Book Blog – Page 68 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

September 7, 2025

Embers of War (Review)

kay, it’s the reader’s osculation, I suppose, for lack of a better phrase. You read a bad book and limp to the conclusion, then follow it with a good book, which becomes a delight (perhaps, in no small part, by comparison). But after limping through a mediocre book, I hit on Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War and suddenly I have a book I found myself making time for. This story is told from various points of view and begins when five battle cruisers (the Trouble Dog among them – they form a pack of human/canine stem-celled AI to control their ships) […]

September 14, 2025

Tuf Voyaging (Review)

‘d hung onto this book since 1986, given how I remembered enjoying it. And only when I located it again during the great termite disaster of ’25 did I realize that the author was none other than George R.R. Martin, famed for his “Game of Thrones” series. What did I remember? That cats. So this series of short stories begins with Haviland Tuf, a huge, hairless and chalk-white man of refined vegetarian tastes, aboard his tramp freighter (of the starship variety) with two cats (who are rare in this future galaxy). His current job is to ferry a number of […]

September 28, 2025

My Friends (Review)

o this is for you Ove fans (for you “Otto” fans, shush, the grownups are talking). My Friends is (as hinted at) is written by Fredrik Bachman, author of A Man Called Ove (a personal favorite). And in it, the author hits another one out of the park. My Friends begins with a troubled young girl moving through an art show, moving slowly towards a certain painting, a massively expensive one. With cans of spray paint in her backpack and determination in her eye, she slips past the rich people, ducks under the rope and …. See how this one […]

October 5, 2025

Son of the Morning (Review)

don’t know where this one came from – might have been from the bookstore up in Norfolk I go to every so often, Anyway, the picture on the cover sold me – two cats flying a spaceship. Okay, so I’m a sucker for that. The author is one Phyllis Gotlieb, who wrote this collection of shorts back in 1981 or so. And two things I immediately picked up on. The first is that she’s riding that 2001 mystical space scifi wave, where nothing is clear and some of the meanings and resolutions are baffling. There is even poetry in there […]

October 11, 2025

Starter Villain (Review)

veryone has that dream that a rich uncle you barely knew you had dies and leaves you with something. Well, Charlie is a sad little guy, a booted business reporter turned substitute teacher, living in his late father’s house until his siblings from an earlier marriage can get him turfed. All he wants to do is buy and run the pub his dad enjoyed so much but without any credit, he’s sunk. But then his uncle dies. And it turns out his uncle is … a villain. Not just a bad guy but a Bond-class villain. The whole thing – […]