Simons Mith

The early D6 Star Wars adventures such as Tatooine Manhunt and Battle for the Golden Sun (which could be told apart because they were saddle-stitched and 40pp or so whereas later adventures were perfect bound and 70pp or more) were all pretty basic scenarios. But Tatooine Manhunt (and also Strike Force Shantipole) were two of the better ones and were good fun! This adventure deserves a 3 or a bit over. And it did introduce a great villainess - the bounty hunter Zardra, who was entertaining and memorable enough to appear in at least one other adventure. More than one GM noticed that she was worth reusing. (But I called her Zadra in my campaign.)

Not a bad fantasy novel, reads a bit like it was generated from quite an enjoyable (for the players) D&D campaign. But were that the case it would have been more fun for the players to play through than it is for us to read about. (I doubt that it actually /was/ a D&D game, but that's how it came across, to me and at least one other reader.) Some good ideas in here which might be eminently nickable for an RPG, but only an average read, or a hair above.

This is a modern superhero comic, a good one, in book form, and also available in epub, and IIRC pdf and kindle. [But epub can be munged into any format you like anyway.] The world is as fantastical as anything the Avengers have had to deal with, but a great deal grubbier and more ambiguous. The protagonist in Episode 1 is a good man whom fate dealt a generous hand, once upon a time, and then stripped more than all of it away.

The Minus Faction is of a newer time, when trust in governments has largely and deservedly vanished. The writing is sound throughout, with sharp dialogue and a cast of strong and interesting characters, and a couple of cultural in-jokes here and there. And then every now and then there's a golden paragraph of prose that uses the perfect words to say exactly what the author wanted. Not many writers, even the big-name ones, have that knack, but Rick Wayne does. It makes some small parts of the book extraordinary powerful considering it was only really intended to be a modern pulpy superhero novel.

Recommended to anyone who likes slightly grittier superhero stuff with some slight cyberpunk influences (nothing very overt). Also recommended if you want to look at a work with the occasional block of text that expresses itself as powerfully as anything Kurt Vonnegut has written, just to see how it's done.

A touching story, joyous, sad and romantic at different points. I think my favourite scene was right at the start of the book, when the traveller meets his future wife for the first time in his timeline and she's so delighted to see him again (after a gap of a couple of years, for her) that she completely bowls him over. I will usually read a 500-odd page book in two or three chunks; this one got read in a single sitting, something I don't often do. It's going to become an acknowledged classic, I'm sure of it.

I have to largely quote a friend reviewing the same book, who wrote

"A Chinese box of a tale, with one tale containing another, which contains yet another, sometimes to the depth of six or seven tales. And Valente has this way of mentioning rather wondrous magical things in an almost matter-of-fact way, and describing the ordinary as if it were exotic, which I liked a lot."

I can't think of a better way to put it.