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Not one of my favorite authors, but Ray Bradbury's effect on the world of science fiction is substantial, at least in popular culture. I liked some of his work, but I found much of it to be pretentious. He was a bit too much of a writer and not enough of a story-teller. Most of the folks...

The Kindle shows up as a hard drive on your computer. All you have to do is open the Kindle under file manager and access your library. The books can be copied like any other file and loaded onto the other Kindle. There is, as previously mentioned, the question of legality, but the act itself...

One of my all time favorite books is his Red Planet (one of my earliest SF reads).

Glory Road, without doubt. Heinlein's personal twist on fantasy. One of my favorite commentaries of all time: Isn't that what we all secretly wish for . . . a return to the wonder and innocence of childhood rather than the harsh realities of day-to-day life? Isn't that the escape that our...

The portrayed weakness of Frodo is one of the most egregious examples of bad screenwriting--the change is unnecessary and capricious in my opinion. I can't imagine what Peter Jackson was thinking in turning Frodo into a puppet. I guess I shouldn't take it so personally, but I was really...

An amusing example, no doubt, but I suspect if you do a philological examination of the word "gift" you will find that it is more of a corruption of the original meaning, than an interlinguistic homograph. That is a much more common occurrence. . . . and sure enough:Origin: Middle English...

Ever read the Russian Stories series by C.J. Cherryh? Good stuff. First books is Rusalka, second is Chernevog, and the third Yvgenie.

Read that when it came out--my reaction was like your--though I did take more than one night to read it.:D One of my all time favorite books . . . series actually. Morgan green! I really wanted to be Alaric :D

Alan Dean Foster wrote two series I found to be amusing and good entertainment as well: The Spellsinger series and the Flinx and Pip series 1st book is called The Tar-Aiym Krang (as published) and there was a pre-quel written in 1983 called For Love of Mother-Not. Just thinking about them...

Well . . . it depends on what you mean by "futuristic fantasy" as was previously stated. Shannara series had future tech (also as was previously stated). Piers Anthony wrote the Split Infinity series which takes place in two parallel worlds, one in which magic rules and the other in which the...

Beriothien - Protector - I can live with that. I wonder upon what this is based. Looks like a fair amount of conjecture on his part.

The question is a philological one. For an answer you need to know what Tolkien was thinking in how the Orc language was developed. If you look at modern languages, you will find words which are spelled identically in two different languages but have two totally unrelated meanings. It usually...

I was an avid book collector and have a library of over 3000 books (about 2/3 paperback). Unfortunately they are in storage and it was a big hassle to retrieve any of them . . . so I began having to buy second copies of some I wished to reread. Enter the Kindle . . . I got mine Christmas 2010...

Coming very late to the topic, I would have advised the movies first, as once you've read the book, the movies are really disappointing . . . aren't virtually all movie adaptations a pallid reflection of the original work? I have almost reached the point of having no desire to see a movie...

Oh yeah, you touched a nerve in this thread. I am constantly amazed at the hubris of so many screen-writers to believe that they are in any way better writers than those authors of the books the desecrate when they "re-write" to make them "better." I fully understand the need to shorten...

I hadn't thought about that, but it is a very real possibility. Reminds me of the old joke about the Sahara Forest. Ba-dum-bum!:D

Yeah, rather surprised it wasn't mentioned earlier; it was the very first scene that popped into my head as well. . . . great minds and all that . . . :D

Peter, thanks for the info. I was aware to some extent, but then what can a Yank really know from watching the tele? Love Morse, Midsomer, Creek, Rosemary and Thyme, et al. As to the name, I admit, I filched it from Mercedes Lackey's book The Catswold Portal. I began using it back in the...

I saw that someone mentioned Wolf and Iron by Gordon R. Dickson, there is another which falls near this category--post alien conquest of Earth (reminiscent of Hubbard's Battlefield Earth)--called The Way of the Pilgrim. Another semi-apocalyptic story--actually post-Soviet takeover of...

This idealization of the world continues today. I would point to the very entertaining mystery series "Midsomer Murders" indeed to most of those tales of murder and mayhem with authors have been penning that are set in rural England. There is no such place in the real world. I suspect it has...