Where to start with this genre-crossing author, spanning fantasy, horror and SF?
There's where where it all started – with his 1986 World Fantasy Award winning novel The Song of Kali, a psychological horror about a journalist encountering a latter day cult of Kali
Or his other horror themed works - or perhaps his dark fantasy or horror Summer of Night, reminiscent of Stephen King with its group of adolescent boys facing a supernatural terror with a long history behind it, or his take on psychic vampires in Carrion Comfort
However, it's his towering SF classics which earn him special mention - the Hyperion Cantos, modelled on the Canterbury Tales and its ‘pilgrims’ to the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, sent by the galactic Hegemony and the Church of the Final Atonement to face the Shrike
But really, it's his other towering SF classic in two parts, Ilium and Olympos, that seals the deal here.
What can I say? - I'm a sucker for the Iliad and the Trojan War. How can I resist an SF duology in which the Trojan War is reenacted by post-humans posing as the Olympian gods on a terraformed Mars around - where else - Mons Olympus?
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We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands...
Valhalla, I am coming
And now we come to a mythology that is one of the best known, even outside its European continent - arguably one of the most hardcore mythologies, with imagery worthy of a metal album cover
I mean, what else can you say of a mythology that features a ship made entirely of fingernails and toenails (of the dead)? Or its creation myth, in which the world was created from the corpse of a giant. No fluffy let there be light here
Revising my Top 10 Girls of Comics, Video Games & Anime - the silver medal spot
Top 10 Girls of Comics (2) Vampirella
Top 10 Girls of Video Games (2) Tifa Lockhart - Final Fantasy
Top 10 Girls of Anime (2) Nami - One Piece
My Top 10 Girls of Comics sees Vampirella in second place - the third of my holy trinity or big three for art and cosplay in comics (Vampirella, Red Sonja & Lady Death). Of course, all three miss out on the top spot for which there can only be one choice...
For my Top 10 Girls of Video Games, Final Fantasy's Tifa Lockhart takes the second top spot, as she continues to be the subject of prolific art and cosplay. But again, she misses out on the top spot, as there could only be one choice
(4) KATHERINE BRIGGS -
A DICTIONARY OF FAIRIES (1972)
A classic book, alternatively titled An Encyclopedia of Fairies, which now seems sadly out of print, by THE classic British folklorist
And as it says on the tin, the definitive guide to that classic subject of British folklore - fairies. Of course, the term fairies now conjures up images of cute little gossamer-winged pixies like Tinkerbell
In British folklore, fairies were much different, most aptly styled as the Fair Folk, itself a euphemism for things that would flay you and walk around in your skin
One of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction - time slip science fiction
What might be dubbed Connecticut Yankee or Lest Darkness Fall time travel on an individual scale - or Axis of Time, Island in the Sea of Time, Assiti Shards or just pure alien space bats time travel on a larger scale
Time slip science fiction involves time travel to the past, almost always unintentionally and often by unknown means. And because the time travellers typically transform the historical past, it tends to involve alternate history
Revising my Top 10 Girls of Comics, Video Games & Anime - the bronze medal spot
Top 10 Girls of Comics (3) Red Sonja
Top 10 Girls of Video Games (3) Atago - Azur Lane
Top 10 Girls of Anime (3) Nezuko Kamado - Demon Slayer
My Top 10 Girls of Comics sees the second of my big three in art and cosplay, Red Sonja, rise to third place or my bronze medal spot
For my Top 10 Girls of Video Games, Azur Lane's Atago gets the bronze medal or third place. Although Azur Lane was released in 2017, her art and cosplay just keeps coming. Of course, her Race Queen design helps
Essentially a prehistoric Celtic Conan (although so too is Conan). "He did not think it too many" is his catchphrase for body count. "Kiss my axe" is another