Count_Zero

I’d heard about the manga The Men Who Created Gundam a while ago from an article on TVTropes – and later had heard that the manga had been licensed by Denpa, though I found it was only available in a physical release, so that ended up serving as something of a hold-up on my picking up the series. However, at long last I’ve picked up up the omnibus release of the series.

As the title suggests, The Men Who Created Gundam tells the story of how the original Mobile Suit Gundam series (colloqually referred to as “First Gundam”) came to be – in a very tongue-in-cheek kind of presentation. The focus is on Yoshiyuki Tomino, who is presented as an almost Spider Jerusalem-esque figure. Not just in the sense of his bald head and ever-present sunglasses (and lanky figure), but his somewhat obnoxious and confrontational attitude, in a manipulative and obnoxious kind of way.

We have a few other supporting characters that provide point-of-view perspectives on the story, like the composite character of Momoe Kusakari, who represents much of the female production staff of the series. She also unfortunately often ends up on the receiving end of some of the regressive attitudes of the time when it comes to sexual politics, with her frequently getting groped (often by Tomino). Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (who is drawn like a rock star) also gets a fair amount of spotlight time, though never as a point of view character.

That ties into what probably is one of the biggest issues with the manga itself – Tomino’s letcherous habits and sexual harassment of women in staff is played for comedy at best or as a a charming element of his character at worst. It makes for a frustrating part of the story, where we see the build-up to the New Century declaration at the start of the launch of the Gundam Compilation movies, but we also see him harassing the staff, with that basically being treated as something of an endearing feature of him. Arguably this is a fictitious aspect of the character that’s being played up for exaggeration, but the problem is that it’s still mostly ever-present in the story.

In all, I enjoyed the manga, but I did always feel a bit of a sense of dread in the manga whenever Tomino and Kusakari were on page at the same time, for fear of what “comedy” beat would come next. I did enjoy reading the manga, and honestly it does make for a good jumping off point for later reading of what actually happened, but intentional groping, by adults, in the workplacek, played for comedy makes this a hard recommendation.

If you know anything about me at all, I have a passion for the history of tabletop roleplaying. One of the books that helped stoke my interest was the book Heroic Worlds, which I read when I was in middle school. That book was a high level overview of the roleplaying game books that were on the market at the time – like the tabletop RPG equivalent of all those Leonard Maltin books giving an overview, one-to-two sentence of a film’s plot, and a one-to-two sentence review combined with a score. Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground provides a more close in view, covering a selection of RPG books from each decade of RPG history to date, with more involved looks at the various games.

So, if there’s a major RPG title that came out over the medium’s history, it’s generally covered here. Dungeons & Dragons? Check! Runequest? You bet! The Fantasy Trip? Sure thing. Vampire: The Masquerade? It’s in there. Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark? Sure thing. Even (as the subtitle says) Mothership. These are included alongside various smaller titles and significant, if not as well known, sourcebooks for the various games that are covered. Stuff like some of the adventure collections for Call of Cthulu or Cults of Prax for Runequest. We even get a couple significant titles from Palladium – like Rifts and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness.

We get some very nice, involved looks at the games and sourcebooks, with the author’s serious thoughts on the books, along with how well they have or have not held up with time – such as with the Sanity rules casually shoehorned into TMNT or the entirety of Oriental Adventures. It’s not a full-fledged buyer’s guide, instead serving something of a critical overview.

It’s not without some problems. While the book is very much aware of some of the prejudices and biases in past works (again, Oriental Adventures), the book has a massive oversight issue. Specifically, the focus is very heavy on games from the Anglo-European zone – while some translated games are covered, they’re exclusively European titles like In Nomine or Kult. Games translated from Japanese (like Maid) or works inspired by Asian media – whether anime (Big Eyes Small Mouth), action cinema from Hong Kong and Taiwan (Hong Kong Action Theater and Feng Shui). The most we get is a passing mention of the Robotech RPG in the entry of TMNT.

This is particularly odd considering, for example, Feng Shui’s mook rules would help influence the Minion rules for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (which is mentioned in the book). Robotech introduced the Megadamage rules which would carry over to Rifts. However, there’s no real mention or in-depth entries on either of those games. It’s kind of head-scratchingly frustrating (not helped by the fact that it also perpetuates the worldview that TRPGs are an Anglo-European (and predominantly White) thing. This is particularly weird because, again, the book does try to acknowledge contributions of Black and Asian creators in the book.

