robert.admin – Page 89 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 17, 2020

A Dove against Death (Review)

remember reading this book on the return flight after my first solo overseas adventure to England in the early eighties. And I distinctly remember thinking (as I closed the cover while we descended into ORL) two words: African Queen. So in this book, set in the same time and place (1914, Africa) as Queen, three English soldiers, the survivors of an attack on a German base with now-discovered radio capacity to direct ships all about the Southern Atlantic, attempt an escape. And it’s running and horses and a stick-up-his-ass German commander with a Quasimodo sergeant sidekick in hot pursuit. And […]

May 14, 2020

Print Ready (DOG EAR)

t’s that time of the quarter again. Tonight is deadline for The Journal Box, a model railroading publication that I assemble four times a year. And it’s a real labor of love. This is the all-important election edition so I’ve been getting biographies of candidates (as well as the division reports). And these communications come in all sorts of formats – I get emails, text files, Word docs, and even PDFs (which I need to strip the text out of). All of these I gather into one Word document so I can sort them and then shift them to Publisher. […]

May 10, 2020

Invasion (Review)

his one was an old hardback from the shelves the cats selected for me by knocking it to the floor. Gave the dust a blow and thought, “Man, I haven’t read this in literal ages.” Yeah, it’s copyrighted 1980, so it’s as far from me today as it was from World War Two when it was written. Anyway, it was penned (probably, given the date) by Major Kenneth Macksey, MC (Retired), who spent twenty-seven years in tanks. So he knows his shit. This one is an alternate history study, a look at what would have happened if the Germans, looking […]

May 7, 2020

Fire and Bronze Revisited (DOG EAR)

nteresting call from mom the other day. As mentioned in the last DOG EAR, I was hunkering down and dealing with the depression of plague politics. But she called and I was in mid-something, so I put it down and talked. She told me that she’d been sitting around in her own doldrums and saw my novel, Fire and Bronze, under her coffee table. I’ve always seen it there and it’s always given me a little pride. You see, my dad and I had little in common as I grew up. He had been an only child and had done […]

May 3, 2020

Fire and Bronze (Review)

kay, I might be a little biased on this. After all, I literally wrote the book. But I’ll do my best to give you an honest assessment. Fire and Bronze is the story of Princess Elisha of Tyre (a city on an island that used to be off Lebanon (as for why it no longer is, refer to my own Early Retirement)). At a young age her father the king passes and she ends up in a power struggle against her brother for the throne of Tyre (and her very survival). She opposes him with her own power faction, noble […]

April 30, 2020

Knowing oneself (DOG EAR)

‘ve always been honest enough with myself to not try to anticipate how I would respond in an emergency. What would I do if someone held a gun on me? What would I do if I was faced with a chance at total corruption for total gain? Could I sell my soul? Easy to “pre-brag” about yourself but me, I’m not so sure. How would I deal with a mid-air emergency if I had a plane? Always wondered. Two hours post-solo in my little red ultralight, I found out. I was climbing steep and hard off Lake Apoka (it was […]

April 26, 2020

Infernal Devices (Review)

ook three of the Mortal Engines series, a great twist to an interesting furture-screwed world where cities roam about on their wheels and tracks, devouring each other, and the planet has become a strange place indeed. So Anna Fang, aviatrix from the first book, has now been remade into a stalker – a mechanically animated corpse (a shame too, since I liked her). She (or it) has been leading the Green Storm, a strange spinoff from the original Anti-Traction movement she was involved in, now more of an eco-militaristic force. And she and the mobile cities are fighting it out […]

April 23, 2020

Bumper Stickers (DOG EAR)

’ll admit that Facebook really brings out the worst in me. Mostly because of you twits. With all that’s going on in the world, all the blame, counter-blame, the alternative history; it’s like I’m Don Quixote and every idiot out there is a windmill. I’m easily baited by faulty logic, simplistic equivalencies and straw man projection. I feel the need to answer. And then I feel the need to check for the reply, so I can answer, reply, answer, and the monkey’s got his fist in the anthill hole again. I had to drive an hour out of town to […]

April 19, 2020

Velocity Weapon (Review)

ot this in withdraw after ripping through Book 8 of The Expanse. Was in the mood for a new space series and this looked promising. So it starts pretty hardcore. Biran is graduating into the Keepers, a monkish organization who control the galaxy-spanning gate system and who have chips with gate design specifications installed in their heads. At the same time, his sister Sanda is leading her gunship squadron against the warlike Icarions, the inner-planet fascists who are rebelling against the Keepers with a total system conflict. But her ship is grievously destroyed, her pod deploys and is ejected into […]

April 16, 2020

Plague Doldrums (DOG EAR)

’m really getting the concept of life in a plague and political turmoil. In many of the historical novels I read, plagues happen. Generally the town becomes quiet save for the rumble of the carts carrying away the dead. At the edge of town, spades eat at the soil, expanding the plague pits. Occasionally doors are marked with an X or whatever to mark a contagious house. And I haven’t lived under a rise of fascism, through I read all about it in Winds of War. Now we have crazed political responses (we just cut funding to the World Health […]