Sebastian Adanko's Blog

“Awesome design ideas. Why don’t you try selling them?”

A nice idea, but for a long time, that is all it was. But then technology progressed, modern print-on-demand dropshipping became a thing, I had a much loved, but long disused domain, and here we are.

I am mainly aimed at making rashguard designers for grapplers like myself – nerdy, sciency, and just a tad bit artsy. All too often grappling gear is either completely minimalist, or completely overwrought, with little on offer somewhere ...

Last year I made the error of kicking off the top-of-the-pops postwith the second-best book of the year, leaving the site carrying the runner-up at the top of the page for a while. This year, I will not make the same mistake, and will merely mention, for example, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the utterly silly, short, postmodern sorta-kinda-novel of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo philosophizing about cities mostly fantastic and sometimes real, a book so transparently and fashionably po-mo tha...

It is always good when a good book series maintains the expected quality throughout its run, as was the case with this year’s seventh installment of Stross’ Laundry Files, Kloos’ continuing battle against the Lanky invaders, or Abercrombie’s foray into the short story world of First Law. Robert Jackson Bennett continued the Divine Cities series with a worthy sequel to one of the surprise wondersof 2014, and after the thoroughly mixed impressions of the first part, the second book of M. John H...

Sitting down to recapitulate the year in books, I was honestly surprised to see how many I have read this year. Well, read orattemptedto read, really, sometimes just flipping through an inane novella desperately attempting to be kooky and weird straight to the end to see if it gets better (it doesn’t), other times simply tossing the logorrheic brick painfully in need of a good editor on the DNF and WNF pile to be forgotten forever, brows twirling in surprise after having thoroughly enjoyed th...

I inadvertently lied a couple of posts back. I said no book from 2015 really blew my mind, and right after hitting “Publish” I started reading Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself. The result? Mind: blown. Well, that may be a bit of hyperbole right there, but it is by far the best science fiction novel I read that was published this year, taking the concept of alien otherness a couple of steps further than is usual within the genre, to the point where Roberts plays around with Kant’s concept of the...

Kelly Link can write the shit out of words. That is why, having read her first short story collection, I kept the next two squirreled away for those interminable nights when nothing in my to-read list looks just right. Well, as I was writing this package of reviews for last year, I hit just such a moment, and so: Magic for Beginners. I was afraid that the novelty factor would wear off. That I might find the magic gone, the stories just a postmodern mishmash of poor imitations of magical reali...

One of the things I really love about genre is the way it produces stories that are altogether different. Yes, by definition, a genre is a set of tropes that should, in theory, limit what you can tell, but in science fiction and fantasy the very rules of the genre are frequently aimed at breaking out of boxes and thinking laterally, at exploring wholly new ground. One such new ground that is slowly opening up to me is Hispanic literature in its original form. Having started Spanish lessons a...

There is something to be said about reliability. Every year, when summer rolls in, I need to know that I will have good stuff to crackle on the beach. Not too serious, no Gulag ArchipelagoorFinnegans Wake, but also not too light, no Remo: The Destroyer or Holy Bible. Something familiar, like a well-worn pair of underpants, yet also not boring, like the shadow of a starship obscuring the Moon.

There are certain authors I could rely upon for this. Some of them are still around and kicking. Terr...

The hype behind some titles this year was incredible. Not all of it massive, though. There were minor breakout hits that proved to be much ado about cheap and dated mary-sue space opera, like Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. There were promises of vividly original fantasy debuts like Peter Newman’s The Vagrant, filled with unengaging characters doing uninteresting things in an interesting environment, but… mired. In a style. Relying on short sentences. Present-tense narra...

Instead of a brutally good or brutally terrible book, the end of 2015for me will bemarked by an insanely horrible design decision by the staff of Goodreads. Out of the blue, they’ve decided they have to do something to “jazz up” the website, and among a series of other relatively poordesign decisions, the “something”boiled down to“use a gray shade of the broken Merriweather font on a glaring white background”, making the website nauseating to read. As a former long-time web developer, I’ve ma...