I did very much enjoy the book, and it makes for a very good starting point for people who want to learn more about historical titles in tabletop roleplaying history. However, I do feel like the book runs into some bugbears that are specific to me.

When Iron Widow came up on the list of the list of rejected Hugo Award nominees in the controversy over the Chengdu Worldcon, I figured that I should bump the book further up my reading list (it was already there, it was just further in). Then it became a Sword & Laser book club pick, and I made sure to get ahold of a copy from the library – and I was not disappointed by this book at all, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the sequel.

The premise of Iron Widow is that it follows Wu Zetian – not the version of our world, but a different one (this is extremely loosely inspired by her rise to power), a girl from basically the sticks, who volunteers herself to be the consort of a Chrysalis pilot – someone who supplies qi to the pilot of these shapeshifting mechs so they can fight the monstrous Hundun who attack the country – a position that also puts the consorts at great risk of death, indeed most consorts die. However, Zetian has a secret reason for this – the pilot she wants to be the consort of murdered her sister, and she wants revenge. When she succeeds in her mission, but not in the method she had in mind, she ends up becoming a consort to another pilot, Li Shimen, who has previously killed numerous consorts, but together their qi balance allows them to work together successfully – and in turn overturn the systems of power that seek to victimize them both.

In short, Iron Widow goes – the story moves at a tremendously brisk pace. It’s not so fast that you lose track of the story’s events, and who is doing what to whom and why. However, it’s also tremendously easy for a significant plot beat to also be overshadowed by a slew of other plot beats. By the climax of the novel, there are a string of character deaths that happen with the rapidity of characters getting killed off of the climax of a Tomino-helmed Gundam series, though not in the “Kill-Em-All” Tomino kind of way.

To be clear, I’m not just making the mecha anime comparisons in a “Guy who only watched Boss Baby gets Boss Baby vibes” kind of sense. When I read the description of the piloting system of the Crystalis mechs, my first thought was, “Huh, I’m getting Darling in the Franxx vibes” – and then I reached the acknowledgments at the end of the book and, lo and behold, Darling in the Franxx came up multiple times, in a clear “This book is in dialog with that anime” sense. As someone who wrote a fanzine for several years for the specific objective of, Parent Trap-esque, trying to get Anime & Lit-SF fandom back together again, I had to stifle a squee in the breakroom at work.

Darling in the Franxx was enjoyable, but certainly flawed series – I didn’t dive into it as much at the time in my review, but it was a series that had sexual politics that were certainly problematic – with a focus on heteronormative romantic pairings likely as part of the political push of the Abe government to try to boost the declining birthrate of Japan’s ethnic Japanese population, and thus failed to examine, interrogate, and explore the other aspects of the sexual politics of the world they were creating, and similarly refused to seriously work with the ideas of having different compatible gender pairings than male dominant/female submissive (which, to be clear, is something that at least Goddanar was willing to consider back in the day – so desire to be horny on main is not an excuse). By contrast, author Xiran Jay Zhao clearly went into this having already interrogated these ideas herself, and was willing to incorporate the results of that interrogation into the book – with plenty of room in the upcoming sequels to explore that further.

Also, the character dynamics in the story are great – especially the core trio of Zetian, Shimin, and Zetian’s childhood friend Gao Yizhi, with a few solid supporting characters like strategist Sima Yi. Not to make this “my year of fiction about polyamory”, but the three make for a great polyamorous relationship, and seeing the relationship between the three build throughout the novel is wonderful. How that relationship will go into the second book is… hard to get into without spoilers, but it’s something I’m excited to read about, but also anxious over how it will turn out – which admittedly is probably what Zhao was going for, so Mission Accomplished.

One other thing I also appreciated – a thing that bugged me about She Who Became The Sun is that it was a fantasy novel heavily inspired by Chinese history that wasn’t really willing to interrogate some serious aspects of it – because the focus was on overthrowing the Mongol government (referred to as the Hu Dynasty, instead of the historical dynastic name of the Yuan dynasty) – so there’s no consideration of the thought that historical China, being an Empire, was generally often in the process of, to use the modern parlance, “Doing an Imperialism”, and the barbarians attacking at their borders were just as often peoples seeking to resist conquest as those seeking to raid and conquer, and in the process, reiterated old stereotypes that basically lead to the Mongols being written like stereotypical Orcs (in the ways that some interpretations of Orcs by Western authors are written like stereotypical Mongols). Instead, Iron Widow through the back half of this story also interrogates the romanticization of Imperial Chinese history – calling out that the country, through its surrogate in this novel, was an empire, and did the things that we justly and rightly call out other historical empires as having done, whether in the form of the brutal subjugation of peoples (particularly ethnic minorities), and using the satellite areas of the nation for resource extraction for the wealthier imperial core. That crap happens in the world of this novel, and it’s one of the numerous injustices (including the heavy institutional misogyny that kicks off the story) that Zetian is seeking to overthrow.

