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The theme music for The Secret Lair is "Skullcrusher Mountain", graciously provided and performed by Jonathan Coulton. Go buy his albums because he is, frankly, one of the best.

Mar

31

The Secret Lair Comic 0003: You’ve Been Infected

Filed Under Comics, Memoranda | 3 Comments

For those of you that may not be aware of the man known as ~~the Future Dark Overlord™~~ Scott Sigler, we at The Secret Lair do not endorse Scott’s most excellent sci-fi/horror novel Infected. Do not, I repeat, do not go out on April 1st and buy this very well written novel that can be found at all major bookstores. Doing so will only encourage him to keep making more awesome books and continue his quest to outshine the true overlords at this fine establishment.

Thank you for your cooperation,

-The Mgmt.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Mar

26

The Secret Lair Comic 0002: The Secret Lair Blood Drive

Filed Under Comics, Memoranda | 3 Comments

[click image to view full size]

Popularity: 44% [?]

Mar

22

The Secret Lair Episode 0008: Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

Filed Under Books | 5 Comments

The Secret Library: Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

When we found Ed Dale roaming through the The Secret Library stacks in a daze, we naturally assumed that one of the test subjects from the Cerebral Transference Laboratory had wandered in after the Matter Phase-Shift Emitter prototype in the adjacent lab proved more powerful than we originally anticipated, rendering many of the walls and floors on three sublevels temporarily immaterial. It was only after a minion pointed out Mr. Dale’s lack of cranial sutures that we realized our misapprehension.

As it happens, Mr. Dale was seeking the discussion group for Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan. In a moment of uncommon benevolence, we decided to let Ed join in the discussion rather than turning him over to our new android librarian, who shushes noisy patrons with depleted uranium bullets and singularity grenades and collects overdue fees with a 7 gauge hypodermic needle.

The Discussion

Also by Richard K. Morgan: the Takeshi Kovacs novels (Altered Carbon, Woken Furies)
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
“Along the Scenic Route” by Harlan Ellison, available in Deathbird Stories
The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
Batman & Robin starring George Clooney and Chris McDonnell
Zack Snyder (300) is directing the film version of Watchmen. Check out several characters in costume (including Ozymandias) on Zack Snyder’s production blog.

Addenda

Laura’s complete review can be found at the official community discussion thread for Market Forces.
Troy posted his thoughts on the book at GoodReads.com.
The book inspired Ken Newquist to play Uncle Bear’s Toybox Wars. You can read Ken’s playtest review at Nuketown. If Ken knows what’s good for him, he’ll share his thoughts on the book in the comments section of this post, at the official community, or on the GoodReads group.

Chris’ Recent Reads

The Retriever series (Staying Dead, Curse the Dark) by Laura Anne Gilman
Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran
Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson

Ed’s Recent Reads

Natural Ordermage by L.E. Modesitt
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Cauldron by Jack McDevitt
The Southern Vampire Mysteries (Dead Until Dark, Living Dead in Dallas) by Charlaine Harris
The Aisling Grey, Guardian series (You Slay Me, Fire Me Up, Light My Fire, Holy Smokes) by Katie MacAlister

Kris’ Recent Reads

Spook Country by William Gibson
The Scorpion’s Gate by Richard A. Clarke
The Goon graphic novels by Eric Powell
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 1 by Laurell K. Hamilton

Series We Can’t Seem to Finish

The Dark Tower by Stephen King
The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
The First Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever (Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War, The Power That Preserves) by Stephen R. Donaldson
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard

Next Time on The Secret Library

Our next selection from The Secret Library comes to us courtesy of Ken Newquist, host of the Nuketown Radio Active podcast. Regular listeners will recall our interrogation of Mr. Newquist from Episode 0006, though it is highly unlikely that Mr. Newquist will.

Mr. Newquist has chosen The Sky People, by S.M. Stirling. Our intelligence reports indicate that the book is a combination of three genres that hold a strange allure to your overlords: alternate-history science fiction and pulp.

From the front flap of the hardcover edition:

Marc Vitrac was born in Louisiana in the early 1960s, about the time the first interplanetary probes delivered the news that Mars and Venus were teeming with life—even human life. At that point, the “Space Race” became the central preoccupation of the great powers of the world.

Now, in 1988, Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the U.S.-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.

But there are flies in this ointment—and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus’s life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc’s Cajun charm.

Meanwhile, at the western end of the continent, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People leads her tribe in a conflict with the Neanderthal-like beastmen who have seized her folk’s sacred caves. Then an EastBloc shuttle crashes nearby, and the beastmen acquire new knowledge…and AK-47s.

Jamestown sends its long-range blimp to rescue the downed EastBloc cosmonauts, little suspecting that the answer to the jungle planet’s mysteries may lie there, among tribal conflicts and traces of a power that made Earth’s vaunted science seem as primitive as the tribefolk’s blowguns. As if that weren’t enough, there’s an enemy agent on board the airship…

Minions in the new Dirigible Assault Division should note that The Sky People is required reading. We will be discussing the book sometime in May. Check out our community and official group on GoodReads to participate in the online discussion.

And another thing…

Thanks to Troy over at GoodReads, we have our first graphic novel selection: Shooting War by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman . This graphic novel was originally published as a serialized web comic, which was greatly expanded for the hardcover edition from Grand Central Publishing. The Eisner-nominated web comic is still available online.

Shooting War is the near-future story of Jimmy Burns, a video blogger who is in the right place at the wrong time and becomes an overnight Internet celebrity. Soon, Jimmy is blogging from a war-torn, occupied Iraq instead of the Starbucks around the corner.

The Secret Library Nominated Novels

Sewer, Gas and Electric by Matt Ruff
The Golden Globe by John Varley
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The Secret Library Nominated Graphic Novels

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born by Stephen King, Peter David, Robin Furth and Jae Lee
Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction by Mike Mignola and John Byrne

Podcasts We Like

Miscellany

Brewed Fresh Daily, news and opinion from Cleveland, Ohio.
Bitstrips is a site where you can create your own webcomics. The overlords suffer from “Boundless Creativity“.
The Dresden Files roleplaying game is currently in beta. Chris recently played with some of the folks from The Game Master Show.

Congratulations

To Scott Sigler, whose novel, Infected, will be available at Amazon.com on April 1.
To Podiobooks author Seth Harwood whose novel, Jack Wakes Up is now available at Amazon.com.
To Mur Lafferty, whose novella, Wasteland (Heaven Season Four) is now available at Podiobooks.com.

Special Thanks

To our Secretary of Artistic Propaganda, Natalie Metzger, who continues to amaze us with her awesome art.
To P.G. Holyfield, author of the audionovel Murder at Avadon Hill, who continues to befuddle and mock us.
To The Vicar and Billy Flynn over at Geek Radio Daily, for spreading the love far and wide…and thick.
To J.C. Hutchins for playing our promo on his recent UltraCreatives interview with Guy Kawasaki.
To Jonathan Coulton, for our theme song, “Skullcrusher Mountain”.
And finally, an extra special thank you to everyone who donated to our tip jar. The Zoom H2 mobile recorder is completely paid for! Official Henchman records will be updated shortly.