On the edge of the Galaxy, an archaeological expedition finds a cache of ancient wonders. But in delving into the secrets of a civilization so advanced they can barely comprehend it, they unleash… something. A Something that bides its time, hidden until it is prepared, and then acts to consume them all, flower into malevolent power. Only a desperate sacrifice by two researchers – themselves also nigh to reaching a superhuman state – allows any of them to escape at all. At the same time, far towards the center of the Galaxy, a race of strange [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Fallout 4
August 18, 2016 By Leave a Comment
As I had rated both of its predecessors – Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas quite highly, one can imagine that Fallout 4 had a high bar to clear in order to rate as well as the preceding installments of the series. Fortunately, it clears the bar with room to spare. Like the rest of the series, Fallout 4 is set in a world where the Retro-Future of the 1940s came true: nuclear-powered cars for everyone, household robots, shining-steel and glowing-tube SUPER SCIENCE inventions brought a true golden age. And it then crosses that with [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Mutineer’s Moon
March 29, 2016 By 1 Comment
David Weber is probably best known for his Honor Harrington space opera series, but this is my favorite of his books. Colin MacIntyre is pilot of a NASA experimental moon vessel sometime in the not-too-distant future, with a simple-seeming mission: use a new "gravitonic" probe to map the mass distribution of the moon in detail. Unlike prior gravity surveys that merely use the slight variations in mass to give a very general idea of the mass distribution, the gravitonic probe should provide fine detail of structure and composition. But the [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark
March 24, 2016 By Leave a Comment
Marley Jacob is a wealthy old woman, known for her charity and eccentricity, a lawyer who no longer needs to practice but who has various unusual clients. She also has a nephew whom everyone – even, with sadness and regret, Marley – dislikes. Aloysius is the classic self-centered, unconsciously arrogant man who has literally never looked at himself in the mirror of the soul. Or rather, Aloysius was that sort of man, and Marley Jacob had such a nephew. Aloysius was murdered, found drained of his blood over a storm grate, and Marley suspects [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
March 22, 2016 By Leave a Comment
What do you get when you have a Japanese who's a fan of Western horror movies and pop music and who's been involved in – and come to despise – the fashion industry? No, no, not Kill La Kill, although there's certainly aspects of commonality. What you get is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. A manga by Hirohiko Araki which began its run waaaay back in 1987, it had a few sporadic one-off OVA/movie animations many years later, but only in 2012 did it begin its run as an anime (which is primarily what I know it from; I've seen pieces of the [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Nancy Drew
November 3, 2015 By 1 Comment
I have previously mentioned two of the strongest influences in my life that gave me a strong assumption of the essential strength and equality of female characters to male – specifically, the Oz series (in which the most prominent characters are almost always girls/women), and the Little House books told from the point of view of Laura Ingalls (later Laura Ingalls Wilder). But there was a third such influence: Nancy Drew. Dating all the way back to 1930, Nancy Drew in all her incarnations has been a young amateur sleuth, child of a [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Dragon Age II
September 29, 2015 By 1 Comment
While I had enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins (and its DLC add-ons) immensely (see my prior review), things I had heard about Dragon Age II made me somewhat reluctant to get it; the most weighty of these being that unlike the prior game, Dragon Age II limited you to a single character, not to the several different choices of character (classes of Rogue, Warrior, Mage and species of Elf, Dwarf, and Human, with Dwarves unable to become Mages, and other choices of social class creating multiple combinations of character type, each of which had [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Disney’s Aladdin
September 17, 2015 By Leave a Comment
The Disney Corporation has produced many animated films over the years, ranging from the old classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (wow, not available?) to newer films like The Black Cauldron, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and many others, some very good, some… not so good. One of my favorites of all is Aladdin. The basic plot of this Disney version of the old classic is probably very well known. Street-rat Aladdin (with his sidekick monkey Abu) encounters the runaway princess Jasmine and has a few [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
September 8, 2015 By Leave a Comment
"Into every generation, there is a chosen one. One girl in all the world. She alone will wield the strength and skill to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness; To stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers. She is the Slayer." Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the biggest media phenomena of its generation, and probably the single largest reason for the explosion in popularity of urban fantasy in the last few decades. While it has many ancestors (including the original movie, which [ Continue reading... ]
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