I recently attended the Gollancz Autumn Party 2008 (with fellow bloggers
Deornoth and
MinDonner, to give them their Westeros.org handles), which was a very pleasant evening rendered more pleasant by free wine and the proximity of the pub for when the function ended. I finished up the evening propping up the bar discussing American politics with
Chris Wooding, which was interesting if random (neither of us being American). I met a lot of authors, including mildly embarrassingly some I hadn't read before (Graham Joyce, Robert Holdstock,
Lisa Tuttle) and some who haven't been published yet (Stephen Deas) and renewed acquaintances from last year with
Adam Roberts,
David Devereux and the omnipresent
Joe Abercrombie. I also met some of the team from
Orbit UK and the head of
Telos Books, David Howe (whose name may be familiar as a frequent
Doctor Who writer), as well as several writers from
SFX Magazine. There were actually so many writers around it was impossible to meet them all, and I sadly missed
Ian McDonald and SF ubercritic
John Clute. It was all a lot of fun, and more enjoyable than last year (where I had to travel for 15 hours to get there: this year it was more like 50 minutes).
Anyway, there are now several 'ongoing' review projects on the blog: over the next few weeks I hope to cover the remaining volumes of
The Wheel of Time and the remaining seasons of
Babylon 5. I'm going to intermixing the Jordan reread with some new material, such as reviews of Peter F. Hamilton's new book,
The Temporal Void, and ARCs of the aforementioned Stephen Deas debut,
The Adamantine Palace, and Adam Roberts' latest,
Yellow Blue Tibia. Sadly, the
Sandman reread has gone on hold as I've exhausted the volumes I currently own. I don't expect to get back to that until the New Year.
On the gaming front, I am currently playing
Westeros: Total War. No doubt that will cause quite a few people to go, "Huh?" This is a user-created free mod for the game
Medieval II: Total War which allows you to fight for control of the Seven Kingdoms. It is a very early beta release and not all features are implemented, but the game is already highly polished, as I hope you can see:
If you want to join in the fun, grab the beta from
here and the patch from
here.
If you want to join in the fun, grab the beta from here and the patch from here.
2 comments:
Hi Adam,
as always I like your posts and reviews and return regularly to this site to see what else I need to check out.
What I was wondering is whether you are going to review Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold anytime in the near future. I haven't yet ordered it but the premises as I read it on Amazon looked intriguing, so I am thinking about it. But I got me a large pile of books still to read so I might postpone ordering it a while. So I thought, hey why not bring this one to your attention (as if you haven't already heard about it).
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Kind regards from the Netherlands
Marc
Thanks! I have no plans to get to it in the near future, mainly because a lot of the other bloggers have already given a lot of coverage to it (Pat's Fantasy Hotlist I believe has reviewed it and interviewed the author). My plan was to hold off and wait until the trilogy was complete before reviewing it. Book 2 comes out in the New Year and Book 3 in the summer, so it shouldn't be too long a wait.
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