Tag: Books
-
Series Review: Writing Violence by Marc MacYoung
Marc ‘Animal’ MacYoung watches rom-coms because Hollywood gets action scenes wrong. Having worked as a court-recognized expert witness, correctional institute director, bodyguard, bouncer, cooler and event security, he has decades of first-hand experience with violence and criminals. His street name came from a high-risk lifestyle filled with life-or-death encounters on the mean streets of Los…
-
Appendix N Review: The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
In the far-flung future, the Sun has reached the end of its lifespan. Under an alien sky, strange animals and plants thrive across the world, ruined cities stand in mute testimony to all-conquering Time, squalor and luxury exist side by side in decaying and decadent civilisations, and science and technology have blurred into a unified…
-
EPulp Sampler Volume 1: What Pulp Is Not
While the Pulp Revolution has been around for a couple of years now, it isn’t the only literary movement focused on pulp fiction. Indeed, it’s not even the first. Before PulpRev came New Pulp, which Pro Se describes as “fiction written with the same sensibilities, beats of storytelling, patterns of conflict, and creative use of words and…
-
Appendix N Review: Three Hearts and Three Lions
To Holger Carlsen, Dane by birth and engineer by trade, science rules all. The immutable laws of physics govern the universe, and there is no space in this rational world for the mysterious and the magical. Yet one fateful day, when fighting along the Resistance in the Second World War, he is knocked out in…
-
What Do Otaku Readers Really Want?
The Japanese publishing industry is getting predictable. Every other week, there’s a brand new series starring a Japanese high schooler who is mysteriously transported to a fantasy world. There he promptly gains overwhelming powers, the antagonism of the local Demon King, and the affections of a harem of cute, buxom, mature, demihuman and underage girls.…
-
Unreview: The Red Threads of Fortune by JY Yang
When I first heard of The Tensorate Series, alarm bells rang in my head. The core concepts sound cool: A crypto-Asian continent-spanning nation fracturing at the seams, exotic monsters roaming the wilds of a strange world, Tensors who use magic based on the classic Chinese elements and the Force, a pair of children who will shape…