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Monday, June 27, 2016

Down the Stacks #30: The Dresden Files

This week, for the thirtieth entry of Down the Stacks, I will be looking at one of my top favorite series: The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.  I’ve previously looked at another o butcher’s projects, The Codex Alera, but The Dresden Files is a completely different beast.  Dresden is bigger, longer, and a bit darker than Alera, and it’s the series that Butcher has put the majority of his lie into.  The Dresden Files is a supernatural mystery series set in a world where just about any myth and fairy tale is true or has a kernel of truth to it.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

A Short-short Story on the Creation of a Multiverse

It is hard to determine where to begin a story, because a “beginning” is rather arbitrary when you get down to it.  Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end, to quote a song line that seems to echo across the multiverse, and don’t things make more sense when we see what events led up to them?  But those events are born from earlier events, and those are responses to even earlier stimuli.  Even Creation itself has a beginning in the hands of a Creator hailing from an earlier Creation.  Get back that far, however, and time loses meaning and the stories become just one eternal round, the same thing again and again.  There are variations, of course, but nothing that truly alters the cycle.  Not to mention, the thing you meant to tell in the first place becomes lost, too small a detail to notice.
Enough philosophizing; we’re already at risk of losing the tale and we haven’t even started it!  We’ll begin at this point:

Monday, June 13, 2016

Down the Stacks #29: Carousel Tides

This week on Down the Stacks, we have an interesting modern-day folktale.  In Carousel Tides by Sharon Lee, a coastal Maine tourist town hides a world of faeries, magic, and otherworldly politics.  The result is good, but the execution is a bit… unusual for my tastes.  Read on as I try to explain.

Monday, June 6, 2016

Down the Stacks #28: 1632

This week on Down the Stacks, we’re going back in time and rewriting history, courtesy of Eric Flint.  Flint is a contemporary author who collaborates frequently with David Weber on a spin-off series to Honor Harrington, and Weber had returned to favor by co-authoring books in Flint’s own long-running project, which is the subject of this week’s review.  1632 is an action- and romance-packed romp through the Thirty-years War, blue-collar American-style.