14 Mar, 2024
The End of History
Lawrence Watt-Evans’ 1992 Crosstime Traffic is a collection of short stories1. It is not to be confused with Harry Turtledove’s Crosstime YA series, although booksellers sure did their best to flog the second to me when I looked for the first.
The edition I am reviewing is the original Del Rey, not the more recent FoxAcre, which seems to differ slightly in content.
7 Mar, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
1982’s The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, also published as The Cyborg and the Sorceress, is the first volume in Lawrence Watt-Evans’ War Surplus science-fantasy duology.
Six months after a cyborg, Slant, was dispatched to infiltrate and reconnoiter rebel planets, the rebel alliance’s ships pierced Solar defenses and obliterated Earth and Mars. Whether this means that the rebels won is unclear. What is clear is that Earth lost… decisively.
Slant is programmed to carry out his mission despite the fall of Earth.
22 Feb, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
1989’s Nightside City is the first of Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Carlisle Hsing hard-SF mystery novels, which are in turn a subset of Watt-Evan’s Shining Steel Universe.
Down-at-heel private detective Carlisle Hsing cannot be choosy about which cases to accept. Nevertheless, the case offered to her by Zarathustra Pickens is a new low. Not only is the pay laughably small, the case itself makes no sense. Why would someone be buying up doomed real estate?
But first! An infodump about the exoplanet on which the story is set.
15 Feb, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Lawrence Watt-Evans’s 1985 The Misenchanted Sword is the first in a series of secondary-universe fantasy novels set in Watt-Evans’ Ethshar.
Cut off from his fellow Ethsharite soldiers by an unexpected northern empire attack, Valder flees enemy soldiers determined to kill him. In his panic, Valder does something that will shape the rest of his quite possibly short life: he annoys a wizard.