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I linked it in yesterday’s Sentential Links, but I wanted to flesh out my response to George RR Martin’s irritation at people who are irritated with him that A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series, isn’t done yet. John Scalzi posts about this: Some fans do have a tendency to forget that the creative folks they love are not simply black boxes, who produce desired product at regular intervals. They’re actually real people who do other things than just what the fans want them to do, because humans from time to timeDown the rabbit hole….

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Over at World in the Satin Bag, S.M. Duke gives a list of his top ten fantasy movies. As always, I shall reproduce said list, with comment. Huzzah! (Cue the chirping of crickets…anyway….) Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson) Absolutely. This is probably the greatest fantasy film of all time. (Referring, of course, to all three films collectively, which is the only sensible way to think of them.) They’re not without flaws, God knows, but the sheer edifice of the creative effort here is so massive as to render the flaws minimal by comparison. It’s hard to imagine a productionDown the rabbit hole….

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Kushiel’s Dart is the first “fat fantasy” I’ve read in a long time; and I enjoyed it so much, I may find myself shying away from the genre for a while for fear of disappointment in whatever Fat Fantasy book I pick up next. Jacqueline Carey has crafted here a novel that put me in mind of Guy Gavriel Kay; in fact, I thought more than once while reading it that this is what GGK would have written if he’d been a woman. This was a wonderful, wonderful book that only let me down at the very end, when itDown the rabbit hole….

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Realms of Fantasy, one of my favorite magazines and one to which I’d eternally hoped to one day sell my work, is shutting down. There are fewer and fewer markets out there for short fiction. I’m frankly starting to think, the hell with it, and just put all of my own stuff up right here and let whoever finds it, find it. Oh well. I always enjoyed reading Realms, and I’ll always have my stash of back issues. UPDATE: Check out Warren Ellis’s headline for this news. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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One of my most beloved literary traditions, the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volume, will not be published this year. Those books are worth their price just for the introductory essays alone; they are chock full of reading recommendations and reviews of the year gone by in Fantasy and Horror, with long essays on graphic novels and music and movies as well as literary F&H. I get hours of pleasure from those essays each year, and their information always goes a long way to shaping what I read over the coming year. And that’s before I even mention thatDown the rabbit hole….

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A few links of geek and pop culture import, starting with some items that caught my eye at AICN: :: A movie version of Philip Reeve’s novel Larklight is in the works. Hopefully this project goes well, because the book is one of the most entertaining reads I’ve had in recent memory. I just hope they don’t get Hans Zimmer to write the music. Nothing against Zimmer, but this will really need a pompous, Elgarian sound. :: Looking at NBC’s announced schedule for next season, I see that ER‘s next season will be its last. Longtime readers will know thatDown the rabbit hole….

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As just about everybody with a blog already knows, Gary Gygax, one of the inventors of Dungeons and Dragons, died last week. I’ve been too busy to post about it until now, and I also didn’t want to make the same obvious joke that everybody else did about Gygax failing his last saving throw. (A favorite geek humor joke of mine is: “Jesus saves! The rest of you take full damage.”) I, of course, choose to envision God as the ultimate Dungeon Master, and with regard to Gygax, he did the old DM trick of dropping a bunch of diceDown the rabbit hole….

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So in the last month we’ve finally caught up on our Johnny Depp swashbuckler viewing by watching the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End. Prevailing opinion of these movies, so far as I can tell, is that each could have been an hour shorter, each is a mess with too much incomprehensible plot, each consists of a couple of large-scale action set pieces surrounded by boring scenes in which characters continually doublecross each other. In fact, the one word that seems common to nearly every review of these two movies I’veDown the rabbit hole….