As I’ve written before, I am an absolute sucker for alternate history. Most of it, unfortunately, is not very good, even by the standards of genre fiction’s transparent prose: the attraction here is really the idea, with all its surprising facets, so the best examples are typically the ones where the idea is so good, the unexpected ramifications so startling at the moment (but so obvious in retrospect), that you can forgive the cardboard characters and lackluster prose.| www.thepsmiths.com
Does every child cost you a novel? Michael Chabon (father of four) considers what he's lost.| GQ
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian: The Original Adventures of the Greatest Sword and Sorcery Hero of All Time!, Robert E. Howard (ed. Patrice Louinet, Del Ray, 2003). Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haire...| www.thepsmiths.com