And here’s the traditional “what I got for Christmas” post that seems to be de rigeur on any blog worth its mettle.
I did receive mostly books, and mostly genre books.
My genre of books, if you will.
And without further ado, here’s a list of my latest acquisitions.
I’m back online for good, and to celebrate I’m doing three related posts on my three blogs.
The first post is already up on GreyWorld, the next is going up later, in Italian, on strategie evolutive.
Let’s say I’m doing a blog tour of my own blogs.
And I mentioned the late Sir Terry Pratchett, on GreyWorld.
I love Pratchett’s Discworld novels – I loved them ever since I read about Pratchett in Michael Moorcock‘s Wizardry and Wild Romance, and decided to check this new writer out.
And if it’s true that the Italian versions of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were seriously unfunny due to some translation problems, as soon as I started reading Terry Pratchett in English, it was a cartload of laughs.
But not only that.
Which leads to the true topic of this post. Continue reading
I’ve been spending the last two hours trying to find my way around the various reprints and repackagings of Michael Moorcock’s Elric series. I read the books out of order, part in English and part in Italian translation, back when I was in high school.
Now, much as I enjoyed the stories back in the ’80s, and for all of their role in shaping the sword & sorcery genre, Elric is not my favorite Moorcock character or series (I prefer Gloriana, or The Dancers at the End of Times).
But I wanted to read through some of the stories because… ok, you know why.
Because I’m writing a series about a time-displaced heroine that’s deployed through history, by unseen masters, as a mystical troubleshooter.
And that’s the Eternal Champion, of course*.
So I wanted to take a look at the original. Continue reading
The so-called ebook revolution has brought back a number of genres and formats that for a few decades had been marginalized to say the least.
The short form is back – novelettes and novellas, novels in the 40.000-words standard of the paperbacks of old.
Pulp is making a big comeback, in all its assorted flavors – from hero pulps to adventure cliffhangers to sword & sorcery.
And for a fantasy reader, the return of sword & sorcery – the small-scale, proletarian, none-too-heroic kind of fantasy that normally involves rogues trying to save their own skin, not champions trying to save the world – is a much welcome event.
I’m currently reading – and very much enjoying – Dariel R.A. Quiogue’s Swords of the Four Winds
A rambling post, tonight.
A friend of mine just posted a long and rather disquieting (to me) piece on his blog, about the systematic harassing of women that seems to be an established element in what I’ll call, to be brief, “fantasy fandom” (which to me includes SF, comics, games, the works).
You find it here – it’s in Italian.
The author, Elvezio Sciallis, is an independent journalist and a fine critic.
Now, the idea of women being harassed and discriminated in what I consider my community scares me and pains me on two levels.
The first is, such behavior is not something I can accept – the examples cited really hit me hard.
I hate these guys.
The second level is possibly even harder to stomach – my experience of science fiction and fantasy fandom never caused me to think such problems were in any way widespread, or something more than an occasional asshole to be rounded up and isolated.
Therefore, now I ask myself: have I been lucky, distracted or, damn, part of the problem myself?
Does the fact that I read old pulps and fantasy and SF make me a sexist, racist individual?
Am I instinctively what I hate intellectually?
And as I normally do nowadays, I’m writing to set my thoughts straight – and you are reading my ramblings.
Continue reading
Karavansara 