Originally posted at : https://lastredoubt.substack.com/p/old-ways Paper has a lot of problems. It’s bulky. It catches fire. More to the point, if I want to send something on paper to Japan, it can cost a pretty penny - for whatever those are worth today. Yet I find myself buying physical copies of things - even things that I have backed up from Kindle to EPUB if I truly care about it and backed p yet again offsite - because paper, and physical media in general, has several advantages. First…
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Originally posted at: https://lastredoubt.substack.com/p/foucaults-pendulum I have a general rule of thumb when it comes to books that still holds true from my high school days - if a book outside of the true classics is beloved by the NYT bestseller/NPR/old ladies book club crowd, stay the hell away. It has stood me in good stead. Other knee-jerk preferences have fallen by the wayside. I no longer head straight to the SF&F shelves at the bookstore. Outside of authors I’ve gotten to know or re…
This book from Pilum press, doesn't really neatly slot into any categories. It's set in the 1970's, a world I dimly remember from my childhood, in a Texas I have even fainter memories of. Nevertheless it captures something that I have glimpsed the afterimages of, and grew up in the fading echoes. It is real and grounded and almost utterly matter-of-fact, not written at all like your "standard" sci-if or fantasy book, especially of the last couple decades, yet it is magical. It pulls this off wit…
Cities come, cities go, yet the city remains. Pilum is now working on getting it's fourth book published, Shagduk by JB Jackson, over at Kickstarter [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deredordica/shagduk-de-re-dordica-book-one-a-novel-by-jb-jackson] . This, fresh off of successfully republishing Sky Hernstrom's Thune's Vision with the addition of a new Mortu and Kyrus story. I've mentioned their first collection, The Penultimate Men, in passing, but today I'd like to cover their second b…
(I'd looked at several of Tim Power's books before - incuding the earlier Vickery and Castine story, Alternate Routes [https://thelastredoubt.com/on-higher-powers-pt-2/]). Since we last saw Vickery and Castine, things had not quite returned to normal. Sure, Ingrid Castine went back to work for the hush-hush transportation agency who's rogue manager had tried to kill her, and Vickery, a former secret service agent, was living a quiet life in a small home near the highway. But both were a bit un…