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.
23 Jan, 2025
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Robert Swindells’ 1984 Brother in the Land is a stand-alone post-apocalypse novel.
Caught in a sudden downpour, teenager Danny Lodge takes shelter in a convenient World War Two-era bunker. Not only does this protect Danny from the rain, it protects him from the Soviet nuclear warhead that detonates in nearby Branford.
Well, the bunker protects Danny from the immediate effects.
2 Jan, 2025
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Alan Dean Foster’s 1983 The Man Who Used the Universe is a stand-alone science fiction novel.
Kees vaan Loo-Macklin, impoverished resident of industrial planet Evenwraith, joins a criminal gang because that seems to the coldly logical young man his best chance to survive long enough to pursue better goals. His boss. Lal, is suspicious of the new recruit, who doesn’t seem to have any personal vices. Anything Lal can’t understand could be a threat. Lal knows how to handle threats.
Lal orders Loo-Macklin to carry out a contract killing. The target has been previously attacked and has defeated all attackers. Loo-Macklin may be being sent to his death. But if he survives… Lal has arranged for a very special reward.
19 Dec, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
1984’s Circumpolar! is the first volume in Richard A. Lupoff’s Twin Planet’s duology.
It has long been known that the Earth is a flattened toroid. Vast ice walls bar the southern (outer) edge of the planet. Fierce winds make passage through the hole at the northern (inner) region nearly impassable. Therefore, while this side of the Earth — the side with Eurasia, the Americas, and all the other familiar continents — has been mapped, nothing is known of the other side.
Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin offers fifty thousand dollars to the first team to somehow reach and return from the other side of Earth.
Two aviator teams undertake this historic challenge.
14 Nov, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Lt. General1 Daniel O. Graham’s 1983 High Frontier is a substantially expanded version of his 1982 High Frontier. Graham’s book shares a title with Gerard K. O’Neill’s High Frontier; they differ in that O’Neill was interested in the civilian uses of space, whereas Graham’s topic is the military use of space. More specifically, ballistic missile defense or BMD. You may be more familiar with his proposal as the Strategic Defense Initiative (as its fans called it) or Star Wars (as its detractors called it).
Is there an alternative to Mutually Assured Destruction that does not involve capitulating to Communist Russia? Graham believes that there is.
7 Nov, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
1985’s Child of Fortune is the second book in Norman Spinrad’s Second Starfaring Age science fiction series. As both books stand alone, one need not have read the first book, The Void Captain’s Tale, before reading Child.
The Jump Drive transformed the human-settled worlds. Travel no longer demanded decades. Instead, the trip was no more demanding than an intercontinental airplane trip centuries ago. The cultural effects were profound.
For teenage Moussa, the most relevant consequence is the wanderjahr.
13 Aug, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
Gordon R. Dickson’s 1983 The Man From Earth is a collection of short science fiction stories.
1983! Tor Books was a brand-new company, which although nowhere near the behemoth it is today, was busy hoovering up famous… well, established, at any rate… authors. Gordon R. Dickson was one such.
Dickson was one of young me’s go-to SF authors. Early Tor was already on my buy list. So was anything with Jim Baen’s name on it; the title page identifies The Man From Earth as a Jim Baen Presentation.
You’d think I would have read this collection before 2024. I did not. There’s a very good reason for that and that reason is named Donald Allen Wollheim.
1 Aug, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
George R. R. Martin’s 1982 Fevre Dream is a stand-alone (but see footnote one) historical horror novel.
1857: Abner Marsh is a steamboat entrepreneur without steamboats. An unusually cold winter saw the Mississippi freeze solid, crushing all but one of March’s precious riverboats like eggs. His remaining paddle-wheeler, the Eli Renolds, being seven years old and surely on its last legs, Marsh faces the end of his Fevre River Packet Company.
Enter Joshua York, a wealthy man with a need for a steamboat and a partner who understands the Mississippi. York offers to finance a splendid new paddle-wheeler, the Fevre Dream, to Marsh’s specifications. The deal seems too good to turn down. Marsh accepts his new business partner.
Only after the Fevre Dream begins plying the Mississippi does Marsh begin to suspect he should have asked more questions about York.
6 Jun, 2024
Big Hair, Big Guns!
1986’s When the Wind Blows is a Jimmy-Murakami-directed animated film of the Raymond Briggs nuclear war graphic novel of the same title. The score is by Roger Waters.
Retirees Jim (voiced by John Mills) and Hilda (voiced by Peggy Ashcroft) live in a picturesque cottage in rural England. Presumably, their marriage vows included the traditional promise of life-long partnership. Thanks to the rapidly warming Cold War, that promise will be fulfilled.
Note: this is not a feel-good movie.