Recent content by Autumnal

Jason Corley once suggested using Vampire the Masquerade for a game of secret psychic conspiracies (like the manga 3x3 Eyes, and James Hudnall’s comic book Espers, among others). The psions drain Willpower instead of blood, and spend it like blood for their powers. The clans become Houses or...

As someone who literally owes my life to what I learned from Camus’ The Myth Of Sisyphus and The Rebel and Franks’s Man’s Search For Meaning, I very strenuously disagree. I won’t pursue the digression, because every noun and adjective that I think of to use in response violates site norms, and I...

I would be all over that.

Sandman Slim did very well for him. I don’t know about his last couple; I’ve been out of the loop in recent year.

I love Metrophage with an unseemly love, even as I recognize its flaws. I apparently startled Kadrey on Facebook in the late ‘00s or early ‘10s by being a continuing fan of the book. :)

No, it’s its own thing. It’s a different twenty-first century, and a different historical milieu.

Oops. Yes.

Random Catch-up Time! I’m at 31/100 for a read-what-you-own challenge and am enjoying it. Ronald Malfi: been meaning to get to him for years, and now I’ve read two of his, Black Mouth and Bone White. Both were superb. More of his work is in the queue. Wow. He’s got an amazing specificity in...

And there’s stuff that originated in the films, or that they claim originated in the films. It’s tricky and ugly, as it can be when one party is out for every scrap of profit it can squeeze out of its property.

These days I respond to that the same way I respond to characters set up to keep a party from cohering other guaranteed to make immediate chaos the other players don’t want: design something else. Lots of concepts of species and culture origins don’t require such things. Go with one of them instead.

The Cruse version did have that great scene with the burning train. People’s expressions of exhausted despair were a very Wells-like moment. There’s a comics mini-series by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli called Scarlet Traces. It’s set ten years after the novel, with Martian technology...

So there we were, watching the 1943 Phantom of the Opera, complete with the subplot about getting Lizst to play a concerto composed by the Phantom to lure him out things end as they must and the credits roll. “Franz Lizst: Fritz Leiber” blink blink blink Turns out it was Leiber Sr, father to...

I really liked The Difference Engine, but it’s really different from anything else I’ve read by either author solo. It goes deeper but not faster. If you’d like to read some 19th century alternate history with super tech that turns out to have a solid physical rationale and radical politics, and...