Child of Light Review

new and non-Shannara, I was therefore skeptical, but intrigued.  Perhaps the only notable non-Shannara works he has published are The Magic Kingdom of Landover series, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  It was my hope that Child of Light would tap into whatever had enabled Landover.  Unfortunately, my hopes were misplaced, and Child of Light proved to be anything but fresh.

Fewer Words, Longer Books

rigorous, quantitative analyses to confirm the trend, so what I really have is a suspicion based on inference, internal logic, and anecdotal evidence; however, it struck me as a sufficiently interesting observation that I should desire to share it with you.  The trend is this: the English language is losing words (ironic, considering our post about word creation), and is using more of them to compensate.

Forsaken Kingdom Review

Some books under-promise and over-deliver.  Swordspoint, which we reviewed last week, is like that.  The summary was enough for me to read it, but I didn’t expect anything remarkable; it proved to be one of the best fantasy books I’ve read this year.  Forsaken Kingdom’s cover blurb was, unfortunately, the opposite.  While the book wasn’t exactly bad, the main emotion I experienced while reading it was boredom.  This coming from the man who recently read Human Dimension and Interior Space from cover to cover, and found it interesting.

Conservation and Cycles

In any closed system, quantities must be conserved.  Thermodynamics inform us that energy is conserved.  Linear and angular momentum are both conserved, whether we’re looking at billiard balls in a Newtonian paradigm, or photons in a quantum system.  Special relativity expands conservation even further to the equivalence between matter and energy.  In a closed system, where nothing can escape, quantities are inevitably conserved.