Book Review: Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber, today best known as the author of the excellent sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, died in 1992, at the age of 81, of "organic brain disease".  I have no idea what that means.  He was the son of the Shakespearean actor Fritz Leiber, Sr., who is actually in the picture; I found this a lot more compelling than most photos of Fritz Jr.

Conjure Wife is the first of Leiber's stories that I've read which is set in the then-modern world.  That it was published in 1953 (according to the copyright information), or 1943 even (when it was serialized), goes a long way toward explaining some of the book's more... politically awkward moments.

Misery, Death, and Slime Molds: My Love Affair with Roguelikes

One of my favorite pastimes in this modern world of 3D movies (who ever thought those would come back around again?), beautiful multiplayer online games, and graphics cards more powerful than my entire first computer, is to play in the humble genre of roguelike games.  But what exactly is a roguelike?  It is a game that is, in most respects, a lot like 1980's Rogue, the first graphical computer game.  Given that they are classified by their similarity to a particular game, roguelikes for the most part share a set of common features:

Book Review: Wizard World, by Roger Zelazny

Who couldn't love that face?

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is totally absent from Wizard World.

Now I am a huge fan of Roger Zelazny.  The Great Book of Amber is the best 1258 pages I ever spent, twice.  Lord Demon, Donnerjack, and Creatures of Light and Darkness are among the most imaginative, atypical works of fantasy I've read.  Zelazny's main characters are typically demigods, in one way or another, dealing with their demigod problems, but with some kind of connection to something like the modern world (e.g., the main character of the second half of Amber has a CS degree from Berkeley, and is also a sorcerer).  Something about this is strangely compelling to me.  As another e.g., Amber starts with the main character waking up in a hospital with amnesia, and is very much in a noir style; the true nature of things is revealed only slowly.  Great stuff.

For these reasons and more, I really, really wanted to like Wizard World.

So About The Name...

So about the name of this blog:

At some point in the mists of the past (I'd say 2006-2007) I got on a roll of making fun of romance novels.  I could swear that I wrote two or three several-paragraph things about the ridiculously manly Count Dangerham, only I cannot find them for the life of me.  Maybe I can try to work myself up to writing some more, but I doubt it.  It's kinda been "done", you know?

Blasting Off to a New Latitude

I spent this very extended weekend in Florida, celebrating my stepdad's 70th birthday / hip replacement.  (I guess that should be "(70th birthday) / (hip replacement)".  /s have always made me uncomfortable that way.  I know for sure that he only had his hip replaced, not his birthday, and I'm reasonably certain that it was his first procedure of that sort.)  He lives in the extraordinarily rich community of Aventura:

Rex Libris: Space Librarian

Read about the first half of Rex Libris: Volume 1 today in the cloying Floridian heat by the pool.  The book starts with a lot of hype about the book itself, which is awkward because I'd:

• Never read the book before, nor
• heard anything about it (I found it at the library)

so that was more annoying than anything, but after that it picks up.  It's about a semi-immortal noir-esque librarian who fights sci-fi/fantasy-style villains to reclaim overdue books, so that's pretty excellent.  The MacGuffin in question in the first book is Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and I appreciate that, although it's not entirely clear why the space tyrant Vaglox actually wants it.  (Maybe he really needs to know how to add?)  Oh, and Thoth is the library administrator, which is just excellent.

Based on the words "colour" and "shit-disturber", I'm reasonably certain that the author is from Canada, the country that brought you poutine and Harlequin Romance.

The frame story for the action is that Rex is dictating his autobiography to his publisher, who constantly jumps in with suggestions on how to spice it up.  This is funny enough, but his suggestions often break into the action in a jarring, semi-diegetic way to relieve all that action with some more words, as if we were in danger of forgetting how smart everyone is.  This contrasts severely with the incorrect (but at least consistent) misuse of "it's" versus "its".  That just makes me sad.

The art is pretty decent; it was drawn by computer, and based on one smoke effect I think I recognize the Hand of Illustrator.  It reminds me of nothing so much as Samurai Jack, both in the aesthetic and the hyperbolic action.  All in all, it's pretty good, although (gods forgive me for saying so) a bit wordy.  Get it from the library first, but watch your ass if you take it across the galaxy and rack up late fees.

Nerdiest Thing Lately

A couple of weeks months ago my wife hosted an in-game, in-character poetry slam on WoW.  I felt compelled to bring my Tauren epic poet, and I wrote this poem for the occasion.  This is my first longish poem of any kind, and almost my first effort in this meter. If you're interested, this poem is written in an old Nordic alliterative verse-form called Fornyrðislag, on which more here. I might make more like this later, either about Warcraft or not.

If you're intrigued or confused by some of the compound nouns like spear-ash and axe-grove, these are poetic devices called kennings. Kennings are used partly to fit subjects into the constraints of the meter and partly to be amazing in their own right. For most of the ones used here it suffices to know that tree = man, so for example spear-ash = spear-man (Tauren?) = warrior. The kennings are the best part, like the chocolate chips in your ice cream.

Like most such poems, it's a lot better if you already know the story.

Ethereal Wiggles

So this morning I was looking at an old shirt I own which has Maxwell's Equations on the back, and I was thinking about undulating electric and magnetic fields.  And then I thought, hey, if I could just set up an oscillating electric field, that would induce an oscillating magnetic field, and that would induce another electric field, etc, and they would propagate away as light.  And then it hit me: I just invented the antenna.  And only 115 years too late.

After recovering from the shock, I decided that the best invention of all is the time machine, because with that you can go back in time and be the first to invent everything else.