It made for a novel that I enjoyed immensely, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the sequel. Also, with how well this book turned out with Zhao riffing on Darling in the Franxx, there’s a chunk of me that really hopes she watched Getter Robo or Gurren Lagann, because there’s a bit of that I’d be interested to see if she riffs on in a future book.

The Mongolians are written in this book in a way that feels like it's consistent with the Wuxia novels that inspired the author, but also in ways that feels like they are ignoring internalized prejudices from those novels - the writers of those works had their own biases, possibly unexamined, about Mongolians as a people, or at least the history of those people, that put them into some of the same archetypes that white fantasy and science fiction writers are (justifiably) criticized for using when writing “Proud Warrior Race” characters and cultures.

It feels like the the author is reproducing those stereotypes from those works uncritically.

A Master of Djinn is set in an alternative history Egypt where, in the late 1800s, a sorcerer known only as Al-Jahiz, working in Cairo, restored magic to the world, and with it Djinni, and all manner of other supernatural beings. In this process, this also brought Egypt into being a Great Power on the global stage (technically again), and lead to an earlier contraction of several empires.  It's now 1912, and rumblings of various political and military disagreements are pointing towards a potential World War. A peace summit is due to be held in Cairo in the hopes of avoiding that ar, organized by diplomat Sir Alastair Worthington – a British man who is well respected in both Europe and Egypt, and who has adopted Egypt as his home country. Worthington has also founded a secret society dedicated to Al-Jahiz and his works, as part of his, for lack of a better term, Egyptophilia.  So, when a person claiming to be the returned Al-Jahiz murders Worthington and the entirety of his brotherhood, using magical means, not long before the peace summit. the Egyptian government has A Problem on its hands. So, the relevant organization – the Ministry for Alchemy, Enchantment, and Supernatural Entities Agent Fatima el-Sha'arawi to investigate, along with her new (and rookie) partner, Agent Hadia.  Clark uses some of the narrative concepts of the “Buddy Cop” (or just “Buddy Crime”) story for considerable effect, through using twists on a familiar narrative structure to help keep the reader grounded, and also preventing a sense of exoticization. By having the characters react to things that are different from our life experiences as normal through a familiar concept, those things become normal, and we as readers are able to step away from our internal sense of exoticization and just roll with it.  As an example, Fatima starts the story as an agent who works on their own – who doesn't have or want a partner – and eschews traditional Islamic fashion, instead wearing Western-style suits with a bowler hat. She also doesn't talk much about her religious beliefs, particularly since she's also a lesbian. Her partner, Agent Hadia, being fresh out of the academy, has less street smarts, but has some book smarts Fatima lacks (particularly when it comes to religious training) – but also can pull her own weight in a fight and, being a member of the Islamic Feminist League, is in tune with various social movements, meaning that it reduces a degree of tension regarding whether the two are going to end up at odds because of Fatima's sexual identity.  The involvement of the peace summit also really helps to round out the larger world of the setting, both with the various foreign dignitaries, and with the handful of emigre communities that pop up over the course of A Master of Djinn, either directly playing a role in the plot, or as background supporting cast. If I had a gripe at all with this, it's that the Conference's Great Powers are “The European Great Powers + Egypt” – with no presence of any of the contracted former colonies of the Great Powers that might have their own tensions that would make the World War fit that description – such as India, China, and Japan. Japan's conflict with Russia in World War I ended up spreading into further grabs for territory in China and Korea, for example, and the rise of magic could potentially have lead to some degree of a resurgent China (giving it a different global perception than it had pre-WWII), and the Indian Independence movement might have already made a level of headway that it didn't get until post World War II. It all feels like a missed opportunity.  On the other hand, Grey gets into the very ways racial prejudices have and haven't changed in this world – the White European members of Worthington's “Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz” look down on the people of Egypt, Cairo has a population of African-American emigres (particularly demonstrated by the African-American Jazz musicians at the club where Fatima hangs out), much as there were in France. However, darker-skinned Egyptians also face prejudice from their peers, and related to this, the story also gets into the historical president of this with tensions between previous Egyptian pharaohs and the darker-skinned population of Nubia to the south, and the ways that the Nubian population was treated in Egypt in the past.  Now, the mystery that is the heart of the plot is wonderfully well written – feeling like a work that fits in the lineage of other detective stories set in and around World War 1, not as cynical as noir, and not as grim as hard-boiled detective stories, but still with a willingness to get its hands dirty in the telling of the story, without getting into the gentility of a cozy.  I'm tremendously glad I read this book, and I'm going to need to hunt down the other novellas in this universe – and I deeply look forward to Clark's next novel. 

