Hear me out, it’s a Big Sword conspiracy. They wanted to be the only weapon marketed to the cross-shaped-violence demographic.

Warrior pope you say? I think I read his biography once

Private Lee Lemon may well be the finest recruit I’ve seen in all my years of service. That young man fills me with hope and some other emotions that are weird and deeply confusing to me.

Alpha male Zapp Brannigan

Meanwhile, Easter

At least the syfy miniseries dared to adapt Children of Dune.

I actually like it. We finally get an Irulan with agency and see Alia as a full character. And Leto 2 getting sandy.

Not sure how I feel about the Baron narrating in rhyming couplets though. Maybe just a tad too strange, even for Dune.

German must have its own share of disappointing terms.

Pferd comes to mind as an example. I really expected something more metal like horzdraken or comical like hoofenstreider. But no, just a boring Roman loan word.

FWIW, Moorcock discusses often in his forewords living the hellscape of post blitz London as a preteen. I highly doubt he would ever co-sign on another nazi regime.

Haha so right. My original draft lamented how the psychedelic, pansexual, spy with a little gun Jerry Cornelius only lives on in the pale echo of Austin Powers. But then I thought it was too niche.

But ya The Final Programme was my first literary introduction to homosexuality. The weird psychotropic defense towers on the Cornelius estate may have been my first introduction to mind altering states too.

The original velvet suited dandy from swinging London (imo):

Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe.

I must say this recommendation is delightfully on theme, nicely done 😎

This caught my attention

A Wizard of Earthsea is one of the most beautifully written books in the English language.

I’m a total sucker for beautiful prose, especially Gormenghast.

Do you have any memorable lines that stuck with you?

Stormbringer is Elric’s famous sword. You can hear someone shout it in GoT when Joffrey is about to name his sword. It’s evil and drinks the souls of those it kills, passing some of the energy to Elric.

Anyways. Elric is a sickly inbred albino prince of a an ancient , evil, and decaying empire (aka Fantasy Britain). Without his evil sword he is a total weakling pushover.

And people think this is a white power character/symbol? Blows my mind.

That’s way harder.

There’s always his iconic anthihero Elric, or the modern incarnation Geralt of Rivia. I like The Vanishing Tower (Elric IV I think) as a standalone in-media-res story.

I personally enjoy the really weird stuff in Blood: A Southern Fantasy.

Behold the Man won him an award and I thought it was a thought provoking novella, at least for its time.

What’s a good place to start? I only really know her for invoking the divine right of kings like a boss 😎

🤣😂

not Roman

Koln: am I a joke to you?

Reminds me of Absolution Gap and its insistence on brane cosmology theory. Most of the book is a side quest for a transmitter to an adjacent “brane” having the deus ex machina. I haven’t seen “brane” used instead of dimension/timeline since.

and then that Cato MFer ups and kills himself just before I was gonna kill him with kindness. Can you believe that? What a dick right?

How I imagine Caesar retold the story over dinner.

Doppelsöldner has entered the chat 😎

Doppelsöldner (“double-mercenaries”, “double-pay men”,[1] from German doppel- meaning double, Söldner meaning mercenary) were Landsknechte in 16th-century Germany who volunteered to fight in the front line, taking on extra risk, in exchange for double payment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelsöldner

Probably need more crossbows because the Romans sorta forgot, according to Emperor Leo VI The Wise

The fact that archery has been completely neglected and fallen into disuse among the Romans has caused a great deal of harm nowadays.

Please tell me this is the German word for wielding a tire iron 🙏