robert.admin – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 18, 2025

Footfall (Review)

ead this very thick scifi back went it came out in ’85 when I was through with one degree and working on another. This was back, kids, when the scifi section in the many neighborhood bookstores were on thick sets of shelves and not a bunch of weak image-based bullshit. Think about it – StarWars was still just a movie (not a religion) and many young people still read. Okay, gripe done. So in Footfall, and intelligent race of (wait for it) elephants coasts into our solar system with the intent of taking over Earth. The first thing they do is […]

May 15, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 5/14/2025

ecky was sitting in the back of her parents’ overloaded Buick, rolling out of some Pennsylvania backwoods town, Tuskawhosit or something. Her dad had to stop for directions (again). They were trying to find the town Becky’s mom’s sister lived in; Westly. Staying two weeks with her coal-mining relatives did not excite her at all. Mom: “They have a canoe.” Becky: “The river is sludge.” Mom: “You can watch all the trains.” Becky: “I hate trains.” Mom: “Look at the fall colors on the trees!” Becky: “…” They were just rumbling down the beat-up two lane road out of town, […]

May 15, 2025

Chatterbox(DOG EAR)

f I know one thing about myself, it’s that I talk too much. I know that’s where my writing has all come from, the desire to get a story out, regardless of how long it takes, to share it with the world. The problem with this (and with the world) is that it really doesn’t care. The world has better things to do. And the older you get, the more things you experience, but the less people want to hear it. Young people have shorter attention spans. They don’t have time for a long story or joke to develop, to […]

May 11, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (SNS) – 5/10/2025

kay, so this was a test flight. We were confident in our flight worthiness. Experienced crews. Casual weekend. Fully planned. With crosswinds. And thunderstorms. And the lights and radars were out. And a UFO was stooging about the boundary fence. We’d all come out for a Saturday Night Special, where fewer people means more elbow room and a chance to engage in more difficult operations. It’s rather fun, a challenge. Tonight was a two-for – TT&TO ops in a new and untested format, and an interlocking district (run by a towerman and signaller) in the Lehigh to Bethlehem stretch. First […]

May 11, 2025

She who became the Sun (Review)

o the only way I can describe this novel – it’s Mulan without the music, the side-kick dragon, all the feel-good nonsense of commercial franchising. Hey, I have a thing for historical fictions about actual princesses. What can I say? So, an unnamed girl exists in a central Chinese farmland during a horrific famine in 1345. Her brother, Zhu Chongba, is prophetized for greatness. And she, a grubby little famished thing, faces “nothing”. But when bandits ruin their shattered lives, her brother lays down and literally dies. And the grubby little girl, she takes his place. His fate shall be […]

May 4, 2025

Silo (Review)

he guy who unloaded the three “Silo Series” books on me also gave me a thin little thing, sixty pages long. In Silo, we get three little short stories. The first one is about a man who was considering going to Atlanta (right before the fall of everything) and decides not to take that lifeboat, but instead ops for his own path. In the second, a woman he’d had an affair with has holed up in Colorado with a bunch of anti-siloists, who hate the entire nanobot releasing group of the Atlanta silos and vows revenge, only to realize that […]

April 27, 2025

Dust (Review)

he third big book of the massive Silo series. So in this, we finally combine the present (Wool) and the past (Shift) with a novel that ties Juliette in Silo 17 and 18 with Donny in Silo 1. And while it all comes down to the final struggle, interesting changes happen to our world, interesting people live and die, and interesting discoveries are made. Of course, to end happily, survivors find their way into a Garden of Eden (and me, being cynical, I wonder how soon it is before greedy thugs and bullies form their own collectives, and weird-ass religions practice […]

April 25, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/23/2025

wasn’t really at the top of my game that night. I’d gotten two boosters (Covid and Measles) and I feeling out of sorts. Also, there’s something going on my life that keeps me up at night. So I was tired. And foggy. I couldn’t even seem to work the dispatcher program, miss-clicking and fumbling my way through it. I wasn’t at my best. And it showed. I kicked out my usual signature warrant start, with orders to 202, SB2, 921, 927 and 223. I should just print up copies of these to cut out to issue, pre-written. Always the same. […]

April 21, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 4/19/2024

n the ride over to Palm Bay and the Farnham’s Florida East Coast, Kyle and I discussed ways we could help Ken make the railroad a little easier to prepare. We do drive over to Doc’s WAZU to help stage and clean. Maybe something like that would keep the FEC enjoyable for the Farnhams (and operational for us) in the coming years. I guess what we did give him was a wonderful session. Kyle and I seem to have the Midas Touch for sessions these days. We’ve had a string of good ones. The best thing was that we were trying to […]

April 20, 2025

Shift (Review)

kay, I’m letting you know that, growing up, I really liked the movie My side of the Mountain. But more on that later. Shift is the second book of the Silo Series, set in a world where some sort of ecological/man-made disaster has swept the planet. Now people live in underground silos, 150 (or so) stories deep. Their entire existence is one of continuous uprisings (one every generation) with (usually) the revolt failing or total crazy chaos (in which either everyone dies or the silo is destroyed remotely. Remotely? But that implies a controlling silo. Doesn’t it? It does. So this […]