The Centre Cannot Hold

There are basically two types of epic fantasy novel being written today. And by epic, I basically mean long. Understand, I have no quibble with a high fantasy story using low fantasy characterisation, or any other such admixture of tropes. You gotta do something to keep the genre fresh, and besides, one [...]

Type: Heaven
Origin: The Koran
Admission: Righteous People of the Book, some animals

Jannah is the Islamic version of Paradise, and for a Heaven, it’s surprisingly full of adult content and shameless hypocrisy: you basically get to indulge in endless materialism, gluttony and sensuality. You know, all the things you were told not to do in life if [...]

Moving right along.
A secondary theme in Planetary - and the major theme in TORG - it the multiplicity of realities. Both settings posit an almost infinite number of realities, in which our Earth is only one, although special for various reasons. The Earth of Planetary (that of the original WildStorm Universe, if you [...]

It’s been pointed out to me that last week, I failed entirely to actually clarify what I thought the difference was between beliefs and assumptions. So this week, I’m backing up a little to define my terms.
Like I should have done in the first place.

Following on from the general theme of the last few week installments, this week’s Militant Agnostic tackles another of the assumptions that I, as an agnostic, must make.
Now, once we’ve assumed that reality is really real, the logical next thing to do is to look for a way to understand reality.  Fortunately for us all, [...]

It’s a great thing that our Prime Minister has officially said Sorry. It truly is. I am wholly in support of him in this matter.
It’s just…
…is it enough?
And by this, I don’t mean, is there more to be done, but rather, is there more apologising to be done?

I’ve added a link to Home in the upper left hand corner, under Pages, to make site navigation a little easier.  It’s a semi-clunky workaround, but it does work.
Apologies to those of you on the Comments RSS, if you got kinda spammed on Saturday with repeated comments - I was trying to find a good [...]

I’ve decided to reformat this series a little, just to avoid a lot of pointless repetition in the entries. As a partial explanation, here’s one of the new bits I plan to add. (Actually, if you go back to the previous ones, I’ve reformatted those to work in the new schema too.)
As a rule, [...]

I’ve always wanted to write an epistolary novel - they seem like such a fun form to play in. But I’ve never really had an idea that suited the form, and didn’t really want to force it.
On Tuesday, I had such an idea. A science fiction novel about a commercial genetic engineering project, [...]

This week, we bid goodbye to the Lord of the Rings, and move on with Unknown Armies to another link in the chain: Planetary. It’s a strange world -let’s make it stranger still!
As always, copious spoilers are to be found within.