Recap and Review of the First Two Episodes of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Did I watch the first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime (Rings of Power from here on out) on Thursday evening as soon as they dropped?  Well, I tried.  I didn’t quite finish the second episode, or even really make it quite halfway.  I can’t blame Amazon for that one so much as a schedule that has me up and moving early every morning.  I was intrigued enough to finish episode two while I ate lunch at work on Friday.  But when Jim Cornelius from Frontier Partisans asked my opinion on the show, I couldn’t muster much passion in response.  I’m just not that invested, and the first two episodes didn’t change that.

SPOILERS for the first two episodes below the fold.

Pic courtesy of Amazon Studios

Second Quarter 2022 Quarter-in-Review

It was a hectic quarter, even if thinks have started settling down as the baby transitions from newborn baby to just baby.  The big wrench in my plans here was my wife and I both finishing leave but only having two days of childcare for the baby each week.  I haven’t figured out a sustainable, reliable posting pattern for that new reality (although by the end of the coming quarter the baby will be in childcare five days a week).

Daughter of Redwinter is Too Generic to Get Over the Hump from Good to Great

Another week, another new series from one of my favorite new writers of the last decade.  Last week it was Brian McClellan with In the Shadow of Lightning, this week it is Ed McDonald with Daughter of Redwinter.  McDonald’s Raven’s Mark trilogy is one of my favorite fantasy series period.  Sadly, Daughter of Redwinter doesn’t begin to live up to that series, although I don’t have much in the way of actual complaints.

Brian McClellan has done it again with In the Shadow of Lightning

Brian McClellan’s opening salvo in his latest series, In the Shadow of Lightning, didn’t immediately grab me.  The opening scenes, which take place some nine years before the events in the bulk of the novel and setup Demir’s character arc, were not as effective as, say, the scenes of revolution that open Promise of Blood.  The glass-based magic system is clever enough, I suppose, but at some point, you read about so many different magic systems—from McClellan or Brandon Sanderson or whoever—that there are diminishing returns.  And it isn’t as distinctive as the powder mage sorcery from Promise of Blood, for example.  But McClellan makes great hay out of it, and the story picks up steam as it goes.

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The Frangipani Hotel Tells Original Vietnamese Ghost Stories

The Frangipani Hotel is a collection of short “ghost” stories by Kupersmith, inspired by her Vietnamese-American heritage. 

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SF: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Hillbilly Highways

I’ve been saying for a while that we need more stories that fall into the overlap between country noir and speculative fiction.  The hollers and dark dirt roads that host country noir yarns have their own rich tradition of myths and folk tales.  And speculative elements, perhaps especially horror, dovetail well with the bones of a country noir story—better than, certainly, romance or even mystery.  In his novel The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones combines supernatural horror and rez noir (a kissing cousin to country noir).  Four young Blackfeet Indians committed some great sin on an elk hunt years ago, and an angry spirit of sorts is looking for bloody restitution.

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Throwback SF Thursday: Firestarter by Stephen King

Firestarter is the story of Andy McGee, possessing mild powers of mind domination, and his young daughter, Charlie McGee, possessing very un-mild powers of pyrokinesis.  The story begins with Andy and Charlie on the run from agents of a mysterious government intelligence agency called the Shop.  We learn how Andy and his wife got their powers and how she died from flashbacks interspersed with the main story.  The antagonist the government, as represented by the Shop, and the primary antagonist from the Shop is Rainbird, kind of a poor man’s Anton Chigurh, so loaded with traits and quirks something the whole is less than the sum.

First Quarter 2022 Quarter-in-Review

It has been some quarter.  If it seems like posting has been slow across both blogs, I have a good excuse!  Our son was born in early February.  Which has kept me real busy, but I managed to still do some reading and writing (and a lot more TV watching than normal).

Throwback SF Thursday: The Black Company by Glen Cook

Glen Cook’s The Black Company was a milestone work that had an outsized influence on the fantasy genre.  Which is probably why Tor decided to reissue it (as a handsome trade paperback with a bland cover) for their “Tor Essentials” line this past Tuesday.  That reissue got me to finally read it.  I had long since owned The Black Company in mass-market paperback, but I finally cracked it open after Tor sent me a review copy of their new edition, complete with new introduction by Malazan author Steven Erikson.

First published in 1984, The Black Company technically falls after my arbitrary cutoff for Vintage SF.  But it isn’t like I was reading much adult fantasy at my tender age in 1984, so it and its peers are as new to me as a book from 1964 or 1944.  Also I was lazy and didn’t post a review on Tuesday when the book was released like I should have.

Vintage Science Fiction Month: Fire Time by Poul Anderson

It’s not exactly Vintage Science Fiction Month anymore, but just because I let this one slip last week doesn’t mean I’m not going to post a review of Poul Anderson’s Fire Time.  As I remember it, I picked up Fire Time at a used bookstore a few years ago thinking it was a fantasy or sword and planet.  It is not, being rather very much hard science fiction.  (The High Crusade is the only other Poul Anderson I’ve read, but apparently Anderson wrote fantasy, space opera, and hard science fiction all.)