Waking up to Donald Trump’s victory elicited a combination of anger, sadness and disappointment. Hate and fear and division won the day.
Fifty years after its advent, the bright, inclusive future that Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek promised seems more distant in the aftermath of yesterday’s election.
It’s also more imperative a goal now than before.
Over the winter, I played a succession of three video games that involved characters in a parenting or protective role: Fallout 4; The Last of Us; and The Walking Dead. And if parenting in today’s world is hard, it’s even worse once the world goes to hell.
Today I’m writing about my parenting experience with The Walking Dead.
Spoilers for the game follow.
Defiant, by Karina Sumner-Smith, is the follow-up novel to her debut, Radiant, and the middle chapter of her Towers Trilogy. Picking up two months after the conclusion of Radiant, the book continues the story of Xhea, a girl with no place in a world running on magic, her friend, Shai, the ghost of a girl from the rich floating city, and what happens when the unwanted pair become the focus of powerful people. The book tells a fast-moving story fraught with danger in clear, readable prose and builds to a climax that packs an emotional punch.
Her dual protagonists Xhea and Shai continue to engage me as their friendship deepens and survives further tests. Sumner-Smith also expands Xhea’s background and history with some surprising reveals.
In Defiant, Sumner-Smith also builds unexpected depth to her setting from Radiant, which is a cool combination of post-apocalypse and fantasy, completely unlike the tired secondary worlds in most fantasy novels.
Immediately on finishing Defiant, I had to dive right into the concluding book in the trilogy, Towers Fall to see how it all turns out.
This looks pretty good. Hadn’t heard much about it before now.
Moleskine, makers of some of the most popular paper notebooks in the world, have teamed up with the creators of the Neo Smartpen to make it a lot easier to digitize your hand-written notes and sketches, to move them onto your mobile device, and to share them.
Source: Moleskine’s Smartpen Digitizes Your Notebooks as You’re Writing In Them
Over the winter, I played a succession of three video games that involved characters in a parenting or protective role: Fallout 4; The Last of Us; and The Walking Dead. And if parenting in today’s world is hard, it’s even worse once the world goes to hell.
Today I’m writing about my parenting experience with The Last of Us.
Spoilers for the game follow.
Julie Czerneda brings the reader back to the site of her first book, the Trade Pact and spins a dramatic story full of surprises and twists. I can’t say too much about the story without giving away the surprises that make it so fun. As always, one of Czerneda’s strengths is the characters that inhabit her stories. And back for the first time in years are a host of characters familiar to readers. And it was great to revisit them. This Gulf of Time and Stars is essential reading for fans of Czerneda’s Trade Pact and Stratification trilogies. That’s the only shortcoming for the book, which is the first in a new trilogy titled Reunification; this is not a book with which you should start reading her works. Czerneda does a good job of providing backstory, but if you haven’t read the aforementioned trilogy then there is still what I would feel is too high a barrier to entry.
After a book packed with developments and revelations, I’m looking forward to the next book in the series. Only about five months to wait.
