“Not wanting to build a mere clocklike mechanism, you inadvertently – in your own punctilious way – created that which was possible, logical and inevitable, that which became the very antithesis of a mechanism …” “Please, no more!” – Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad Three stories. “The universe is infinite yet bounded.” So begins the Seventh…
Category: Book Reviews
CSFF Blog Tour: The God-Hater
(Note: In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.) People don’t like Nicholas Mackenize. And there’s no love lost, because he doesn’t like people. But he saves his real hatred for religion. He is – loudly and proudly – a God-hater. Of all the creatures…
CSFF Blog Tour: Breaking the Love Triangle
I’m going to start off by putting a Spoiler Alert on this whole post. From here on in I’ll make free in discussing details from the book. One of the interesting aspects of Dragons of the Valley was the love triangle. Bealomondore loved Tipper, Tipper loved Jayrus, and Jayrus loved … well, you couldn’t tell….
CSFF Blog Tour: A Judge, a Priest, a Paladin …
One of the main characters of the Chiril Chronicles is Jayrus, dragon-keeper and prince of something. A wizard proclaims him to be Chiril’s Paladin. What is a paladin? According to my Dictionary, it is “a champion of a medieval prince”. According to Donita K. Paul, it’s some sort of spiritual leader who, by the by,…
CSFF Blog Tour: Dragons of the Valley
(Note: In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.) It’s been said that good fortune follows good fortune, and bad fortune follows bad fortune. This may be why Chiril’s first armed rebellion in many years is followed by its first foreign invasion in many years….
CSFF Blog Tour: Someone’s Got to Label
There’s been a lot of variation in how The Wolf of Tebron is classified. I’ve seen it labeled Children’s, Adult, and Youth; I’ve read reviewers say it was above children and even above teens. I’ve read that it’s good for some teens, good for young adults and up, and good for everyone. Who is responsible…
CSFF Blog Tour: The Wolf, the Lion, and the Messiah
Yesterday I said that there is a strong Christian aspect to The Wolf of Tebron. I wrote a little about it, but there is much more that can be said. Today I hope to say some of it. I’m afraid that, in order to discuss certain elements of the book, I’m going to have to…
CSFF Blog Tour: The Wolf of Tebron
(Note: In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.) How far would you go to save your wife? Would you make good on the old lovers’ promise to go to the ends of the earth? Would you go to the most extreme north, to the…
Coming Next Week …
… the next CSFF Blog Tour. On Monday we begin reviewing The Wolf of Tebron, a novel styled after C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. A “unique reinvention of the traditional fairy tale,” its website states. Come back and – as the newsies used to say – read all about it.
CSFF Blog Tour: The science, the scam, the history of Phrenology
Phrenology is the study of the structure of the skull to determine a person’s character and mental capacity. This pseudoscience is based on the false assumption that mental faculties are located in brain “organs” on the surface of the brain and can be detected by visible inspection of the skull. The Viennese physician Franz-Joseph Gall…