“Another year, another anthology! This year’s theme is ‘wizards and magic,’ and it must be quite the well of inspiration indeed, because there are no fewer than seventeen stories this time around plus a prologue and epilogue.”
Tag: 1995
“Mark Anthony seems like the kind of over-ambitious author for whom Jeff Grubb had to invent his notorious ‘Don’t blow up the moon’ rule.”
“War in Tethyr starts off as a potentially interesting story, but devolves into a polemic where the author uses this mass-market paperback fantasy novel as a soapbox for espousing his political convictions.”
“It’s basically Malaugrym spring break — unwise youngsters on their own without supervision for the first time, making bad decisions and getting into trouble — which is the worst way to sell them as impressive villains.”
“If I were to rank every baby in fiction by how sympathetically they’re portrayed, Kaedlaw would rank just ever so slightly above the keening fetus-beast from Eraserhead.”
“There are a million problems with drow society, but Liriel’s only problem with it is that it so often bores her.”
“It’s such a relief to spend time with a female character who feels like a real person after slogging through so many women used as sex objects in the recent Ed Greenwood novels.”
“The general impression is that the world revolves around Elminster to such an extreme degree that if he were to spend an hour in the toilet after eating a bad mussel, the world would crumble to its very foundations.”
“I’d heard whispered rumours of this book before, sinister intimations that someone had written a Forgotten Realms novel so bad that it would rend your sanity and leave you a gibbering wreck if you should dare to peer into its pages for too long. Naturally, like the protagonist of any Lovecraft story, I assumed this was overblown nonsense and plunged right in…”
“Pinch makes a fantastic anti-hero protagonist, as morally grey, vicious in a fight, and good at ferreting out plots as any Dashiell Hammett detective.”