New Chapter for "Agent Shield and Spaceman"

Good morning folks!

I have a new chapter up for "Agent Shield and Spaceman," my espionage web fiction. Frankie Two-eyes, already at the Thulewaite party starts to mingle and quickly gets himself over his head.

Other than that, my mind has been preoccupied in recent days by the superlatively good epic 'silk punk' fantasy novel "The Grace of Kings" by Ken Liu. Ken's name has come up a few times on this blog because I have enormous respect for his talent and the clarity of his ideas. This novel is door-stop and I hadn't had enough time to really launch into a massive fantasy epic until this summer. I guess at the moment, all I have time to say is that I'm blown away by it. I think it's easily one of my favorite fantasy stories and ranks pretty high up in terms of general works as well.

I could probably talk for a couple of days about all the reasons I think this novel succeeds at everything it sets out to do and writers of speculative fiction have a lot to learn from its example. I'm going to try to put together some of these thoughts at some point this week and see where it goes. In the meantime, do yourself a favor, pick up "The Grace of Kings" and give it a read. It's a huge, consequential addition to fantasy literature.

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With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl

I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that happen

Ancient Logic

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