Category Archives: Books

Colin McPhee’s A House in Bali

Colin McPhee, a Canadian-American composer who had much more influence on American music than the body of his music might indicate (see Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds by Carol J. Oja), left behind two books that were as influential, … Continue reading

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Carol J. Oja’s Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds

The music of the East, particularly the gamelan of Indonesia, and even more particularly that of Bali, has a longer history of interaction with the music of the West than many might imagine. Claude Debussy first encountered the gamelan in … Continue reading

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Cathy Fenner, Arnie Fenner, and Irene Gallo (eds.), r/evolution — The Art of Jon Foster

One thing that I’ve found a delight while reviewing for GMR is the chance to move into fields I’ve never been able to focus on much before, one of which is illustration, specifically the art of the fantastic. Given my … Continue reading

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Kage Baker’s Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key

Kage Baker’s short novel, Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, is not a sequel so much as a continuation of the adventures of John James, fugitive, sometime pirate, and free-lance muscle, who was introduced in her novella “The Maid … Continue reading

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Kage Baker’s Dark Mondays

Most people know Kage Baker from her novels and stories of the Company, those wonderful folks who discovered time travel and put it to their own uses. Sadly to say, I only recently encountered the Company. Then her newest story … Continue reading

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Christopher Snyder’s The World of King Arthur

Michelle Erica Green Penned this review. For every serious student of ancient Grail lore and Arthurian myth, there are a hundred people who love the cultural artifacts of the story … the woodcuts and paintings, The Faerie Queene and The … Continue reading

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Jon Courtney Grimwood’s Lucifer’s Dragon

Lucifer’s Dragon is, as the Max Headroom series used to say, is set twenty minutes in the future. It set a century from now with flashbacks to a future not that far from our present. Though marketed as cyberpunk, it’s … Continue reading

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Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings

I’ve been working on my post on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, which has a rich imaginary geography, and which naturally has a map of its world, as created by its creator, which you can see here. There are equally … Continue reading

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Robert Heinlein’s ‘All You Zombies—‘

In a scant fourteen minutes, Heinlein creates the perfect time travel story of all time and laid the foundation for World as Myth novels that were written much later than this which was written in Heinlein in 1958. He has … Continue reading

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Gordon Hall Gerould’s The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story

This is a fascinating, yet ultimately horrifying book for several reasons. It has taken me quite some time to finish it after starting it some months ago, a process that happens more often with music, rarely with books. So why … Continue reading

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