After twenty-two years of adventuring, Viv had reached her limit of blood and mud and bullshit. An ore’s life was strength and violence and a sudden, sharp end - but she’d be damned if she’d let hers finish that way.

It was time for something new.

A retired orc barbarian and a succubus with artistic flair open a coffee shop.

Nope, not even a joke. Instead, it’s the heart of one of the best examples of cozy fantasy I’ve read yet.

And I haven’t even mentioned the ratkin with their heavenly cinnamon rolls, the hob carpenter (hm), and a shy bard with a flair for experimental music.

read more...

That is not at all what I expected. Tony Stark, born with super powers. Constant pain and a regeneration factor. It’s… quite different. Too different.

I think there’s a reason this was later removed from the Ultimate Marvel canon.

read more...

Getting the team together, sleeper agent Wolverine, love triangles, betrayal, mass murder, and the bluening of Beast.

That is an awful lot to fit into a single volume…

The philosophical differences between Professor X and his X-Men versus Magneto and his Brotherhood is quite often at the core of these stories, so it’s no surprise to see it here.

The only question is… what comes next?!

Onward!

read more...

We are the interviewers. For a story.

And who am I?

You are the old sailor who remembers being a young sailor on Unicorn, a three masted schooner out of San Francisco plying the Pacific waters.

That sounds familiar.

You are Clarence St. Elmo, for a name. You are a bad poet lost in the sea of time, a castaway on an island where the dead gods wander.

That sounds awful.

And beyond a name, on that side of things, past the mirror and the window and the words, you are the Keeper of Shipwreck Light in the Sea of Suns and Moons.

Oh, I knew that.

That… is a truly delightfully weird book.

It jumps around in structure and time between letters from a sailor to the girl he left back home–to said sailor being interviewed by … someone–to stories about a most mysterious shipwreck and the island he came to inhabit thereafter.

Structurally, it’s very strange and at times hard to figure out what in the world is going on–but that’s all intentional. It’s really quite worth it in the end.

There’s not much more I can say without spoiling the whole thing–that is, if I really actually understood what and how, if anything, of the story actually happened. 😄

Well worth a read.

read more...

The Culture: a “a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens, and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy” (Culture series)

Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.

You’d think (or at least I did) from that description that we’d have everything starting in a state of wonder and harmony… and only then watch things go to hell (because otherwise, where’s the story?).

So imagine my surprise where (in Consider Phlebas), we start in the middle of a war between the Culture and another group (the Idirans) told from the point of a view of a shape shifting secret agent (more or less) who ends up with a crew of mercenaries (no, they’re a ‘Free Company’), goes through a few disastrous missions with them, almost gets eaten by a disgusting gigantic blob of a religious cult leader, breaks into a card game where the stakes are real human lives, and finally comes back to a graveyard system and then just about everyone dies.

Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

I … don’t even know what to say.

read more...

Nothing bad ever came of a ‘who can you trust?’

The contrast between Matt Murdock and Elektra is really what sells these stories. Doing what’s right versus what needs to be done.

I hope to see more.

And if Kingpin is involved…

read more...

Only one volume two volumes. Interesting. Let’s go!

Elektra making new friends at college.

And a younger than I’m used to Matt Murdock, already fighting crime and just starting in on the law stuff.

Of course things escalate quickly and of course something has to drive them apart. One of the rules of comics it seems. No one can be happy.

I hope we see more of them!

Onward.

Spider-Man starts to settle in to his new life. School, a job, a bit of light vigilantism, perhaps a date with MJ…

and of course decides to set his sights on the big man himself: Mr. Fisk. Kingpin. He’s a personal favorite big (heh) bad of mine. So I’m looking forward to where this goes.

Also I’m enjoying the teenage dynamic. So far as I’m concerned they nailed it. It’s insane, what he’s trying to do… but it feels so right.

Onward!

read more...

Peter Parker gets beat up at school; Parker goes in a field trip to Osborn’s lab; spider goes chomp; etc. It’s the standard Spider-Man origin, especially if you (like me) started with the Sam Raimu Spider-Man.

But you have to start somewhere right? It’s a solid story, I like the art, and we’re setting up for something big.

Onward!

read more...

There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it’s all right there in front of us. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That’s what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.

Take a survival story (a la Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet), re-tune it for a world where survival is life rather than a temporary situation (ten thousand or so years ago), sprinkle in an oddly modern feeling narrator, and make it super horny… voila. Shaman.

I at once rather enjoyed it and was rather annoyed by good parts of it.

read more...