficult to do concurrently with an in-person con. Still, I've been running hybrid group meetings for three years running. I was one of the online moderators and chat room hosts for Discon III. I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to run an effective hybrid convention. But for all that, I know that my day is coming. When the Milwaukee Falcon finally launches late next year, I'll be putting my limited expertise to the ultimate test. So, when I relate the horrific nightmare that was Pemmi-Con's Virtual Con experience two weekends ago, I know full well that I might be forced to eat my words when it's MY butt in the hot-seat. It's easy to criticize as a fan. But when you're a conrunner, everything looks different, because you know how impossible i...

  When I first dove into Silvia Moreno-Garcia's work, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau , I was convinced that I would be reading a prequel describing something that happened to Doctor Moreau before he came to be on his island - the one described in the original novel by H.G. Wells. But this was not at all the case. This work is a different version of the Moreau mythos, though not necessarily original. Variations on Wells' work have been done before. The classic 1932 film The Island of Lost Souls is one example. Another film made in 1977 starring Burt Lancaster and Michael York brought back the original title, but also introduced the idea that Moreau had a daughter, named Maria, which was something not found in Wells' book. The idea of Moreau having a daughter was revisited in the 1996 remake starring Marlon Brando and David Thewlis. This time, his daughter is named Aissa. That film was also landmark in that it used the modern twist of DNA infusion instead of vivisection to cr...

  Cory Doctorow is hailed as an intellectual, challenging the corporations who chip away at people's rights to own the media and electronics they buy. But he's also quite the fiction writer. Case in point is his 2008 masterpiece, "Little Brother," which may be the best "man in hole" plot I've ever come across. In a classic opening, Marcus Yallow and his teenage hacker friends find themselves on the wrong side of school administration. In Marcus' case, just one more unexcused absence will result in expulsion. Yet he finds himself playing hooky anyway because he and his friends can't resist an alternate reality game that uses cell tower signals in the San Francisco Bay area as targets. They have a run-in with a rival team from a different school who are also playing the same game. And then... The Golden Gate Bridge explodes. It quickly becomes apparent that this is another 9/11 type attack, and the public loses its collective shit. Marcus and his f...

  Mur Lafferty has written a true gem. Everyone loves a good murder mystery, and when it contains the fantastical, so much the better. This book, the first in the "Midsolar Murders" series (and every other science fiction writer is kicking themselves for not coming up with that one first), is both a serious work and a fun romp, featuring alien abduction, interstellar romance, and a whole lot of death. Meet Mallory Viridian, a bright young woman who is cursed by two extraordinary things: First, every time she encounters a murder, she instantly intuits who did it. And second, murders seem to happen around her all the time. Convinced that she is a hazard to anyone who encounters her, she gets as far away from other people as she possibly can, going so far as to abandon the planet Earth altogether in favor of a distant, alien space station. Her curse, it seems, doesn't affect extraterrestrials.  This remote and lonely existence works well enough, until she learns a shuttle f...

So, apparently, on July 3rd, an interview with Samuel R. Delany was published in the New Yorker. Now, I've defended Delany in the past, and taken some flak for it, so this article caught my attention. It basically was a personal look back behind the curtain, giving people a glimpse at what Delany’s personal life is currently like. And the man is 81, so his life is pretty slow these days. But the article also confirmed some things I already knew. Now, as much as I love Delany’s pre-spider writings (and by that I mean everything he wrote prior to Valley of the Nest of Spiders, because Hogg is just awful, and I’ve said so), I do have a bone to pick with him regarding this pro-NAMBLA statement which he made back in the 90’s. The New Yorker article touched on this, but only briefly. I’ll read you the quote, because it says it far better than I can summarize: “His tolerance could go alarmingly far. Delany once praised a newsletter published by NAMBLA, the pedophile-advocacy group, for it...