This year, Elio and I gave each other the Babylon 5: The Complete Universe box for Christmas, and we’ve spent the last week watching entirely too many episodes a day. We’re almost through the first season already, and I expect we’ll keep going at a brisk pace throughout January. Its really very good television, and this box is pretty darn good value for money.
On 41 disks it contains all five seasons of B5, all of Crusade, and the movies In the Beginning, The Gathering, Thirdspace, River of Souls, A Call to Arms and Legends of the Rangers. This particular box is the Region 2 release, and there isn’t actually a matching set for Region 1, just two separate collections of the five B5 seasons and of the movies (minus Legends of the Rangers) .
Among our Christmas presents this year was a copy of Shaman’s Crossing, the first book in Robin Hobb’s new trilogy, Soldier Son. This book marks a departure from the world made familiar by the Farseer and Liveship Trader books, and introduces a brand-new setting which by fantasy standards is relatively "modern", with guns, canons and a strictly traditionalist nation on a path to development and expansion.
The main character (who, like Fitz from the Farseer books, tells the story from a first-person point of view) is Nevare Burvelle, second son of one of the king’s "battle lords"; men raised to nobility for their deeds. As a second son, he is destined to become a soldier, and initially he rarely questions the rigid Gernian belief that one should never question the place in life allotted to oneself by the good god. But slowly doubts start to creep up on him, and he finds himself forced to accept that the simple, straight-forward rules that governed his life as a young boy cannot—and perhaps should not—always be followed.
Shaman’s Crossing starts out a little slow, but I soon found it quite impossible to put down the book (I started it on the eve of the 24th, and finished just a little while ago). Nevare may not be as interesting a character as Fitz as he is, at least initially, a far less troubled young man, but the story he tells soon had me firmly hooked. I wanted to know more about Gernian society, the cavalla Academy and, not the least, the strange, dappled Specks who seem to be seeking a way to repel the Gernian expansion that has already claimed the lifestyle of the once fierce and free plainspeoples. And now that I have finished, I am hoping the next one will be out soon.
I always find it frustrating when I am unable to effectively recommend great books to others because of them being out of print. Such as, for example, Judith Tarr’s brilliant Alamut and The Dagger and the Cross. These prequels to The Hound and the Falcon have been pretty impossible to get a hold off for years, but now Tarr is selling copies of older books of hers via her livejournal. Including hardcovers of the aforementioned titles, which I cannot say enough good stuff about. Oh, and they’ve both got gorgeous covers by Tom Canty.
The Dabel Brothers have provided Newsarama with a sizable preview of their upcoming adaption of Raymond E. Feist’s first Riftwars novel, Magician: Apprentice.
Its that time of the year again, and we thought we’d compile a little (or not so little, actually) list of reading (and watching) recommendations for the holidays. We’ve included both some recent releases and some older favourites, and we think that most of them are great additions both to your own wish list and to your shopping list.
So we learn that Sky One is planning to remake The Prisoner. Well, it was bound to happen eventually, one supposes. But there’s catch.
As I managed to clear out some of my work earlier than expected, I decided to reward myself with a bit of reading from the rather large to-read pile that has accumulated of late. The book I picked up was Song of Unmaking by Caitlinn Brennan (a pseudonym for Judith Tarr ). This is the second in her series from Luna (Harlequin’s semi-new fantasy imprint), following on from last year’s The Mountain’s Call.
This is actually rather old news, because someone (cough) forgot to keep herself up-to-date via Louise Cooper’s website on the author’s efforts to get her older books back into print. And now, it seems, she has succeeded.
Mundania Press have begun bringing out some very nice looking editions of her first series, the Time Master Trilogy; The Initiate, The Outcast and the Master.
Via Whedonesque, we learn from the man himself that he’s going to be writing a brand new Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic for Dark Horse which will be canonical and set post-Buffy and Angel. And there’s more news beyond that.
Dabel Brothers Productions has released a preview for the forthcoming Woodboy/Burning Man graphic novel featuring adaptions of the titular stories written by Raymond E. Feist and Tad Williams.
Although the most important book that I have read of late obviously is A Feast for Crows (I leave the reviewing of that one to Elio, except to say that it is a very good book but also a very different book from the previous ones), I have also managed to take time out from my work to read the second half of Jacqueline Carey’s The Sundering;
Godslayer.
Via Steven Brust’s LiveJournal we learn many interesting things—such as that the man is silver (according to one test), that Vlad is presently wandering around in search of a plot, and that Brust is presently working on a media tie-in novel for Joss Whedon’s excellent Firefly.
From Newsarama we learn that Fallen Angel, an excellent creator-owned series by Peter David that was originally published by DC, has recently moved to IDW and will be restarting. In an attempt to gauge reader interest, PAD and IDW are offering for free the first half of the new first issue in PDF form to those who request a copy.
DB Pro has recently announced that they plan to package their graphic adaptions of Raymond E. Feist’s "The Wood Boy" and Tad Williams’ "The Burning Man" (both from Robert Silverberg’s Legends, which also containted "The Hedge Knight" which DB Pro later successfully adapted) as a single graphic novel. Some early preview art from "The Burning Man" can be found here.
Recent news on the Internet is that Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder is coming to a close—at least when it comes to printing single issues. The singles, according to McNeil, have acted as a "loss leader" for the trades, where the real profit has proved to be. The single issues had become a signficant enough money-eater that McNeil has decided to turn Finder into a free webcomic.