SciFi Masterworks Meme
Stumbled across this meme on Walker of Worlds which links to the SciFi Matesterworks project, which I have not had time to fully check out.
The List below are classics all, like Walker of Worlds, I’ll bold the books I’ve read, and italicize the ones I own and should read :) Granted, this is one publishers list of titles, and I do not find fault with any choices other than is seems very heavily weighted with PKD. I really like PKD but always run into road blocks of one kind or another when i get ready to pick up something to dive into. His influence is surprising the entertainment industry today. I venture to say more of his stories have been created into successful high quality productions than Stephen King (and I like SK too). Granted SK has a ton of movies out there, but few satisfy like the results you get with Blade Runner, Paycheck, or Total Recall.
1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish
4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8 – The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
9 – Gateway – Frederik Pohl
10 – The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
11 – Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
12 – Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
13 – Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
14 – The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
15 – Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance
20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
22 – Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
24 – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
25 – Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
26 – Ubik – Philip K. Dick
27 – Timescape – Gregory Benford
28 – More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
29 – Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
30 – A Case of Conscience – James Blish
31 – The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
32 – Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
33 – Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
34 – The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke
35 – Pavane – Keith Roberts
36 – Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
37 – Nova - Samuel R. Delany
38 – The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
39 – The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
40 – Blood Music – Greg Bear
41 – Jem – Frederik Pohl
42 – Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
43 – VALIS – Philip K. Dick
44 – The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
45 – The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
46 – Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
47 – The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
48 – Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
49 – A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
50 – Eon - Greg Bear
51 – The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
52 – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
53 – The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
54 – The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55 – Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
56 – Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
57 – The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
58 – The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
59 – Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
60 – Ringworld - Larry Niven
61 – The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
62 – Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
63 – A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
64 – Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
65 – Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
66 – Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
67 – Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
68 – Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69 – Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70 – Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
71 – Dune - Frank Herbert
72 – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
73 – The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
74 – Inverted World – Christopher Priest
75 – Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
76 – The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
77 – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
78 – The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
79 – Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany
80 – Helliconia – Brian Aldiss
81 – Food of the Gods – H.G. Wells
82 – The Body Snatchers - Jack Finney
83 – The Female Man – Joanna Russ
84 – Arslan – M.J. Engh – Arslan
Optimum Wound Comics
This is one of the things I really like about twitter. Today I gained a new follower, I am sure he found be from some tweet I made or from one of the other comics related people I follow. However he found me, new follower and now I am following him. Jumped over to his website and find out he is part of a small independent comics publisher. They have a new book coming out soon, a black and white anthology, looks like it will be fairly strong in content which may turn some off, but I wish them all the luck. It looks like Diamond has opted out of distributing them so they will be selling it themselves and it will be available on Amazon.
Not sure if I have the funds for it right now, but it will be on my list of possibilities for sure. Thanks for the follow on twitter and good luck with the book! They also have a few web comics on their site. Check them out.
Studio Voyuerism
I am fairly sure most artists and wanna be artists are into this. Taking a look at other artists studios is just interesting. You often get a glimpse of the tools they have laying about. The toys and books on their shelves. Works in progress on their desk or drawing surface of choice. Here is an example, Glenn Southern has posted some pics tagged Studio on his flickr feed. On his info page he actually goes into the construction of the room he had built for his studio. If you are not already into checking them out that will get you started.
ImagineFX has a feature (not sure if it is regular) they spend a page on with a shot of an artists studio, some notes and a short bit by the artist on their process (or just a rambling, depending on said artists temperament). Many artists books like Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang use this as part of the process of teaching.
Finally, Studio Space is an entire book on just this subject. This book in particular covers quite a few great folks and allows you to get inside the head of the artists in a fairly revealing way. It may have not been the intention but it reveals quite a bit just the same.
Mythic Design – Adventure Art Review
I pop twitter up on my iPhone periodically or on the PC if I am taking a break from something. I follow various game personalties and companies and saw a tweet from Mythic Design offering up a free copy of Adventure Art Issue #1 to the first few folks to respond, the only catch being those who won be willing to provide a short honest review. What follows is that review.
Adventure Art #1 is offered both as a print and a PDF, I am reviewing the PDF version and think for this type of produce, while it is nice there is a print version available, really works best as a PDF as you are granted permission to reproduce the art for personal use. The product is a collection of twelve character sketches with a bonus action sketch thrown in. It has a table of contents of sorts consisting of a very short intro for each character as well as the credits for the concept and art. Very handy way to make sure the creators get credit while keeping the utility of the character sketches clean. The quality of the art is above average to very good.
Other than being just fun to look through, for me, the best use for this around the game table would be a tool to spark ideas for a game master looking for help with NPC’s for his game. Players would gain the benefit of having a picture to place with the description the GM throws at them. Always nice to have a face to associate with in a game. All in all $6 for a PDF of printable clean character art is not too bad. Mythic Design has two issues out so far, give one of them a try.
WotC screws the pooch again..
I just happened to catch a tweet from Wolfgang Baur (monkeyking) announcing WotC is pulling all sales of PDF’s from RPGnow (effective NOW) and Paizo effective midnight. Speculation is it is either in line with this press release related to a lawsuit they filed today or they are planning to bring all pdf sales in house. Either way it is incredibly short sighted on their part. If it is related to the lawsuit, this snippet seems more appropriate to THEIR actions in pulling legitimate sales and not those of the pirates they are chasing.
“Violations of our copyrights and piracy of our products hurt not only Wizards of the Coast’s financial health but also the health of whole gaming community including retailers and players,” said Greg Leeds, President of Wizards of the Coast. “We have brought these suits to stop the illegal activities of these defendants, and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”
If it is their intention to bring all pdf sales inhouse, expect two things. An increase of anywhere from 50 to 100% price increase. A horribly broken system for downloading the files that limits sales to the point they beomce non existant.
