The Dying Earth

This book is a fantasy novel by Jack Vance - the first of a series, though I've only found a copy of this first one so far. I was somewhat skeptical of it for the first few pages but Jack writes with an elegant, poetic simplicity that paints the fantastical futurescape of our old old world with a breathtaking colourfulness, darkness and depth - the stories contained in this volume feel like they could have dropped straight out of ancient myths from a bleak, real time, and are utterly captivating. And there's not much more you can ask of a fantasy story, is there? Will definitely be checking out more of his stuff - especially since recently also having discovered that Vance's conceptualized systems of magic literally formed the groundwork for that used in the Dungeons & Dragons world-lore, which is a hell of a claim to fame impact-wise.

the Gospel of Judas

This book is a non-canonical early work of Christian literature, that some, probably most Christians may like to call "Gnostic" or its close cousin term "heretical"; but I'd rather lump under the generous benefit-of-the-doubt term "fanfic" - if for naught else then to free up myself to do a post on it without getting a new arsehole ripped for me by Protestant gate-keepers of Orthodoxy in the comments, not that these generally exist, as nobody reads this blog. Dear reader - if I'm talking to you, yes, this is your fault; the fact that Christians haven't been crowding the feedbacks on my slowly entropizing rabbit-hole trip down the weirder darker forgotten corners of Christian thinking, and therefore peer-pressuring me back into conformity, has literally been the enabling factor driving me to read ever more 'riskier' shit from aforementioned weirder & darker corners. Only joking, but not really.
   Anyway, I think as a text this is a really interesting piece of literature - it has a strange section with apocalyptic symbolism and stuff, and some nice background conversations between Jesus and Judas vaguely similar to what we see in the perhaps comparable fanfic of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ - though there are levels of poetic poignancy to this text particularly that do provoke some interesting thoughts on the dynamics amongst the disciples in the gospel story, and I personally didn't find it particularly at all hard to read while imagining whoever wrote it to be a properly well-intentioned and orthodox-doctrine-holding Christian of the early Church, but maybe you'll disagree. The only way you'll never know is if you refuse to read it because it's not in the Bible - which is the given excuse I've heard most evangelicals from my upbringing background give in reference to any "fanfic" text or similar like this; which is pretty weird when you think about it, given that they wouldn't bat an eyelid at a text like this, even though it in my opinion takes far greater artistic liberties with Christian doctrinal elements than, say, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, if one was to presume that that was also fanfic and not as is claimed by many scholars to be a relatively cogent compilation of likely actual Jesus-sayings.

Dark Matter

This book is an expansion for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition by Mage Hand Press, being effectively a total integration of science fiction elements into the gamiverse. All the races get a nice update, plus there's six new ones; there's a new Gadgeteer class, several pretty interesting factions, and buttloads of excellent worldbuilding material with ships, blasters and whatnot as techno-magical items - and of course loads of new spells. I've been using this to flesh out our campaign for which I'm DM, as we'd initially started playing a Savage Worlds campaign which blended fantasy and sci-fi elements - but it's just not as good as D&D, so we've kept all elements on the table for Full-Fat Fantasy with All the Science-Fictional-Additives - and, though it's been a lot of work for me to leap from the RPG-for-dummies* model we started out on, and admittedly there is probably still about 10% of our campaign that's technically homebrew because I've not been able to find anything in either here or the WotC books that properly maps onto things we'd had running in the story, it's so much bloomin' fun I can't even - if you're a dungeon-master** looking for cool new shots in the arm of your campaigns, do a sci-fi overhaul with full retention of all the classic bits - I can vouch for Dark Matter being the perfect add-on for such a campaign.


* No offence to any Savage Worlds players, it's a fun enough game, but you know I'm right.

** Or galaxy master, as I not-at-all-megalomaniacally now refer to myself as. The players are meant to hate me anyway, right? I mean, I am all the bad guys...

Poetic Diction

This book by Owen Barfield (see this about his Christological work expanded upon); and it is immediately up there with my top twelve books of all time for sheer nonfictional grandeur of scope, efficacy and implication.

   It's a study in meaning, which is pretty complicated from the off - but I reckon with a bit of effort getting into his philological boots and throwing your imaginary Poeting Hat into the air a few times so you can really practice catching it on the way back down - this book does for poetry what the Necronomicon presumably does for necromancers. I don't touch that stuff personally. Or this for vegans. You get my gist? I hope you do, because I think I've got Owen's but it's hard to tell, because he will just lump a Latin or Greek or French or Aramaic quote at you like "OOF" with no subtitle translation. Editors take note.

