Eerie Domestic Attention (Ah, there are other people out there!)

Yesterday when having a look at the browsing statistics for this blog I noticed a little blip. For some reason Fire Broadside was linked to from the website of Science Fiction Bokhandeln (The Science Fiction Bookstore), one of Sweden's largest providers of scifi and fantasy books as well as board, miniature and roleplaying games. Specifically it was my recent post about Earth Reborn that was linked since the game has just become available for purchase at the store.

The reason I mention this is because it's the first time I've seen this blog in connection to "the Real World". That is to say, when blogging it's easy to find yourself in your own little Blogworld. Your own blog and the ones you follow, and the ones you keep discovering and the different users and the comments and... well you know. Sometimes you forget that there are people outside this (constantly growing) circle who are reading my blog and it's nice to be reminded.

Also it's fun since SF-bokhandeln is pretty much an institution in the Swedish geek sphere and has been around since the late seventies! I remember going there as a kid and buying stuff like H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson and Frank Herbert. Good times! That was back when it was the archetypical geekstore; a maze of murky, narrow, winding aisles with books up to the ceiling and so on. Since then they've moved to a much roomier location, although it's usually full of people so you still have to tread carefully.

What makes it eerie is that in the same little blurb the guy (David) mentions the new novel by Joe Abercrombie, whose book The Blade Itself I'm currently reading* and compares it to Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains that I just finished last month! Hmm...

*To be honest I'm not reading it, I'm listening to it. It's narrated by Steven Pacey and he is AWESOME! Yes, to the point that I have to use all caps! Since my years in Japan, where there often wasn't room to hold a book when you rode the train, I've listened to a lot of audiobooks and heard a lot of good narrators, but so far mr Pacey is a class of his own. He switches between a wild array of dialects, accents and speech impediments with ease and all the characters have their own distinct voices. Really great stuff. I mean, The Blade Itself is a good book as it is, but hearing it read like this brings it to another level