Chalker

terror is not the answer: lessons from Jack L. Chalker’s G.O.D. Inc. series

December 9, 2010

I heard this amazing interview of the writer, Reza Aslan, on NPR the other day. He was talking about his new book, Tablet & Pen, an anthology of Middle Eastern writing over the past hundred years. The review on Amazon says, “This mammoth anthology goes a long way toward achieving its equally mammoth goal: to [...]

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Does sci-fi writer, Jack Chalker, even like science and technology? Maybe, maybe not.

November 9, 2010

I think that it is super funny that for someone who is essentially a science fiction writer, Jack L. Chalker doesn’t seem to really think much of advanced science or technology. He sort of hints at this inescapable fact in the preface to Wonderland Gambit 1: The Cybernetic Walrus. I’ve come across discussions on such [...]

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science fiction cover art: appealing or a barrier to success?

May 31, 2010

I’m embarrassed to admit that though I love science fiction writing (at least some of it) the bright, flashy, sexy, cheesy covers on most of the novels make me anxious and slightly uncomfortable. It’s true. On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the art. It’s often incredibly complex, visually stunning, etc. Sometimes I even fantasize [...]

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Chalker’s endless bodily transformations heightens human sympathy and they’re a lot of fun, too

May 13, 2010

In all this type of story the living interest lies in their non-fantastic elements and not in the invention itself. They are appeals for human sympathy quite as much as any `sympathetic’ novel, and the fantastic element, the strange property or the strange world, is used only to throw up and intensify our natural reactions [...]

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Chalker’s “Charon” may not be the greatest but don’t call it quits yet!

April 29, 2010

Of the four novels in The Four Lords of the Diamond series, I think that Charon: a Dragon at the Gate, simply falls on its face. I thought the same when I was sixteen reading the series for the first time. The first book, Lilith: A Snake in the Grass is cool because it sets [...]

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stagnation, exploitation and hope in Chalker’s Lords of the Diamond and Soul Rider novels

April 7, 2010

I’m still on my Jack Chalker kick. Just the other day, I finished re-reading The Four Lords of the Diamond series. I read it last when I was sixteen. It’s a pretty exciting tale of a super assassin sent to four separate, interrelated, penal colony worlds, the Warden Diamond, to unravel a secret plot of [...]

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sexual politics in Chalker’s Soul Rider series

February 25, 2010

I’ve finished Jack Chalker’s five volume “Soul Rider” series and since, I’ve been obsessing more and more about issues of sex, gender and sexuality raised by the work. So here we are on this amazing place called World. There are areas that are more or less like our planet where the “conventional” physical laws work: [...]

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ecstatic happiness on Chalker’s world of flux and anchor

February 4, 2010

“…some people take drugs to chemically induce a happiness they cannot otherwise achieve; others drink to excess for the same reason. Still others throw themselves into religious frenzies in a bout of self-intoxication. All are seeking happiness. But happiness, even Heaven, is the absence of further progress. When one is happy, one wants no more [...]

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surviving the Eighties on Jack Chalker’s Well World

January 7, 2010

Has anyone out there in the greater blog-i-verse ever heard of Jack Chalker? He saved my sanity in the 1980’s. I was a dorky, shy, hypersensitive high school kid then; confused about a lot of things: adulthood, sexuality, my relationship to the world beyond the cookie cutter NoVA suburb that I grew up in, you [...]

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