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Category Archives: reading

Slam dunk

Well, I have just come across some information that pretty much guarantees the pilot episode of “A Game of Thrones” will get picked up for at least a full first season.  The producers of the pilot are posting on the Westeros message boards and they have just revealed that the pilot’s final line of dialogue before [...]

Persistance of Vision

Two days ago I was reading in my book of Locus-winning short stories, and I came across the first Story That Blew My Mind that I’ve read in a long while. It’s called Persistance of Vision and is by a guy I’d never read before, named John Varley. The story was everything literature should be [...]

Good god

Look how much the top ten highest-earning authors make: 1. JK Rowling – $300m (£170m) 2. James Patterson – $50m (£28m) 3. Stephen King – $45m (£25m) 4. Tom Clancy – $35m (£20m) 5. Danielle Steel – $30m (£17m) 6. John Grisham – $25m (£14m) 6. Dean Koontz – $25m (£14m) 8. Ken Follett – [...]

This goes a long way toward explaining everything

You’ve seen the strange clusters so often you don’t wonder anymore why they’re strange. For instance: why do people who think government should be small get fighting mad at the implication that humans have caused global warming? And why do libertarians inevitably have beards? Or at least some kind of weird facial hair that looks [...]

Nothing Matters?

I just discovered this interview with Scott Bakker, author of one of the three greatest fantasy epics of all time, The Prince of Nothing, as well as Neuropath, a near-future pyscho-thriller.  In the interview Bakker mentions having had an email exchange with Richard K. Morgan  regarding “the nihlistic implications of modern neuroscience.” Bakker says: There’s going to be people who deny this stuff come hell [...]

The essence of Noir

In the course of moving the blog over to WordPress and creating an archive, I ran across the first “real” LSH post, which was about a book I’d just read: Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan. As it happens, over at Clarkesworld there’s an extensive interview with him, mostly about his book Thirteen, but also [...]

Entertainment Tidbits

My posts are generally a bit scattershot and I’m currently obsessed with the election but here are a couple of non-political, geek-related entertainment items: George RR Martin shares encouraging news on his “Not a Blog”, stating that HBO has exercised its option and has bought the full television rights for the proposed A Song of [...]