Category: Science Fiction

Golden Trillium [Review]

Golden Trillium by Andre Norton Bantam Books, 1993 Golden Trillium is the third book in the Trillium series of fantasy novels, which debuted, with much fanfare, in 1990 with Black Trillium. Since that’s over 30 years ago, I’ll recap the project here. Three respected female writers of classic SFF, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and …

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AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref

After a year or so mucking around on Midjourney I’ve only recently begun using the –sref and –cref functions. What are these, do you ask? Well, they are offshoots of the basic reference pic users can paste into their /imagine prompts. Midjourney calls them Imagine URLS. As the user’s manual says, “Imagine URLS can be …

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The Sentinals

Silent they stood, surveying the quiet countryside. It was a matter of time before they would be discovered, yet it mattered not to them; the world would have changed so drastically by that point that none of the sentients would have been much interested.

An Eight-Legged Aslan?

No… it’s just a whimsical illustration for a French edition of Thuvia, Maid of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, depicting a Martian banth (apex carnivore resembling a multilegged lion. )

The Product
[Reading Challenge 2024]

The Product by Marina Fontaine Conservatarian Press, 2022 [ #23  After the fall: A post-apocalyptic or dystopic book. ] This book kept popping up in my Kindle feed, so I chose it for the “Dystopia” category of this year’s challenge. It occurred to me when writing this review that “Russian Dystopia” is perhaps a subset, …

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An ASFR Tidbit

I haven’t been posting much ASFR content on here lately, but I’m pretty pleased by this happy accident of a Midjourney prompt, which was for a futuristic London subway, but came out… skewed sideways as often happens. Female wrongdoers were placed into transportation sarcophagi for their journey to the processing facilities. Such displays acted as …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/15/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 4)

There are interpretations of the Milky Way other than the arms of a distant galaxy. The Milky Way candy bar, invented in 1923 in Minneapolis, is still going strong domestically and globally. Its inventor was one Frank Mars, who gave his name to — you guessed it — the Mars Bar. You’d think he chose …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/8/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 3)

The Greeks weren’t the only ones to create origin stories for the Milky Way. Centuries before them, the Babylonians had their own version: it was the tail of Tiamat, the dragon/serpent goddess of primordial chaos, placed there after her defeat by the god Marduk. Likely the first version of the chaos vs. order megamyth, not …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/1/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 2)

The painting above, by Peter Paul Rubens, offers a different take on the Milky Way’s origins. I like it a lot better than Tintoretto’s which appeared last week. For one thing, it feels more real. There’s a story being told as your eye travels from element to element in the painting. But it’s not the …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/20/24: SFF Theme Burgers (ChatGPT)

Because ChatGPT did such a good job of generating Hawaii-themed cocktails (granted, edited by me to make them more unique and coherent) I decided to see what it could do with hamburgers. Gourmet burgers in fact, themed after science fiction and fantasy books. In this I was inspired by a Seattle coffeeshop where I and …

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