I first read Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World six years ago when I was near the top of our own world. My wife and I were hiking outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, and on a clear day, you could see the Artic Circle from the top of the ridges we were walking along. Eye … Read more
George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones offers fantasy fans a gritty, realistic medieval adventure that stands in sharp contrast to the aloof elves and all-pervasive magic populating endless Tolkien knockoffs. The book is set in the land of Westeros, a fantastic realm removed in time and space from our own medieval period. In this … Read more
The gunslinger is not a whole man. For years he quested after the man in black, whom he thought was his key the Dark Tower. Along the way, he lost bits of his humanity. First, he sacrificed his hawk David to earn his guns by defeating his teacher, Cort. Then he lost his friends Cuthbert … Read more
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” That’s one of the great opening lines in speculative fiction — or hell, any kind of fiction. It immediately evokes mystery, drama, adventure and an entire Old West mythology. It doesn’t merely tug at the mind — it rends. It compels. It forces … Read more
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a creative, heroic and inspiring movie that faithfully reproduces the book of the same name on the big screen.
Industrialist Marissa Van Hutten has a dream and a nightmare. She longs to see humanity return to the stars, exploring the solar system and given men and women a reason to look up with pride again. But she fears as well. One day in her early twenties she saw a fireball — huge meteor — … Read more
Fantasy addicts looking for their next fix of sword and sorcery should check out Robert Jordon’s modern classic The Eye of the World. Published in 1990, the novel is the first in a saga called The Wheel of Time. It opens in the tiny village of Edmond’s Field, where stubborn shepherds raise sheep and equally … Read more
There are a few books that I’ll be reading to my kids from the first day they open their eyes. One is The Hobbit. Another is Wind in the Willows. But first among these books will be the modern fairy tale of Watership Down. The book opens with two rabbits, Hazel and his younger brother … Read more
In Startide Rising, David Brin began the epic adventure of a crew of neo-dolphins, their starship Streaker, and a terrible, war-inspiring secret. He won the Hugo and Nebula awards for the novel, the story of which remained unfinished for years. Now, with the Uplift Storm trilogy, Brin is continuing – but probably not concluding – … Read more
Take the horrors of the Vietnam War, combine them with an advanced state of virtual reality where human soldiers control their soldier boys — or mechanical soldiers — remotely, and throw in a new hi-tech weapon that threatens to end life as we know it, and you have Joe Haldeman’s latest novel, Forever Peace. As … Read more