I am a big fan of David & Leigh Eddings books, especially the ones with Sparhawk as the main character, the Elenium and the Tamuli. There is a newsgroup, alt.fan.eddings, which is supposed to discuss their works but the subject matter is often completely off-topic and we like it that way. For more information go to the website. The new book, "The Redemption of Althaus" is due out soon so we should have lots to talk about and the off-topic stuff may diminish for a while even.
Peter F. Hamilton has written some brilliant Sci-Fi, and the recent Nights Dawn trilogy is the best space-opera I have ever read. I was unable to put the books down, if you like sci-fi then you have to read these. There is a very good website set up by a fan, that contains essays and stuff written by the man himself as well as details of all his books.
Babylon5, mankinds last best hope for excellent TV has sadly finished now but you can still buy the videos or watch the repeats on channel 4 (UK). A truly excellent show with an ongoing story over the 5 series, although the last series was a bit naff, but it still had it's moments. The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 has all the info you could ever require and links to practically every B5 site there is.
More recently, and still running, I have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is suprisingly good. You don't expect a show of this type to have the depth it does. They kill off major characters with no warning, and sometimes no reason, there has been significant character development and the show constantly changes. You can never predict the endings and it delibarately sets things up so you expect something to happen and then something completely different happens. A very funny show that you should be watching if you are not already.
In case you didn't know, PBM stands for Play By Mail. You are sent information about your character/empire/whatever and then you create a set of orders for what to do next and send those to the moderator. There is usually a fixed time period to get the orders done in and when the time comes all the orders of all the players are processed and new positions sent out.
All this dull stuff basically means that you can play a turn-based game with as many other people as the moderator can handle, and when the moderator is a computer this can be in the hundreds! These sorts of games are becoming very popular on the internet because of the speed and cost advantages of email compared to snail mail.I've just joined a new PBEM game myself called Realms of the Arcane and am quite excited as this game seems to be very heavily populated. I haven't actually got my first turn yet so I can't say much about it but it looks good.
Last Updated: 28/04/2000