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Emperor Norton Ponders Thick and Thin Descriptions

Earlier this month, Emperor Norton wrote an absolutely fascinating blog post on the limits of description in fantastic literature. Norton promised a follow-up on creating dense descriptions, but in the interim, Norton has written a further exploration of the limits of description that contains an assertion that clicked with me:

Pelicans in Tim Powers' Dinner at Deviant's Palace

Aaron Irber asked me yesterday on Twitter whether Gregorio Rivas’ violin-like pelican in Dinner at Deviant’s Palace is a reference to the medieval representation of the Passion of Christ by means of a pelican feeding its young by piercing its own breast and allowing them to drink the blood,

Janissaries: Storms of Victory by Jerry Pournelle and Roland Green Book Review

Janissaries: Storms of Victory [Amazon link] by Roland Green and Jerry Pournelle is the third volume in the Janissaries series. At least until this year, it was also the last. I think Jerry and Roland did a pretty good job wrapping things up in the original three, but clearly there

The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic comes out tomorrow on Kindle

I reviewed the first book in the Saga of the Iron Dragon series, The Dream of the Iron Dragon, in January of 2018. Book 4 is coming out tomorrow, The Legacy of the Iron Dragon [Amazon link]. If you like hard scifi, alternative history, or Vikings, why don’t you

Janissaries: Clan and Crown by Jerry Pournelle and Roland Green Book Review

Janissaries: Clan and Crown [Amazon link] is the second installment in Jerry Pournelle’s long-running Janissaries series. Jerry was solo author on the first one, but this volume was co-authored with Roland Green, who somehow didn’t rate a mention on the cover in 1982. Jerry made sure he was

Books 1-3 of the Dragonback series by Timothy Zahn are on sale today

The first three volumes of Tim Zahn’s Dragonback series are on sale at Amazon today for $3.99, a good price for three enjoyable books. This particular series is targeted at young adults, but I prefer the older term juveniles. Here is what Jerry Pournelle had to say in

The Emperor Ponders the limits of description

Emperor Norton at The Emperor Ponders describes for us the four kinds of text you can write: There are four broad categories of text you can write (exposition, narration, description, and dialogue,) and descriptions are what can give more problems to a fiction or genre writer. To sum up, description