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.

Swordspoint Review

While I knew that I wanted my next few reads to be fiction, I harbored a certain degree of trepidation as I made my selections.  Even when I sat down to open Swordspoint, I was cautious, approaching it like someone poking an injured monster to see if it is still alive, anticipating that I would again read through a fantasy novel and finish thinking that it was just okay, and when does the next Stormlight book come out, and why won’t Rothfuss ever finish the Kingkiller Chronicle?  Less than a page of Swordspoint was all that was required to chase away my doubts and hesitations and any thoughts of other fantasy stories, because it was that beautiful.