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Benjamin Espen

Gideon Ira in Castle Bloodghast: Deus Vult Wastelanders Book 4 Review

Gideon Ira in Castle Bloodghast [Amazon link] is the fourth volume in the Deus Vult Wastelanders series, but the third featuring Gideon Ira. The basic structure of the Gideon Ira books I have read are all similar: Gideon receives a mission from God, and proceeds to shoot, smash, or chop

The Emperor Ponders Dense Descriptions

Emperor Norton has written a follow-up on generating dense descriptions, and it is well worth the wait. I talked about thick descriptions in one of my posts on this subject, but Norton is here talking about dense descriptions, where every word is pregnant with meaning. Norton uses Robert E. Howard

The Long View 2008-02-29: Inflation; Capital Gains Zombies; Bill Buckley; Iraq & Public Opinion

As we move from the era of Imperial Populism into the Comedy of Errors, ponder the lasting influence of a coalition now seventy years old has on the American Right: The components were more than usually incompatible. The foreign policy hawks really needed the patriotic solidarity that the New Deal

Linkfest 2020-12-18: Shannon Edition

“Bit Player:” desecrating the memory of Claude Shannon Scott Locklin has a bit to say about the legacy of Claude Shannon in his characteristically dyspeptic way. I have never ceased to be amazed by the fundamental inventiveness of the 1930s. The transformation of America, and then the world, in the

John J. Reilly on Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace

John J. Reilly’s review of Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace [Amazon link] contains a remarkable digression on the economics of abundance. John wrote it twenty two years ago, and if anything it only gets better with age. Read it for yourself. Then there is the economics of abundance. In

Re-reading Paxton Locke

I’ve got an ARC of The Sacred Radiance, book 4 in the Paxton Locke series [Silver Empire affiliate link] by Daniel Humphreys, and I felt like it would be fun to run through the three previous volumes again before I get into it. Spoiler alert: it was. In my

The Long View 2008-02-27: Killer Robots, Giant Snakes, McCain's Necessity, Pournelle's Fallacy

The widespread use of drones in combat has been talked about for decades, but still hasn’t quite happened. The recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh may be how that long mooted future finally comes about. Killer Robots, Giant Snakes, McCain's Necessity, Pournelle's Fallacy Landmines are no substitute