Author name: Paul Weimer

Paul Weimer is a SF writer, gamer, reviewer, and podcaster and an avid amateur photographer. In addition to the Skiffy and Fanty Show, he also frequently podcasts with SFF audio. His reviews and columns can also be found at Tor.com and the Barnes and Noble SF blog. He is best seen on twitter as @princejvstin and his website.

The Skiffy and Fanty Show Podcasts

303. Patrick Tomlinson (a.k.a. The Stand Up) — Trident's Forge (An Interview)

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https://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFEpisode303InterviewWPatrickTomlinson/Sandf–Episode303–InterviewWPatrickTomlinson.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSAlien planets, comedy, and cheeseheads oh my!  In our 303rd episode, Patrick Tomlinson joins Paul and Shaun at Convergence to talk about his stand-up, his Ark series, and much more. We hope you enjoy the episode! (Note:  If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show!) Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 303 — Download (MP3) Show Notes:

Blog Posts

Game Review: Timewatch, by Kevin Kulp

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“History is not written by the victors, it’s written by the people with the time machines.” — Robin D. Laws Time Travel, as one of the earliest streams of science fiction literature, is similarly one of the earliest themes and modes in roleplaying games. From Timemaster to GURPS, to Continuum, and many others, characters acting as adventurers, patrollers, and explorers in the corridors of time and space have been a staple of science fiction roleplaying. Timewatch, written by Kevin Kulp and published by Pelgrane Press, is the latest iteration of time-travel roleplaying games. The default setting of the Timewatch RPG is the familiar line of a Time Patrol who monitors and keeps History on track. The Timewatch have a citadel in the out-of-time-and-space locale just before the singularity event that creates the Big Bang, and it is from that point that they monitor changes to the time stream due to outside agency, and then when one is detected, the agents are dispatched to discover why history has gone off track, and to correct it. Time’s track goes off because of, not usually pure chance as in the matter of Voyagers!, but rather because of other time travelers. Thus the players are pitted against would-be meddlers in history ranging from misguided do-gooders looking to kill Hitler to mutant time-traveling intelligent cockroaches seeking to create the nuclear apocalypse that will bring their species into existence. The opposition wants to change history permanently, and it’s up to the PCs to foil their plans and fix it.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Atlas Obscura

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The world is stranger, more magical, more strange than you can possibly imagine. Since 2009, the Atlas Obscura website has been a destination for people who want to look at, or add to, the ever growing database of strange and wondrous places and things in the world. From giant balls of string to glowworm caves, Atlas Obscura has been a blessing for people looking to escape the spreadsheets at work for a bit. And now there is a book. Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, written by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton, takes 700 entries from the Atlas Obscura website and rewrites them into a handy hardcover book. The book is arranged by region, drilling down to the state level in the case of the US. The variety of the 700 entries is a mixture of the small, the large, and the unexpected. Be it the agricultural museum of Cairo or the Kola Superdeep Borehole, or one square mile Carcross Desert, or the sign post forest at a spot on the Alaska Highway, there are sites from places you might never get to. And then there is the CIA Museum in Langley, and the Hobo Museum in Iowa, Carhenge in Nebraska, the old mechanical clock in Salisbury Cathedral, and other places  and things you can really visit. Each entry provides directions on how to get to see it for yourself, cautioning the reader in cases where one has to dare going onto a closed locale, or even dare a trip to North Korea. It’s all implicit invitation for travelers to follow in their footsteps and see the wonders with their own eyes.

Blog Posts

Excerpt from The Found and The Lost by Ursula K. Le Guin

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We here at the Skiffy and Fanty Show are big fans of Ursula K Le Guin. At least one of us thinks she’s Nobel Prize for Literature worthy-good. So, today, we present an excerpt from The Found and the Lost, the collected volume of Le Guin’s novellas from Saga Press. The other volume in the recently published set, covering her shorter fiction, is  The Unreal and the Real. Gorgeous covers, the both of them.

Blog Posts

Book Review: A Little Knowledge by Emma Newman

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Fourth in the Split Worlds series, and in some ways a brand new start after the original trilogy (Between Two Thorns,  Any Other Name, All is Fair), A Little Knowledge by Emma Newman brings new opportunities, changes, and challenges to the characters in Newman’s urban fantasy world. Talking about those characters, their changes, and what Newman does with them is necessarily spoilery for the first three novels. This review assumes that you are all right with spoilers, or you have read the first three novels. Newman’s title “A Little Knowledge” seems to invoke the often misquoted line from a poem by Alexander Pope, “A little learning is a dangerous thing”. And that is definitely true of the three major protagonists in the novel. All of them have been raised to positions of power, with ideas of what to do with that power, but find that the actual application and use of that power for what they want and need to do is much trickier than they ever expected. Even in an urban fantasy world, there are no magic wands to wave.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Breath of Earth by Beth Cato

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In an alternate early 20th-century world where Japan and the US have created a powerful alliance, a secret geomancer struggles to protect herself and the city she loves from forces seeking to shake San Francisco to pieces in Breath of Earth, the first in a new alternate history fantasy series by Beth Cato. In the alternate world that Cato depicts, there is magic in the world, and the primary form of magic are those magicians who are sensitive to the movements of the earth. These geomancers not only can keep San Francisco tectonically stable, but can channel the bled off energy into a mineral, kermanite, whereupon that energy can be discharged to do work, to power vehicles and other things in the same way that a battery can. Thus, kermanite is an extremely potent strategic resource, and its acquisition and control is part of the reason for the Japan-US alliance. Even better, the novel shows the clear costs and dangers of geomancers. It’s a potent form of magic, but one that can cause not only destruction around the user, but actively be harmful for their health. There are also social costs to being a geomancer, a theme that Cato has explored previously in the Clockwork Dagger series.

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