Haha. What? Triece isn't a burly dude? I'm astonished. :) The size differences still trip me up, even now. The bell ropes at the noble houses hint at it, but the ergonomics in a society of such diverse body types would be a challenge. You'd think it would be worse for the nobles, really, since there...

My only idea is that if you are not going to explicitly declare it part of YA, then go light on pulling in YA references, even if the protag is YA. Perhaps name it after the protag or a salient characteristic of his or hers, or a goal. For existing readers, at least, it may not matter. If you trust ...

Or they could go to Lesser Shia and acquire some of that nifty anti-addiction tech. There might be something there for mental addictions too. Also, I bet Tomas could handle the void as well, and he obviously has unexplored magical potential, which means he could conceivably train himself up to be bo...

@brainsniffer Yaaaaah, David is right about that. Unfortunately. I'm not old, but knowing I was old enough to read novels back in 1990 doesn't make me feel like a spring chicken either. /dramatic sigh --- On an unrelated note to everyone, I would avoid L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Recluse series. It had a go...

I have just rediscovered The Varayan Memoirs by Rick Shelley. It's about a 21-year-old college student that comes home to find his parents missing. He learns that his strange life (learning fencing, multiple martial arts, and wilderness survival skills) has all been training for his role in a family...

Huh! I completely missed that one - that's what I get for reading Discipline first, and not knowing who Scott or Mary was at the time. I'd read nearly everything before that point, with the exception of Dead End , and Lament 2 and 3. I think that was written before the importance of the multiverse ...

... Have we ever found an alternate reality where someone powered in one wasn't powered in the other? The bit that Dale pointed out that Merry may be powered in another is interesting... I don't remember actually reading that, but I absolutely know that it happens in Dale's multiverse, since all po...

Dareg called Samantha and Eva his daughters because they were children of his own mind. They knew much of what he knew, had his speed, and even elements of his personality. They were not really like Tiera in particular. It was even explicitly stated that Eve was parallel Tiera, not a parallel Eva.

Talk of Godwin's Law put me in mind of something that hasn't really been discussed before, at least not in the books. Since everyone is immortal, it follows that every criminally insane psychopath in cosmic history is an Elder God as well. In my mind, this compromises the validity of the"enemy'...

It's an excellent novel. For the most part, what could be extraordinarily confusing, the weaving together of parallel worlds, is handled well. That was my main concern with these novels, once the ball got rolling with Alternate Places 4. The only part that got even slightly sticky was when Alternate...