Brad Bird is probably best known as the genius behind The Incredibles. However, he was also one of those responsible for another brilliant piece of animation, one rather unfairly obscure: The Iron Giant. Something crashes to Earth during the Cold War, leaving a trail of destruction through the Maine woods; when this giant mechanical figure rises and tries to find its way out, it encounters an electrical substation and electrocutes itself. Hogarth Hughes, a young boy who lives on an isolated farmstead with his [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: One Piece – The Second Piece!
April 18, 2014 By Leave a Comment
A while back, I reviewed the shonen anime One Piece. That review covered what I had seen to that point, but One Piece is a titanic piece of animation, a series still ongoing after more than 630 episodes. I'm now going to talk about what I've seen of One Piece since – up through around episode 380. When we last left our group of intrepid pirates (who are about as piratical in their normal behavior as Will Turner and Jack Sparrow in his gentler moments), Monkey D. Luffy had just managed to defeat God Enel/Eneru, a Devil [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Bastard!!
April 9, 2014 By Leave a Comment
"Several hundred years after the fall of human civilization, 'twas a lawless period, a time without order; only blood, flesh, bone, and iron. It was also a time of sorcery. Having been terrorized by demonic creatures their entire lives, human beings were miserably inadequate, and forced to subsist in a barren, hostile environment." (Yes, that's a quote directly from the opening of the anime. Painful, isn't it?) Bastard!! (no link; looks to be out of print) is a somewhat twisted D&Dish fantasy [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Myth Adventures by Robert Asprin and Phil Foglio
April 4, 2014 By Leave a Comment
Robert Asprin wrote quite a number of books and was well-known as an editor on others, and a co-creator of the fairly successful Thieves' World shared-world setting, which I may write about in another entry. But what he may have been best known for was his comedic fantasy entry Another Fine Myth and the subsequent long-running series of novels based on the adventures and misadventures of young failed thief and would-be wizard Skeeve, scaly, blustering, and devious "demon" Aahz ("Oz?" "No relation."), and a diverse cast of [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
March 3, 2014 By Leave a Comment
1977, as I have mentioned before, was something of a banner year in my fandom experiences for me. Star Wars was released in that year; I first encountered roleplaying games, in the form of Dungeons and Dragons, in 1977; The Sword of Shannara was published in that year. And so was Lord Foul's Bane, the first book in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever – a series which was first a trilogy, then two trilogies, and now a total of ten books with the addition of a final tetralogy. I have not read this final [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Pirates of the Caribbean
February 26, 2014 By Leave a Comment
"You're forgetting one thing, mate: I'm Captain Jack Sparrow." Once upon a time there was a rather cheesy amusement park ride called "Pirates of the Caribbean". Disney had constructed this ride to capitalize on the image of pirates that it had, itself, helped to create, swashbuckling rogues who were perhaps not quite as blackhearted as they would like you to think, and certainly not very much like the real thing. This was certainly a slight foundation on which to build a movie, and I myself have never seen the ride [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Witch Family
February 24, 2014 By Leave a Comment
Written by children's author Eleanor Estes (best known for her "Moffat Family" books and "Ginger Pye"), The Witch Family is probably my favorite of her works. It tells the story of Old Witch, the oldest, most evil, and most powerful of all the witches, and how she was "banquished" to the great bare bleak glass hill for her wickedness by Amy, an ordinary mortal girl living in Garden Lane in Washington, DC. The action of most chapters is an interspersion of Amy and her best friend Clarissa talking about Old Witch and [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
February 19, 2014 By Leave a Comment
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment." My last post reminded me that I hadn't yet posted anything about the original -- an oversight that I now rectify! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a man of wide experience and education – a doctor who served on both a Greenland whaler and a steamship on a voyage to western Africa, a scientist with a keen sense of justice, a man fascinated with the unknown and unknowable. Though he had many notable achievements in his [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Young Sherlock Holmes
February 17, 2014 By Leave a Comment
The power of speculative fiction – and, indeed, of many other works of fiction – rests on the simple phrase "what if…?" What if we could reach the moon? What if you could predict the course of civilization and saw its collapse? What if the Greek Myths were real? This is of course also the foundation of much fanfic – what if the story continued, what if these people had a different relationship than shown in canon, etc. What if someone wrote a marvelous Sherlock Holmes fanfic and got it filmed? [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Weapon Brown
February 14, 2014 By Leave a Comment
"I've got a lot of names, depending on who you ask. I'll let you call me Chuck. I kill for a living. There's a lot of guys in my line of work, and they're all cheaper than me. If all you want is to put a hole in somebody, you hire one of them. But if you want to take out a tank crew of battle-hardened scum and fall asleep knowing they died screaming -- you call good ol' Weapon Brown." Holy. Crap. There are few things that leave me speechless upon encountering them. WEAPON BROWN is one. I ran into this [ Continue reading... ]
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