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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5549513" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 232: August 1996part 4/8The role of books: One foot in the grave by Wm Mark Simmons is not a book based upon the sitcom, but a vampire story involving a beleaguered half-vampire. Cliche, you may say, but we all know there's little new in the world, and this is a story that manages to make the idea fun. There's action, sex, and plot twists aplenty, and while it's open for a sequel, it still manages to finish it's current plot properly. It's all very well balanced. Shade and shadow by Francine G Woodbury combines mystery plotting with magic as science ideas, to produce a fairly slow paced but well written murder mystery. John's main complaint is that the worldbuilding possibly isn't taken far enough. That's the stuff roleplayers need to steal for their games. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Firestar by Michael Flynn is one of the many books coming out around that time that tries to capitalise on pre-millenial tension. How long ago and silly that all seems now. Still, it's very much of the vein that we can make the future better, not that the world is doomed and there's nothing we can do, which is welcome. After all, sci-fi ought to be driving us onwards to advance technology, not making us hold back out of fear. The magic touch by Jody Lynn Nye is our negative review for the month. It's blandly written, derivative, and the tone really doesn't match the setting. Gotta warn us away from stuff as well as recommend it, otherwise this section wouldn't be half as interesting. Wind from a foreign sky by Katya Reimann sees John bemoaning that the explosion of fantasy actually means fewer heroic epics in the old skool vein. Fortunately, there are some new writers producing them, like this one, and he hopes they get at least a good trilogy out of this series. But will they enjoy the same commercial success in a competitive market? It's so much easier to become legendary when you're a pioneer. Tales of the fifth age: The gift of fire by William W Connors & Sue Weinlein Cook (so she's married Monte now? Iiinteresting) We've had stories showing us what's happened to the kender & gnomes during krynn's upheaval. Now it's dwarves turn. With 4 months to go, I don't doubt the elves'll get their go as well. As befits the race, this is actually fairly serious, showing that they're having to deal with internal tensions as well as outside challenges, and do morally dubious things to survive. Such as trying to train a fire dragon of chaos to fight the great dragons taking over the land. Yeah, that's the kind of plan that's likely to lead to massive losses on both sides, whoever wins. And it's not surprising it leads to it's user being banished from the dwarven halls for his rashness. This is actually pretty good, with plenty of drama, well defined characters, and a story that holds up on it's own but still ties into the larger sweep of krynn's history. We're finally getting somewhere with this 5th age idea, figuring out what it's supposed to be about and the stories we could be telling in it. Let's hope they can bring this to a climax at the end of the year, and justify their sluggish start.</blockquote>

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