Many years ago, when it first came out, I read a novel called "Magic's Pawn", by Mercedes Lackey. It was popular, it had very good reviews in the fantasy and SF magazines, and, remarkably, it was about a gay teenager in love with his talking horse, with lots of vengeance, and tears, and star-crossed lovers, something like a YA version of Narnia. It ought to have been a huge hit, but for some reason it didn't work for me. Not just "didn't work", but I actively despised it, and avoided Mercedes Lackey books for many years in consequence.
So, anyway, for some time now, I'd been aware of 'Skandranon' as a popular Gryphon name, but hadn't known whence it came. Thus it was that while looking for Gryphon stories to read to fuel my recent Gryphon obsession, I came across a review of Lackey's "The Black Gryphon". I read it. I'm floored.
It's kind of like a Harlequin Romance with lots of violence and emotionally-needy Gryphons. It manages to press pretty much every button I've got. This could have been written to order for me. It's superficial, and over-wrought, and emotionally manipulative, and kind of fanfic-like, and I fell completely in love with it! (I'm not a devotee of Serious Literature, for those keeping score.)
I need to go back now and see what was the deal with "Magic's Pawn", I suppose.
*****
The Canadian train disaster has followed a very old-fashioned news arc here, with initial stories on Saturday telling merely that a train had caught fire and derailed, and one person was dead, to stories today of the town centre being obliterated, and maybe 50 or 60 dead, once they find all the bodies.
News stories used to develop like that. Some apparently minor thing would just get larger and larger over a few days' time. I remember as a child, when you had the papers and news magazines to rely on, always making mental note of those one-paragraph bits about volcanic eruptions, revolutions, earthquakes, etc, in some far-flung part of the world, since they would usually generate detailed followups in the next few days papers, and then 'Time' would have pictures.
What's weird here is that this happened in Canada, and not off in the extreme north or anything, but right by Montreal. I haven't a clue why news was so slow to disseminate.
*****
That had to be a particularly nightmarish doom for the people in that nightclub, with the building suddenly surrounded by a lake of burning oil, and no way to escape.
*****
It's good that
we're claiming portions of the moon as US territory, albeit belatedly. I cringed at the 'for all mankind' speech they had Armstrong give, however in consonance with the zeitgeist it was. I think to this day that had we landed, stuck in our flag, and promptly claimed the moon as American property, there'd prolly be a half-dozen different countries with moonbases there today.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
