Geoffrey James
Excerpt: SORCERER: A Novel of Queen Elizabeth’s Alchemist by Geoffrey James
SORCERER: A Novel of Queen Elizabeth's Alchemist
SYNOPSIS:
Based on a true story, the novel describes an early scientist's descent into mysticism and madness.
The year is...
Test Your Knowledge of Movie Cliches
Answers and scoring at bottom of post.
The hero and his less macho sidekick are about to take an alcoholic drink. How will the sidekick...
Is SETI Hopeless?
Today's manhunt in Boston for the alleged Marathon bomber has pretty much buried yesterday's story that NASA's Kepler telescope has discovered three exoplanets that...
The Dumbest Part of The Lord of the Rings
I first read Tolkien when I was 13 and (like many others before and after) totally fell in love with the Middle Earth thing....
How to Make a SciFi Feature Film for $500
In 2006, I created Borg War, an animated Star Trek feature film. Since I suspect that most writers would jump at the change to...
Lessons from the Tolkien Boycott
How times have changed.
Back in the late 60s, Ace Books found a loophole in the copyright for The Lord of the Rings that...
AI is Religion Not Science
A few weeks ago, I posted an explanation of why it's highly unlikely that that anybody will anytime soon replicate the human brain on...
Why Sorcerers Have Long Grizzled Beards
Ever notice that fictional sorcerers always seem to have long, grizzled beards? Ever wondered why? Well, probably you haven't, but you're about to find...
Mini-Review of Felicity Savage’s “Black Wedding”
It's been so long since I've heard a "new voice" in horror writing that I'd forgotten what it feels like. Felicity Savage's "Black Wedding"...
How to Begin a Short Story
Maybe I'm just impatient, but I'll generally stop reading a short story if the first two paragraphs don't answer the following questions:
Who is this...
Why Piracy is Never Okay
Since the bloggers on this site are mostly authors who no doubt believe in the concept of copyright (because presumably they'd like to get...
A Way To End Ebook Piracy?
I recently had my most-recent non-fiction book pop up on an illegal file sharing site. Within a week, it had gotten 500 downloads. Needless...
Machines that Think Are Improbable
Intelligent robots have been part of the SciFi lexicon since before Fritz Lang's seminal file Metropolis. While it's fun to imagine what the world...
How SFX Can Ruin a Horror Film
It recently struck me how most of the films that, IMHO, were truly scary were the ones that had little or no digital special...
The Unsavory Racism of Middle Earth
The concept of race in Middle Earth bears a strong resemblance to racist concepts that were popular during Tolkien's youth. Readers need to be aware of these concepts and guard against taking them literally.