Victor Koman’s Kings of the High Frontier shows us a world a few years in our future where a number of individuals, from billionaire Larry Poubelle to smuggler Marcus Grant, seek to shrug off the combined shackles of Earth’s gravity and Earth’s government to live among the stars. Caught between the astro-entrepreneurs and the sinister … Read more
In the Pit is a comic book about gamers penned by some of the folks behind Eden Studios, the company that brought us the All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPGs. It takes place in a comic book store crawling with a not-unfamiliar cast of dysfunctional misfits, each more eccentric than … Read more
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
I’ve been reading a fair number of gaming magazines recently, foremost among them being Electronic Gaming Monthly, in a quest to find new games to review. As I’ve paged through them, one thing’s become obvious: these magazines weren’t written for me. They’re aimed at people who live to game …rather than gamers who have lives. … 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