About this blog

Why Blog?

In late 2014 I decided to start a blog to comment on stuff I like: Science Fiction/Fantasy in all its forms, primarily focusing on books, but also comics, TV, movies, board and computer games, and what ever random stuff takes my fancy.  Unfortunately, life intervened and I finally got around to putting the blog up in early 2017.

But why a blog? Well, I blame three things: my old friend John, the internet’s leading Batman expert Chris Sims, and the need to find a new creative outlet (with no ability to draw, compose music, or friends with free time to podcast).  The first is relatively straight forward, John suggested I track the books I read, rather than just rely on memory.  From there it was a slippery slope to writing reviews and impressions.  The second was an article Chris Sims wrote on comics alliance about Scooby Doo and secular humanism.  This was an idea I had been thinking about as well, but here was a clear, well written, and most of all entertaining essay on what is, charitably, one of the most esoteric topics imaginable.  I can only aspire to reach the quality of writing and obscurity of subject matter.   Finally, after spending half my life at university, my research career had run out of steam and I needed to move on.  While many people think of scientific research as dry, for me it always felt like a creative process – wrestling answers from the universe and writing them down.  This blog represents a way to do the same thing with the fictional universes that I love.

What Blog?

Basically I’m going to try a variety of things and see what sticks.

The bulk of the content will be reviews of things I’ve read.  I won’t review everything I read, but I will certainly hit the highlights.  I tend to write spoiler free, impressionistic reviews – about what I like and didn’t like, without focusing too heavily on plot.  I’ll post new reviews as I do them, and will post ‘historical reviews’ (reviews I wrote purely for myself over the last two years) once a week until I clear them.  I’ll also try to branch out a bit past books and comics.

With the start of the blog, I’m also going to start adding essays.  The goal is to put one out every 1-2 weeks, and given I will be fitting them around work and life, they will be relatively short, and not as well researched as I would like.

Finally, I sometimes attack geek projects.  In the past this consisted of reviewing the Hugo Slate, and trying to get into Marvel Unlimited by going through the Marvel Now slate in order.  I’ll post previous ones when it seems appropriate.

What about you?

I hope you like what I post.  Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Because this is both a side gig, and I’m a jack of all trades, I’ll inevitably do a couple of things: make mistakes and reinvent the wheel.  Feel free to point this out, but take a moment to assume incompetence rather than malice.  From my writing style, you’ll know when I deploy malice.

I have no delusions that this will ever be read much beyond my friends and the odd lost google search, but if I’m writing things, I may as well publish them.