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So Long, and Thanks…
‘Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled,’ said Arthur, ‘to ignore it.’ Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Trilogy of Five, p. 755 2022 has been a rough year for any number of reasons,…
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I Launched a Book!
In 2014, I co-organized a one-day conference on Greek warfare with three fellow doctoral students, Roel Konijnendijk, Cezary Kucewicz, and Joshua Hall. Over the subsequent seven years, through various changes in content and line up, this conference evolved into the edited volume Brill’s Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx. On Tuesday 22nd February,…
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Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler
At an uncertain point in humanity’s future, the world has come to be ruled by the Patternists, organized into houses led by their strongest under the dominance of the Patternmaster. Weaker Patternists may be journeymen and apprentices in a house, or they may be independent wanderers between houses, or they may be enslaved as ‘outsiders’…
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage and read by Bill Wallis
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown My rating: 5 of 5 stars As Arthur and his allies celebrate Christmas at Camelot, a Green Knight arrives offering a challenge: any knight may come forth and strike him, but they must receive an identical strike from him a year and a day later. Arthur’s noble…
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It doesn’t have to get better
This year I have begun rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish or Ekumen novels in the Library of America edition that collects these disparate stories together in two volumes of novels and stories. In the exuberance of rereading her first novel, Rocannon’s World, I ordered various additional volumes of nonfiction and short stories by Le…
Writing in the Dark 