  Bitmap Books is a company that's been on my radar for a while, but whose books I'd never gotten around to picking up. They had built up a very solid reputation for generally very well-written books about video games, both on the computer and the PC with really solid production values, both in terms of the layout of the books, and the quality of the materials used. The book I'm reviewing today – The CRPG Book – is no such exception.      The CRPG Book does kind of what it says on the cover – it runs down the history of computer role-playing games (console games generally excluded) from the 1970s to the present day. The rundown is broken down by decade for the first portion of the book, then by 5 year span by the later portion of the book. Each section includes some a quick primer on what else was going on in games at that time to give context – such as the release date for games like Doom and Quake, along with home consoles like the Xbox, as those had impacts that would spill over to CRPGs, either by changing the style of game to take advantage of new technologies or pushing changes in style to fit with releasing the game both on console and on PC.  It's also important to mention what this book is not. This is not a “150 CRPGs to play before you Die” kind of book. Some of these games have aged poorly, and the writers often, but not always, recognize that. Other games are just bad, but are bad in interesting ways. Other games are a very acquired taste that make them something the contributor to the book likes, but you may not. Others just are lacking quality of life improvements that would make them difficult for people to play, or have mechanical quirks meant to make the game more “special” but can make them obtuse – which the contributor thinks isn't a problem and you should git-good.  This does lead to the weakness of the book, which is also (to a degree) its strength. The book has a massive variety of contributors to the text, who all bring different things to the table, both in terms of their history with CRPGs and their taste in games. While the reviews are marked by author, it's with a three letter initial code. While there is a list of contributors at the start of the book, it's also not exactly done alphabetically in a way that makes sense. It might have taken more column inches to give a longer contributor name, and in the process added a page or two to the contributor section, but it would have done a lot to help keep straight who contributed what, and in the process to see how their preferences impact what games they write about. 

I like cookbooks. They are the fusion of my love for cooking and food, and my background in technical writing. I also love fantasy fiction & roleplaying games, with The Elder Scrolls series in particular. So, when I first played Skyrim and found there was cooking in the game, one of my first thoughts was “Man, an Elder Scrolls cookbook would be neat!” So, when one finally came out, I knew that I needed to check it out. Much as with the second Von Bek novel, I should have been looking at the Monkey's Paw.

Let's start off by focusing on the positive – there are some things this cookbook does very right. The book has several spice blends that look interesting. Additionally, each recipie includes a difficulty ranking from 1-10, presented with a Skyrim/ESO-style skill bar. This, in particular, feels like an innovation that more cookbooks could use, on top of the usual prep time, cook time, and total time information.

All of that said, the book has some problems with recipe presentation. For example, the multiple bread recipes in the book do list the rise time with the prep and cook time. However, they don't indicate in the recipe where to have the bread rise, and then if there's one rise or two. Now, if you have experience making bread, that's not necessarily an issue – as you may be able to intuit where to let the bread rise. However, if you are inexperienced, that's a problem – and it's especially an issue when dealing with a cookbook where the target market is “People who like the Elder Scrolls games and want to cook more, but don't due to lack of experience.”

However, that leads to the other problem – a lot of the recipes here are slight modifications and re-skins of some fairly common or classic recipes – stuff like rice pilaf, or shepherd's pie with goat instead of lamb, mutton, or hamburger.

