I would pay money to see a decent cover done for Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Such a graphically-suggestive book, (and with drug-induced interior illustrations by the author, too) and no good cover has ever been done. A shame.

(The Kevin Tong cover for Brave New World, above, is interesting for the visual…

Ugh. It is the height of irony when the end of civilization is chronicled by bad comic books and bad YA fiction - considering the contribution both make to the end of civilization....

A good general theory - it explains why I, for example, snack on "truth telling", ignore corn syrupy "memes", and chow down in "valley of ambiguity" for solid, nutritious, useful information - and why I regard social media sites in the same way I regard a fine bag of corn chips: they taste good, and sometimes you…

Guns, Germs, and Steel was (and still is, judging from the controversy Diamond dredges up with every publication) like an older cancer treatment to the body-politic of the social sciences — You have to let loose some god-awful killing strategies to flush out and eliminate cancerous neoplasms and shock the body into…

Correia's piece is a remarkably shallow, ideologically-driven, and un-scientific (in the tribal-culture-of-the-social-sciences sense of the phrase) article on which to peg an argument about Jared Diamond's inherent racism. There are far more informative criticisms which balance the huge flaws in Diamond's approach…

Ah. The law enforcement flashbang of the 22nd century.

There was but one power in the world capable of defeating such stone monstrosities. But the beast had been sleeping in downtown Chartres for nearly a thousand years and the city had literally rose up around it. Could it be awakened in time? Would it ally itself with humanity, as it had done, centuries before?

Georges…

There's a misunderstanding of terms here. "Technocracy" and "technocrats" aren't about gadget-technophiles who solve problems with technology, and the idea wasn't introduced in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Technocracy refers to the idea that a methodologically-scientific approach to governing nations and using…

Been similarly done already, hasn't it? In the Flesh, a BBC TV series about "cured" zombies after the apocalypse. Aired last spring, with a multi-episode renewal for 2014. Interesting take on de-zombification and reintroduction into society....

In second part of The Silmarillion (the short essay on the Maia) Tolkien specifically describes Olórin's influence on a later age of Middle Earth - with enough suggestive detail that it's hard to imagine him being anyone but Gandalf. So I think we not only have Gandalf's word, but Tolkien's strong (even flirtatious)…

"What superpower would I want to abuse for personal enjoyment?" I guess I misunderstood the question.... The Soviet Union? The United States? The People's Republic of China (which is almost, but not quite)...?

Casting the DSM as a dystopian novel is an interesting exercise, but I still prefer the idea of the DSM series as a modern, secular mash up of texts such as the Missale Romanum, the Malleus Maleficarum, and the Directorium Inquisitorum. The institutional politics involved in each edition are as complex and as…

The origins of literary characters usually evolve from a complex synergy between different categories: personal experience, prior literary characters, historical characters and stories, and mythologies. I suspect Tolkien's Sauron is an amalgamation of all four.

A literary character like Gilles de Retz may be one…

That's one of the "great mysteries". Tolkien finally stated - after years of debate among the readers - that Bombadil and Goldberry were sorts of Pan-like "forces of nature" - which really satisfied no one. Some had claimed that Bombadil was Manwë or Ulmo of the greater Valar. Most controversial was the proposal that…

Another godless, rampaging bear.

You're one of those unruly bears, aren't you?

Not unless he had the rights to work other than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - which are held (some say fanatically) by the Tolkien family estate and in particular, Christopher.

Entirely right - the "pieces" are scattered all over.

Yes, really.

Apparently the orcs were bred by Melkor from elves he had corrupted and enslaved before the journey westward from Cuiviénen to Aman. Or so characters from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and History speculated, iirc.