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I Might Believe in Faeries

Friend of the blog Aaron Irber invited me on his podcast I Might Believe in Faeries to talk about Tim Power’s masterful time-travel novel The Anubis Gates. I spoke with Aaron and his patrons for an hour an a half in a wide-ranging discussion on Powers’ use of symbolism,

With Both Hands Classics: Great Teacher Onizuka

This is the first installment of what I hope to make a regular feature here at With Both Hands, a reflection on a key work of fiction that I find myself returning to again and again that I will call With Both Hands Classics. For this inaugural edition, let’s

Kipling's Influence on Futuristic Fiction

Via Castalia House’s Sensor Sweep, here is a great blog post at Tentaclii listing some well-known authors who credit Rudyard Kipling as being an inspiration to the science fiction in general and them in particular. Despite being a very low stakes story, Kipling’s With the Night Mail is

Dreadgod Book Review

What happens when the universe’s greatest executioner gets sick of his job? Everything you see here. And what do you see here? One of the best adventures written in the early twenty-first century. I admit that is a pretty low bar, but I gladly stock Wight on my shelf

A Spaceship for the King

I stumbled on this great retrospective on Jerry Pournelle’s A Spaceship for the King on the Castalia House blog while looking for something else. This particular post was mostly about Jerry’s influence on the Traveller RPG, but I want to look at some other things as well. Let’

Sam Youd's Birthday (AKA John Christopher)

Thanks to Twitter, I found out that A hundred years ago today, writer Sam Youd - aka John Christopher - was born in an unseasonable Easter Day snowstorm. The Tripods novels were one of my first youthful forays into science fiction. At the time, I had no idea about the

Linkfest 2022-04-08: The Lonely Fight

I recently saw a re-post of Katsuya Terada’s Legend of Zelda illustrations, and it sent me searching for more. Here is a gallery of many of the images Terada created for Nintendo Power magazine. In later years, much would be made of the concept of “multimedia”, using the power