Recent content by SpanishSpy

I like how they can't imagine Norway joining, but much of the Islamic world doing so. I also like how they view Palestine as its own country (given these are Brexiteers they wouldn't strike me as the type to do so).

Are you still taking stories for this one? I have a workable concept for one.

Of all the stuff I've reviewed for the SLP blog, Daniel Quinn's After Dachau, Brent Olson's Between the Helpless and the Darkness, Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, and P. Djeli Clark's A Master of Djinn have impressed me the most.

Which is ironic, because Olson is American. He seems to be that sort of Midwesterner with Scandinavian ancestry who has gotten really into their history.

The geography definitely works - it's why the Italians had a launch site there for a while (and still use the ground facility).

There's a fellow in Alternate History Online (which, full disclosure, I moderate) who is a very liberal, progressive Frenchman who will slam America for any number of crimes but dissemble about France doing similar, and yet have the gall to call himself antinationalist. There was a conversation...

Very similar happened in Virginia - to the point that we got another state out it.

He'll make America stand again.

There certainly are more conservative groups who teach swing as some sort of 'wholesome' dance - and, in fairness, it isn't nearly as raunchy as blues can be. Swing is a very bouncy dance and having the partners close enough to enable anything salacious simply doesn't work. When I was college...

When reading about Israel and Palestine I quickly decided I needed overviews of both Jewish and Arab history, going back millennia, just to establish the mentality of the historical actors involved. I also found I needed a decent understanding of British and Ottoman politics circa World War I...

My highest congratulations to @M_Kresal and @Andrew J Harvey!

My heartiest congratulations to @Jared!

As someone who has spent a lot of time around people like in the article, the joke to me is that they believe that they're the continuation of a 'pure' and 'authentic' tradition of a black musical genre when the reality is that the experience is heavily filtered through a white middle-class lens.

The most irritating blurb I've ever seen was one I only 'appreciated' after I read the book - this being Daniel Quinn's After Dachau, which I have reviewed for the SLP blog and is one of the best AH novels I've ever read. The blurb on Amazon is clearly trying to tie the book's plot into modern...

This is an odd and frankly somewhat silly idea I had today, when I brought up the topic of silphium, the plant used as a contraceptive by the ancient Greeks and Romans before being driven extinct. I then asked myself - what if the plant had been rediscovered at some later date, and widely...