   But still, I feel loath to even write a blogpost about it in case my fellow poets read it and surpass me in my dark powers of understanding. Jokes. Great book.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

This book, the first Dirk Gently novel by Douglas Adams,* is - and it truly pains me to write this, but I must be sincere - a bit of a mess.** I have actually read it before - in the hazy, distant past of 2007ish; having loved the Hitchhiker's series and hungry for more by the same author - but at the time I found it too dense and impenetrable and just not as funny. And my conclusion now, on having reread at the wise old age of thirteen [assuming that is that that's how long it's been] years older than I presumably was then, is - still that it's too dense, somewhat impenetrable, and just not that funny. It's a very clever book - I have to concede that - but much like the chief character Dirk himself, one gets the sense as a reader that Douglas is revelling in his own cleverness with the construction of the story, and I had to step back away from each chapter several times and then read stuff on the fan wikis just to figure out what the hell was even happening, and that's the kind of reader experience I expect from David Foster Wallace but not Douglas; & while of course there are many excellent bits and funny details and plot elements that are easy enough to follow that you do get the typical sense of engaged excitement one expects from a sci-fi comedy romp novel, these are, in my opinion, lost somewhere in the predominant tidal flows of deliriously elusive holistic mind-manglage that stands in for any semblance of any halfway cognizable plot to the book. That's not to say it's not worth a read - for the sense of humour and deftness of playful linguistic whimsy alone, any fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide will probably find a lot in here to enjoy - but probably not the story, because it's just bloody hard to find one, until it ends, and Dirk congratulates Douglas on having done such a clever job, and you're left scratching your head at what even it was. Maybe I'm just projecting bitterness at my own feelings of inferior readership at not having found it such an easy story to follow as it seems to think it is to read? Or maybe that's the point? Maybe it's not meant to make sense unless you do actually go away and read Coleridge's entire works, with abundant historical-contextual analysis thrown in for good measure, just to really get exactly what happens with Kubla Khan and the Electric Monk and all that - as I do think were holistic detectives to properly exist that's the kind of thing they'd do? I don't know. And if this the point, I missed it for not having done this and the blame is mine. But it just feels like it ends on a bit of a lazy half-arsed note, where you see the shape of the story that's just happened but have no idea where or why it went as it did, and surely one can't be too roundly derided for expecting a novel about a holistic detective agency to be able to disentangle these kinds of things in a way somewhat more satisfyingly explicable to the client - or reader. I feel like I'm taking the biggest most overegged shit on this book and I don't hate it at all - it's a fun read, and a good story, I think. It just gets lost in its own fluff at every corner. Though perhaps this is the point, and if so, I'm slightly less fond of it for its having so.

* The same author as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series - for which I've done my introductory post on the first instalment, and my totally-excessively-deep dive into the themes/shit on the last.

** Bizarrely, the same can be said of the Netflix series, though where this novel loses itself in its own ridiculously-overconvolutedness, the screen adaptation takes exactly the right liberties with dialing this back - just a notch, but it's enough - effectively liberating the characters and content to do something similar enough to be faithful to the Adamsian spirit while being something entirely new, and through its being somewhat easier to follow than the book actually ends up being riveting science-fiction and thoroughly entertaining... Also the cast is great, with Netflix-Dirk being an extremely likeable figure who speaks with great relevance to the Millennial malaise; and the Elijah Wood character they have instead of Richard has bucketloads more personality. It's very rare that I'll concede TV or film does a book better than a book does but in this case I think it has. Sorry, Douglas...

Ravenor

This book - actually trilogy, being an anthology comprising the novels Ravenor, Ravenor Returned and Ravenor Rogue - by Dan Abnett, is the second in his "trilogy of trilogies" [this being the first] dealing with the dark and daemonic happenings around the Imperial Inquisition of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

   Somehow, though having owned this book for well over a decade, I'd never got round to reading it - I think the disquieting subtextual impacts of Gregor Eisenhorn's prior adventures may, perhaps, have been slightly too much for my innocent autistic teenage Christian brain at the time, and so I just parked the idea of ever reading the sequel trilogy - apart from now having revisited the former and loving it and having read this and thinking it's even better - like, it's a chonky ~900 page tome but I devoured it in a couple of days; the characters are ridiculously fun, the psychic scenes play out like nothing I've ever read and the plot - oh Holy Throne of Terra the plot! Well suffice to say, I fething almost lost mine, finishing the second half to this whole trilogy in a single all-night sitting because just - there isn't a sci-fi writer out there who does high-concept thrilling action like Warmaster Dan, and these three novels are probably the best of his I've read. Sorry, men of Tanith...
   Now to somehow stay sane until the third trilogy is completed to a readable degree, because I've certainly come away from this whole thing with considerable warp-taint if naught else.

Fight Club

You know the drill. We don't talk about this one.