All of this is especially an issue when it gets to the brewing suggestions – there are a variety of recipes here for brewing your own mead. Again, this is neat – I could see more than a few people who maybe have some experience making beer wanting to branch out to mead based on playing Skyrim – or electing to start brewing based on Skyrim, and maybe starting with mead. However, if you've never made mead before, if anything in these recipes is omitted that is a big deal (equivalent to the number of rises for bread, for example), you, like I, would not know if that's missing.

All of that makes for a real deal-breaker that keeps me from recommending this book for purchase.

This review was originally posted on my blog: https://countzeroor.com/2021/01/03/the-elder-scrolls-the-official-cookbook-book-review/

Virgin Books' Doctor Who: New Adventures series was, back in the day, meant to provide fans of Doctor Who the thing they wanted after the show was put on indefinite hiatus after the serial Survival. Time's Crucible is the 6th book in the series, part of a pair of thematically linked stories under the heading of “Cat's Cradle”.

The story involves the TARDIS basically having a temporal collision with an early prototype Time Ship from Gallifrey from just before the rise of Rassilon. This gets into material that doctors from Tom Baker on had explored directly, but which Sylvester McCoy's doctor had only explored obliquely – the history of the Time Lords.

Conceptually, telling the story as a novel lets you do some stuff that would be really hard to do in live-action television. The mixed up TARDIS interior is described with a weird surrealistic and claustrophobic interior that you could do with comics or animation (as was demonstrated by the anime Id:Invaded), but would be very difficult to do with a TV budget for the time (even modern Doctor Who might stumble a bit with that).

Additionally, the book puts Ace at the forefront in some interesting ways – she's always been an active character in Doctor Who stories, but here for 3/4th of the book she's the driving force of the resolution of the plot.

The book's not without some real problems though. The elements of the plot with time folding in on itself and alternative versions of characters from different places in their timelines running into each other works very awkwardly in prose. By the end of the book I've completely lost track of some of these characters timelines. This, on the other hand, is something that a visual presentation would work strongly with – through showing the same character in different physical states to indicate where they are in their life and their timeline (or timelines).

Additionally, the opening portions of this book are something of a slog – when the book gets going, it really gets going. It's just that it takes almost a quarter of the book to get there.

(This book review originally appeared on my blog)

Most of the focus this book is politicking, with a little bit of space combat.

Interesting developments in this installment.

Note: This review originally appeared on my blog - https://countzeroor.com/2018/05/12/book-review-dungeon-hacks/

Procedural content, permadeath, and extremely punishing difficulty has become more and more of a thing in game design. So, that fact, combined by my affinity for the history of technology from a social, technological, and scientific perspective, lead me to this book about the history of roguelikes. It makes for a good portrait of the development of four games, and getting briefly into some of the ways roguelikes have spread into wider gaming culture, though what could be a good look at the larger gaming picture is sadly limited.

Dungeon Hacks is, ultimately, the story of six games - Beneath Apple Manor (BAM), Rogue, NetHack, Moria & Angband together, and Ancient Domains of Mystery. Beneath Apple Manor is set up as being what Rogue could have been - the Roguelike that predates Rogue, but which failed to get the level of penetration that Rogue did.

Rogue and Nethack probably get the most time each, with the discussion of Rogue getting into how the game came about, along with it's cultural permutation through its initial distribution in BSD Unix. The discussion of Nethack gets into the concept of the Nethack “Dev Team” along with how distributed development for the game was handled.

Moria and Angband, and Ancient Domains of Mystery get the least time of the main roguelikes. In part, that's because Moria & Angband were basically designed as a response to the fact that NetHack's tone is pretty much all over the place, with tongue-in-cheek classes (like “Tourist”) and joke monsters (like the actual Three Stooges). Ancient Domains of Mystery mostly stands out because it's pretty much the main focus of one developer, and with a much larger scope than any of the other Roguelike games.

The book concludes a discussion of “Rogue-like-likes” - in particular FTL and the original Diablo.  This part is probably the most disappointing part of the book - mainly because of the limited scope - and particular what this section overlooks. In particular, the book basically takes the tack that the mainstream popularity of the roguelike is a modern western thing. This is unfortunate and wrong - in both respects. Home consoles got roguelikes, either as straight-up roguelikes like Fatal Labyrinth on the Genesis, or as “Roguelike-lites” like the Mystery Dungeon series and the Shiren the Wanderer series. They may not have gotten the same degree of penetration here that they did in Japan - but it is still important to mention - they got an incredible amount of cultural penetration in Japan, at at time where they had no penetration whatsoever in the US.

