Book Blog – Page 66 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 6, 2025

The War of the Wenuses (Review)

o one would have believed in the first years of the twentieth century that men and modistes* on this planet were being watched by intelligences greater than women’s and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over London, serene in the assurance of their empire over man. It is possible that the mysticetus** does the same. Not one of them gave a thought of it only to dismiss the idea of active rivalry upon it as impossible or improbable. * = a man who designs women’s clothing. ** = a sub-species […]

April 13, 2025

Destroyermen 14: Pass of Fire (Review)

econd to last book in the series. And probably one of the more unfortunate titles I’d ever seen on a jacket. Was hanging out with friends, talking about books, and I mentioned I was reading Pass of Fire. Someone looked at my funny. “Pacifier?” “Huh?” Had to blink. “Oh.” Regardless, its another sea yarn set in the dino-world of alternative-literature, a planet like Earth except that dinosaurs still live and all sorts of different sorts of peoples from different sorts of times show up. Now, unlike our world, this one came with its own Panama Canal, and everyone wants it […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 25, 2025

Dungeons and Drama (Review)

kay, Hell is freezing over. Pigs are flying. Dogs and cats are living together. I read a romcom. I’m in a Sunday evening class and when our old bookstore closed, I thought we were done. But then the class reformed in the same space, new owners. But this bookstore, The New Romantic, is a Romance bookstore. Not really my thing. But I was there early one night, poking around the store just before they closed, and I found Dungeons and Drama, a YA romance about a high school drama student, Riley, who is forced to work in her father’s game store as […]

June 1, 2025

The Unfeeling Sky (Review)

was something like ten years old, visiting the Wright Patterson AFB museum. In the gift shop were a number of aviation novels (remember those quaint old days when people actually read?). Plucked this one off the shelf and loved it. So Frank Thompson is an infantry officer in World War One. While in the shitty, muddy trenches, he watches his childhood friend get shot down into no mans’ land, and the hun that does it comes back around and kills him. Thompson watches the German buzz away, noting his distinctive aircraft paint scheme. And then he joins the Royal Flying […]

June 8, 2025

To The Last Man (Review)

n interesting premise here. Jeff Shaara, a historian, writes a fictional account with real people, trying his best to tell the events of a war (this time, World War One) from the surmised point of view from some of the people who lived (and died) in it. For this novel, the author chose four people to represent various viewpoints – Rosco Temple (an American doughboy), John J. Pershing (his general), Manfred Von Richthofen (the “Red Baron”) and Raoul Lufbery (one of the early fliers in the Lafayette Escadrille, a French squadron of Americans). Other historic figures are also encountered, and […]