Book Blog – Page 46 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 6, 2020

First Contact (Review)

f you don’t like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, you might as well stop here. Because First Contact, by Evan Mandery, is very much in this class of storytelling. Me, I loved it. Written in 2010, it’s got a clueless president (so dense and self-centered, it’s nearly prophetic). It’s got his aide, Ralph, the hapless young man who he sends to get his sub sandwich lunches. It’s got Ralph’s new girlfriend, who is second-guessing her decision of going to law school. And it’s got the ambassador from Rigel, who is a bit of a practical joker, and his own aide […]

December 13, 2020

Diamond Sam (Review)

ince I’m still deep in another book, I met this week’s deadline by peeking into the next story in my Sam Gunn Omnibus, a collection by the recently-late Ben Bova. This time, it was Diamond Sam. So the collection continues with Jade, a young girl attempting to make a historical drama out of the late, great Sam Gunn, spaceman and adventurer. In this, she interviews Grigory Protov, an aging cosmonaut living out his last days in a Russian old-spaceman-home on the moon. And Grigory has nothing good to say about Sam, calling him a spy and a thief. Turns out […]

December 20, 2020

The Vagrant (Review)

kay, so the hero is a kickass silent man, with a cloak and a magic sword with an angry blinking eye in its hilt. And under that cloak, he’s toting a baby. And to feed the baby, he’s hauling a goat, an angry bitch that kicks and bites with attitude, the perfect sidekick for laughs. The only thing it hasn’t got is Eddie Murphy doing its voice. But that’s the trick Peter Newman set up – a party in which nobody speaks. Oh, eventually they pick up someone who can actually talk but until then, it’s all nuanced gestures and […]

December 27, 2020

Beacon 23 (Review)

ometimes the parallel between the actual world and the projected world is so direct in a science fiction book, it’s obvious. And sometimes I don’t care. In Beacon 23, we have a war-torn vet tending a hyperspace beacon that marks and asteroid field. The guts of the station are in the spherical hub. But the broadcasting unit needs to be a distance from it, so it’s on top of a projection for safety. Kinda like… a lighthouse, right? Just like The Vagrant from last week, you’ve got a single-point POV from this sorry keeper as he tends his beacon, talking […]

January 3, 2021

The Book Thief (Review)

ou can’t have a more hardcore story opener than this – little Liesel is on a train going to meet her “new” mother and father (since it’s 1939 in Nazi Germany, and her real mom is either unfit or too poor to take care of her and her brother). But a bad day goes further south when her brother suddenly dies on the train to her foster home. Once her brother is buried and before the train moves on, a book falls from one of the grave digger’s pockets and, even though she can’t read, Liesel steals it off the […]

January 10, 2021

Old Man’s War (Review)

t’s a pretty simple premise – when you get to a certain age and become a drag on the economy and only have maybe a decade to live, you can elect to join Colonial Defense Force. They will give you a new body, train you to be a soldier, and expect a two-year (but, as it turns out, ten-year) hitch out of you. You just won’t be coming back to Earth. You’ll go where they tell you, fight who they tell you, and die when they tell you. Simple. Well, the new body part is true; manufactured bodies with all […]

January 17, 2021

Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 (Review)

ell, I always rip through my Christmas gifts. My wife bought this one for me – safe bet, since like a box of chocolates, there is always something good to find in an anthology. And happily, among all these offerings of scifi and fantasy, there were a number of good reads (and interestingly, there wasn’t a spaceship or a wizard to be found – modern writing, I suppose). So, their great stories include: Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience ™: A failing Indian man working in a VR park about American Indians presents a fake image of the Indian Experience, […]

January 24, 2021

The Hollow Men (Review)

ou know those quaint little curb libraries where you can trade books? Usually I find them packed with children’s coloring books and gothic romances. But while shopping the three in my neighborhood, I found a five-year-old hardback, a medical thriller titled The Hollow Men. So Doctor Harry Kent is a bit of a rudderless soul, a fellow who, besides his hospital rounds, puts in time as a police surgeon for the London Metropolitan Police. And one night he’s called in; a young teen has gone into a chicken fast food place with a starter gun and a list of demands: […]

January 30, 2021

The Ghost Brigades (Review)

had a good feeling this was going to be good. The first book of the series (Old Man’s War by John Scalzi) was really a joy to read. And I had my best friend Jesse (as well as the guy behind the counter at the bookstore) rave about how good the followup was. And I’ve got to say, “I had it on good authority…” Great book. This book centers on the Ghost Brigades, far-future solders who are created from the DNA of the dead, who fight and die to keep the human colonies safe. However, one of them is a […]

February 7, 2021

The Demonstration (Review)

his shortie comes from The Fortunes of Captain Blood, one of the collections of short stores that 1930’s megastar Rafael Sabatini wrote about his break out character, Captain Blood, a pirate in the golden age of piracy. In this short tale, Monsieur de Saintonges, on a sort of inspection tour of the French possessions in the Caribbean for his masters in Paris, has been successful in that he has married a very rich woman who owns most of Martinique. In completing his circuit and before heading home to enjoy his wife’s fortunes in his homeland, he calls upon Tortuga, a […]