polytropic_parrot

Comment Threads

• Robert van der Heide commented on New Book Week!
  The following feels odd: “...headless robots shaped like German shepherd dogs with gun muzzles for heads.”...
• J. J. MacClure commented on New Book Week!
  I've read all of your books, except for The Merchant Princes series, as I tend to avoid fantasy and this series has been marketed as such for years. However, I realize genre can be a misnomer, and I get the sense that publishers just aren't sure in which bucket to place the series. Given that, am I correct in thinking of the series as speculative economic fiction in which the many worlds hypothesis is used in strategic financial arbitrage? No unicorns or flying lizards? Alternatively, the premise of this novel is interesting to me. Do I need to read the...
• Pigeon commented on New Book Week!
  Don't forget Richard (eminently forgettable though he was) :)...
• Pigeon commented on New Book Week!
  Ignore the "fantasy" tag entirely - as Charlie has explained, it was just a contractually-required fudge relating to the original publication of the first novel, and which speedily lost even that tenuous relevance. If King Arthur is fantasy then Merchant Princes is "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", only better written and without the long boring bits. If I'd never read any of Charlie's books and someone handed me a Merchant Princes book and a Laundry book and asked me to guess which one was labelled as the "fantasy" one, I'd pick the Laundry one without hesistation. The series...
• Graham commented on New Book Week!
  It's Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." To start with, world-walking is simply treated as magic. It happens, some people can do, deal with it. By the end of the original set of books, technology catches up with it. The new series expands on the technology side in various ways. I was initially worried it was going the way of midichlorians, but thankfully OGH can write better than George Lucas......