Note: This review originally appeared on my site.

A few years ago I did a video review of the original OVA for Record of Lodoss War. At that time, the OVA was out of print, as was (and still is, sadly) the manga adaptation of the novels. Since then, Funimation (not the company I expected to do it) license rescued all of the anime, and now Seven Seas has done something I never expected to happen - they licensed the first novel, and gave it a fantastic edition in 2017.

The OVA and the novel share a common framework and characters, but have some very dramatic changes from the novel to the anime. Some of these are clearly due to the change in medium. Others appear to be due to budgetary restrictions and length.

The book follows the party of Parn - a young inexperienced warrior seeking to prove himself and try to make the world a better place, Deedlit - an elf looking for adventure who finds herself drawn to Parn and his companions, Etoh - a priest of Pharis and Parn's childhood friend, Slayn Starseeker - a wizard searching for knowledge and something else... he doesn't know what yet, Woodchuck - a thief out for wealth and with a chip on his shoulder, and Ghim - a Dwarf looking for the missing daughter of the priestess of Marfa and his friend, Neese. The party goes on their adventures along the backdrop of an invasion of the island of Lodoss by the forces of the dark empire of Marmo, lead by Emperor Beld. Beld is advised by a mysterious sorceress known only as Karla.

And that's where a lot of similarities end. Probably the biggest example of this is the characters of Ashram and Pirotess. In the anime they are set up very early on as the dark opposites of Parn and Deedlit - both are skilled warriors (though Ashram is very skilled from the beginning), and both care for each other, though Ashram and Pirotess aren't particularly able to show it because in Marmo it would be a sign of weakness. In the anime, Ashram and Parn first meet during the sacking of an Alanian fortress, with Parn witnessing Ashram's attack and swearing revenge. Further, throughout the anime, when the narrative moves to the Marmo camp, in addition to seeing Beld and Karla plotting, we also see Beld and Ashram together (setting up Ashram as Beld's #2), and Ashram and Pirotess (again, setting up Ashram and Pirotess as the dark version of Parn and Deed).

In the novel, on the other hand, while we cut back to Beld and Karla, Ashram barely shows up in this the book, only appearing briefly in the battle between the Empire of Marmo and the Valis Alliance, and Pirotess doesn't show up at all. Wagnard, Beld's court magician, is dramatically much more visible, and has a much more direct connection to our protagonists, though he and the Heroes of Lodoss don't interact in this story.

This leads to the other really dramatic change. Much more time is spent on characters backstory in this installment. In the OVA, we get backstory for Parn and his goal to redeem his father's memory, and Ghim and his goal to bring back Lydia to Neese. However, here we also get more backstory for Woodchuck and Slayn. We learn about Slayn's time at the Wizard's academy, why he left, and we get a connection through him and Wagnard - that Wagnard was a classmate of Slayn's who was not only expelled, but also had a lock placed on his magic so he cannot cast spells without great physical pain. Also, the book sets up that Woodchuck had been incarcerated for almost 20 years for a heist gone wrong, and was only just released, putting a chip on his shoulder that leads to him making a particular decision at the end of the story that he didn't make in the anime.

Additionally, the dungeon crawl that takes up the OVA's first episode takes up about two paragraphs in the novel.

The other changes are a little less dramatic. Parn and company meet Deedlit and Woodchuck in the middle of a festival in the novel, which would have been really expensive to animate in the OVA. Also, in the OVA, the battle between the Valis Alliance and Marmo is just a general pitched battle, without any real tactics or maneuvering (and which generally goes badly for the Alliance before the end), while in the book, it's a more strategically planned battle, with Parn and Kashue taking on a flanking force of Marmo, and only after they are repelled successfully do they join up with the main force, and then at that point do they lose the track of the battle and things start to look closer.

As an aside, there's another change from the book to the OVA, but the Chronicles of the Heroic Knight TV series incorporates and shows the book version, so it less merits mentioning.

Karla is still one of my favorite antagonists, because her worldview is internally consistent, and while it doesn't make sense from a human perspective - that's the point - she's lived so long and through so many bodies that she's effectively lost touch with her humanity, which makes her a more interesting and unique protagonist. The character of Mordenkainen in Greyhawk is the closest character in tabletop RPGs as far as motivations go, through as near as I can tell, the depiction of his motivation as being similar to Karla's doesn't seem to appear until after Lodoss gets a US release in the late 80s, so I don't know if that aspect of the character was inspired by Lodoss .