Either reason WotC has for doing this is sure to cause all those pdf’s to become even more available via torrent than they were before, because it will be the ONLY efficient way to get them, and if you have downloaded anything via torrent you know how sarchastic that statement was.
I personally just grabbed a couple of Planescape products I was missing from Paizo while I still could. Oh well. WotC/Hasbro really does just not know how to make a smart call. If only they would choke their sales to the point Paizo can just buy the whole thing, lock stock and barrell, we might actually game to be proud of again.
Guillermo Del Toro meets H.P. Lovecraft
Folks who know me also know my fondness for H.P. Lovecraft . Usually movie adaptations of his work translate poorly or on the flipside are true enough to be too damn weird. He wrote some seriously strange stuff and is the father of such authors as Stephen King (The Mist), Brian Lumley, and Ramsey Campbell to name just a few. One of the better movie directors of our time (Guillermo del Toro) has filtered Lovecraft’s influence into many of his films and is apparently hard and getting At the Mountains of Madness turned into a reasonably faithful film adaptation. Granted the films he makes aer not exactly mainstream, but neither is Lovecraft. This may be pretty amazing. Here is a link to a Lovecraft specific blog with some tidbits.
Repost: Ravenor Trilogy Finished
Quite often fiction based on game or movie settings just are not that good. They seem to be churned out with a desire to pump them to the fans and not really hold much value, often not getting much more respect than romance novels. Once in a while you stumble on a book or series that suprises you. The “Ravenor” series written by Dan Abnett was one of those suprises for me. I had been wanting to give a book in the Warhammer 40,000 universe a try and Dan Abnett has written quite a few, so I figured it would be safe to give the first in the trillogy a chance.
Initially I was a little worried. The title character is a telepath, and the author pulls the cliche run down of minds as Ravenor scans the city looking for someone. Reading that just turns me off everytime I see it or anything similar used. Fortunatly it only happens, if I remember correctly once in this book and once in the last book of the trilogy. Other than that the books are just good dark SciFi/Fantasy fun. Good plots, decent villains, supporting characters you feel are worth knowing without spending too much unnecesary tiem learnign backstory for them.
Being a trilogy my 2nd fear was the 2nd book. No problems there and the 3rd book cleaned things up nicely. So I see no reason not to rate the whole group with a single rating.
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Repost: DnD 4th ed. and Market Value
Apparently, according to the “rules” in 4th edition D&D, the player characters are idiots when it comes to commerce. Ok this is going to be a nit pick for the beginning of my look at the new books. I have no intention of doing a full review, that would take really getting down and playing and time is limited. This nit is however symbolic of things strewn about my skimming of the books.
From a sidebar on the section on rituals.
You can sell ritual books or ritual scrolls for half the market
price of the rituals they contain, assuming that the DM
agrees that demand for a particular ritual exists. Although
you can try to sell copies of a ritual you know, doing so
offers no financial gain, and there is limited demand for
ritual books or scrolls. You pay the full cost to create a
scroll and can typically sell it for only half value. In addition,
the number of people in the world who can afford to
perform an expensive ritual and who can succeed on the
necessary skill checks is small, and many of the NPCs who
are skilled enough and wealthy enough to be potential
customers already have collections of ritual books available
to them.
So now from the Wikipedia article on Market Value
Market Value is the estimated amount for which a property should exchange on the date of valuation between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arms-length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgably, prudently, and without compulsion.
First why write a “rule” like this. They say several places in the PHB how much things will sell for. I know previous editions have set pricing structures for things. But the Saying the Market Value for something is say 50 but since you are a PC you can only sell it for 25 just seems silly.
Honestly any DM worth his salt will ignore this and do whatever they want. The writers should know this and take it into account , writing to the level of the players. I feel like this is what is coloring some of the dislike experienced RPG are expressing.
Sorry, just something that bugged me and I had to dump it somewhere.
Book Burro
I know folks who read this blog are fans of real books also. If you are buying books online ( and who isn’t ) and if you use Firefox for your browser ( and you should ). You really need this extension. Book Burro detects when you are on a site looking at buying a book and goes out and hits other sites and pulls their prices down so you can compare. On install it compares Amazon, Alibris, Abebooks, half.com, buy.com, Barnes and Noble and a few others. Since I often buy books at Amazon and then kick myself for not checking Abebooks, it has saved me a few bucks a couple of times since installing.
It also is very subtle once installed so does not get in the way. Nice that is does not add a freakin toolbar, eating your browsing window or cluttering things more. Highly recommended.
GNR via PA
One of the coolest things about the web is also one of the most insidious qualities it has. Links that spring out leading you to suprising resources you might never have found if someone else had not stuck it out there for you to stumble across. Now I know this is not a ground breaking realization or anything. However once in a while you hit a link and say, “Damn I wish I had known about this before”.
I read Penny Arcade regularly. The comic is decent to good and the blog is usually better than that. Today I was dumbfounded that Tycho had not fully consumed Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Heck I was a little suprised he even admitted it. Oh well, all the better for me because in this confession was a link to Graphic Novel Review. Specifically a review of Conan: Tower of the Elephant (And Other Stories)
Good review and tasty links to waste more of your time on. The blog itself seems very nice and the reviews are board spectrum as far as graphic novels covered. Looks like I’ll add it to my list of regular reads.
While talking about links, finding new info and the time it wastes. We must always hit Wikipedia for the ultimate in sidetracking ones self.

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