6 Mar, 2025
The End of History
Steven Brust’s 1990 Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille is a stand-alone science fiction novel.
Cowboy Feng’s offers good food, excellent music, and, oh yes, refuge from the end of the world. Or rather, from the ends of several worlds.
27 Feb, 2025
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Steven Brust’s 1987 The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars is the first volume in Terry Windling’s eight-volume Fairy Tales series, about which more later.
Protagonist Greg Kovaks is an artist. He has just hauled out the vast blank canvas that he calls the Monster. Like the canvas, his career so far is a blank.
11 Feb, 2025
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Steven Brust’s 1984 To Reign in Hell is a stand-alone fantasy novel set in the Christian shared universe.
Existence is a sea of chaos, in which anything might appear… briefly, before dissolving. When the firstborn angels — Yaweh, Satan, Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, Leviathan and Belial — manifested, they possessed a will to live and the power to fend off the chaos.
Heaven was their refuge, an artificial realm of stable laws safe from corrosive chaos. However, Heaven was flawed.
19 Nov, 2014
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As one might guess from the title, 1994’s Five Hundred Years After picks up with Khaavren and friends half a millennium after the events of The Phoenix Guard. Dragaerans are very long lived and so rather than having been dust for four centuries, Khaavren has merely matured into a comfortable middle-age as the respected commander of the Phoenix Guard. All of his old companions, Tazendra, Pel, and Aerich, have also found lives suitable to their characters.
spoilers
10 Nov, 2014
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1991’s The Phoenix Guards seems to have intended as a one-off, as far as I can tell from the two “about the author” pieces. Nostalgic for works in the style of Sabatini and Dumas, Brust set out to create a new work reminiscent of the French Romantics, one set in the distant past of his on-going Vlad Taltos series.