The Grey Witch isn't exactly a ground-breaking novel now, particularly when it comes to modern heroic fantasy. As with Legend of the Galactic Heroes, it's a genre that has become well trod, and numerous other works have paid reference to and been inspired by. Still, it's worth reading seeing where all those stories came from, and honestly, it's an exciting read.

My video review will go up first Wednesday of October.

Fun little volume. Mara is back and wreaking some havoc, and we have a potential new recurring character with Kodama.

Some interesting developments this volume. Additionally, I really want to adapt the setting to the rules for Numenera - not just the Cypher system, but Numenera itself. The two worlds, thematically, have a lot in common,

Kanna's crew has just expanded by one, and we have Father Nitani's backstory. I kind of wish Nitani had the opportunity to bring the Pontiff on board, but ah well.

The ending was a little anti-climactic, and the plot for the first half really didn't go anywhere, but otherwise the story was enjoyable.

Disclosure: I received this book for free from the author for purposes of review.

When I received Aetna Adrift from the author, Erik Wecks, at OryCon last year, I saw that the book was a prequel to another series of books that he'd put out – his Pax Imperium series. Before I accepted the book, I asked if he considered the book to be a decent jumping point to this series. He said it was. I was a little unsure, but I accepted the book anyway. The good news is that the book is. It starts on a rough foot, but once it really gets going, it makes for an enjoyable read.

The book is set at a somewhat unspecified point in the future. Humanity has traveled to the stars and has splintered into a series of various governments. One of these is the Unity Corporation – a totalitarian corporate state, with internal politics that can best be described as literally cut-throat.

Out in the ass end of the Unity is the planet Aetna, an ice planet (similar somewhat to Europa) that is home to a hydrogen mining operation. On that planet is Jack Halloway, who is doing his damndest to stay under the radar, out of the way, and in the process retain a degree of personal independence. In this case he does it by running a small smuggling operation bringing luxury goods into the colony. However, when a Unity executive by the name of Timothy Randall shows up on Aetna with his entourage, and ropes Jack into his plans on pain of death, things start going very bad, very fast, and it takes all of Jack's craftiness and a lot of luck to get through this alive.

So, Jack Halloway is our viewpoint character, and our lens through which we view society in the Unity. The problem is that life in the Unity is pretty rough and dystopian, some elements of which Jack recognizes as bad, but others he accepts as normal, but I, the reader, see as negative, since I'm an outsider. This is especially the case for women in Unity society, and it clearly comes across that way in the book. However, for most of the book Jack doesn't notice it, because it's either not a problem for him, or he's in a position to benefit from it – and by the time that changes in the book, there's enough other stuff going on that other matters are pressing concerns, until the very end of the book.

Getting into the positives, Wecks creates an interesting cyberpunk-adjacent world here, a setting that gets into some of the elements of cyberpunk, but with the addition of interstellar travel. Where this gets interesting in particular is that most works of Cyberpunk don't get much into what life in a corporate state is really like. Wecks gets into that. It's all the worst parts of real world corporate politics, with a side of Robocop's corporate politics as well.

Aetna Adrift did get me more interested in checking out some of the rest of the original Pax Imperium series, to see how well those books present the larger universe.

Technically I listened to the audiobook version put out by Bureau42.com, read by Blaine Dowler.

This was a really interestingly done gothic horror novel - I'll have a full review of this later.

A decent adaptation of the first Vampire Hunter D novel, thought the art in this volume is very heavy on the lines, to enough of a degree that it disrupts the flow.

This volume has the train-ride to the hot springs. If you've seen this portion of Hayate The Combat Butler series 2, then you know the plot beats here - the anime adapts it fairly faithfully. I kind of prefer the anime version of it, because some of the jokes are a little funnier in motion - but this volume of the manga is really enjoyable to read.

Well... one of our two leads has had their psychological cooling rods removed, which makes me very interested in seeing what they'll be doing next book.

While I enjoyed this book immensely, the fact that Borsk Fey'lya managed to continue to be a major player in the New Republic after the events of this book is surprising. At the very least you'd think the Bothans would have sent someone else to represent them on the New Republic Council after he managed to mess up this badly.

A really good conclusion to the Thrawn Trilogy. The most recent audiobook is also very well done. I really hope the X-Wing series gets some similar audiobook treatments.