Tag: Jack Vance

Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams (Demon Princes, Book 5)

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This entry is part 4 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

Well, this is the saddest of the Demon Princes novels, because its villain, Howard Allen Treesong, was the most sympathetic of the series: a lunatic, to be sure, but he lost his mind through abuse and bullying and a horrible childhood. The eponymous The Book of Dreams feels like some kind of metonym for a lot of SF as a literary form: a kooky, self-aggrandizing remix of obscure adventure stories, folklore, and religious tracts. The “high school reunion revenge” scene is the stuff of a Netflix miniseries season climax, I tell you. Also, the parallels between Gerson and Treesong are… …

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Jack Vance’s The Face (Demon Princes, Book 4)

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This entry is part 3 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As you may have noticed, I’m mostly blogging to log my reading for the year, at least right now. Most of these posts come at least a few weeks after finishing a given book, to give me time to think about, process, and settle in my feelings and thoughts before discussing them.  So, I continued on in the new year with the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance, of which this is the fourth. (I’d read the third back in December, so it wasn’t long ago.)

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Recent Books (More Recenter Books Edition)

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So, here’s some stuff I’ve read lately… It’s a lot of what I’ve read so far in 2006, at least since my last book post. Since I typically are working my way slowly through any five books at once, these posts tend to come slowly, and to have a lot in them when they do come, so I’m including just fiction here. I’ll put up a second post, a bit later, with the  nonfiction stuff in it.  Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan I picked up this book in Los Angeles, and I’m very glad I did.  A creepy …

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Reading The Gaean Reach RPG

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I’m somewhat familiar with the Gumshoe RPG system: I’ve played a short campaign of Trail of Cthulhu, and skimmed several core rulebooks using the system—Trail of Cthulhu, Nights Black Agents, Ashen Stars, and Cthulhu Confidential, all of which I own copies—but I haven’t had a chance to read any of those rulebooks in full or run a Gumshoe system game. In fact, until recently the only Gumshoe gamebook I’d actually read in full was Gareth Ryder Hanrahan’s Lorefinder book, which essentially is an extended Gumshoe hack designed to be bolted onto Pathfinder (and other D&D-styled traditional RPGs), in order to …

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