A little less than two years ago, something startling and magical began: a webcomic called Namesake. I discovered it very shortly after it started, and it immediately became one of my favorites – shortly thereafter becoming my absolute favorite webcomic, even outracing the formidable competition of Schlock Mercenary (which I will be discussing in another entry) and Girl Genius (ditto). As they recently released, through Kickstarter, a hardcopy of the first volume, Namesake is now truly On My Shelves. Namesake is the [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Danny Dunn
June 27, 2012 By 10 Comments
When I was young, I read books of SF and of fantasy as well as science fact voraciously. One thing I noticed was that there were commonly books that had children as protagonists – such as Edward Eager's Half Magic, or Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It, or the much more famous Narnia chronicles by C. S. Lewis – but often if anything fantastic or wondrous happened to the children, it was something treated as a secret – something that couldn't be told to the adults. This didn't exactly fit with my mindset. My [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Steven J. Reed
June 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
"Who?" I hear everyone asking. "Never heard of him." No, you never did, almost certainly, unless you read a post I made on my LiveJournal about five years ago. Much of this Under the Influence post is taken from that tribute post. Steve was my friend -- one of my first "older" friends, someone significantly older than I was who treated me as a full equal (he was about 10 years older than me). From a social point of view, Steve would never impress anyone. He was very intelligent, but never ended up in a job or [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Roleplaying Games (RPGs)
June 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
1977 was the most transformational year ever in my life, with the possible exception of 1995 (the year I married Kathleen). 1977 saw the release of Star Wars, of the first Shannara book and the first Thomas Covenant novel. In 1977, I first began going by the name of "Sea Wasp" online. And in 1977, I first encountered a game called "Dungeons and Dragons". In a very real sense, I had been doing roleplaying games long before that, just as had children from the dawn of time: making up characters and [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: E. E. “DOC” Smith
June 1, 2012 By 15 Comments
I deliberately waited for a while before posting this one. This essay is very similar to the one posted on my original website for Grand Central Arena, and I wanted to have time for other influences to be posted before returning to Doc Smith. I first encountered the work of E.E. "Doc" Smith in sixth grade, in Shaker Junior High School. My homeroom and English teacher, Mr. Dickinson, knew I was a reader of science fiction, and was responsible for introducing me to two great SF writers of the old days. The first happened [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: The Chronicles of Amber
May 30, 2012 By 4 Comments
Roger Zelazny was one of the true masters of fantasy writing. At least one of his works is included in most people's lists of "best ever fantasy" -- and sometimes, people argue, science fiction, as he did very much like to bend the definitions and skewer them. Zelazny produced a number of top-notch books and short stories, but two of them consistently outpace the others in mentions: Lord of Light, and the Chronicles of Amber (especially the original five-book Amber sequence). While Lord of Light is indeed an excellent [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Chrono Trigger
May 21, 2012 By 2 Comments
When my wife and I were married in 1995, one of our wedding gifts – partly as a joke – was a Super Nintendo gaming system. There were a few games we occasionally played but it was more an in-joke for the group than anything else. At that time we were also heavily into Dragonball/DBZ fandom, with my wife specifically a fan of Akira Toriyama's art. So when, some months later, we heard about a new video game, a so-called "RPG", that Toriyama had done the design work on, we decided to get it, mostly for the neat character [ Continue reading... ]
Welcome to My New Website
May 7, 2012 By 3 Comments
Hi! Welcome to the first entry of my blog. I'm Ryk E. Spoor; click the "About Ryk E. Spoor" tab if you want way too much info on me. What's important in regards to this blog is that I'm a science-fiction and fantasy writer with, at present, five published novels and three more under contract. My most prominent works are Grand Central Arena, a space opera novel in the Golden Age tradition (or so I like to think) and the Boundary series with Eric Flint, a hard-sf science-adventure (blame any failure in hardness on me, not on any advisors or [ Continue reading... ]
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