Book Blog
March 29, 2026
oddamn, but I loved this book. We start with a down-on-his luck hero who is wandering a spaceport, scruffy, worlds-worn, looking for any sort of ship work if only to get passage to move along. A ship opens up for him. He goes in, calling “Hello…. Hello?” and suddenly the door slams shut and an AI bot starts talking to him. Frightened, scared, he tries to get the lock open and suddenly it does, to reveal the crew of the Ambit, a merc-looking guy and a tufnut female engineer. But the merc the drifter knows and freaks, trying to make a […]
March 15, 2026
he Japanese love cat stories, specially ones that deal with cats interacting and improving their owners. And this book is nothing short of that. Kyoto (as I remember from my trip there) is a town arranged in a neat grid, everything lined up nicely. Further, there is the old geisha quarter just across the river, still active. So, interesting place. What I didn’t know is that is an alley that can only be located if you really need to locate it, one that leads to a run-down building. At the top of five flights of stairs, a large door. Go […]
March 8, 2026
ong time John Scalzi fan, from Old Man’s War to Redshirts to Starter Villain. So when my best friend (and fellow Scalzi fan) told me about this book, I had to immediately say… “What?” Okay, so stay with me. One day, for reasons not given or even hinted, the moon changes… to cheese. It is first noticed in various museums and lunar rock storage areas, where now all they have are lumps of cheese. But it is quickly noticed in the sky – so as not to throw off the tides and wreck havoc, the moon is much bigger (since the mass of cheese […]
March 1, 2026
he Warrior is a David Drake novel, following along in the tank tracks (not correct, since they are hovertanks) of the feared and respected Hammers Slammers, a mercenary tank battalion in the far future. I’ve mentioned a couple of novels from this series, including the titular Hammers Slammers. The thing is, the author is a combat veteran and it shows in the novels. People don’t question, don’t ponder life’s strange events, they simply act. And the tanks they act in are the largest and most dangerous machines in the galaxy. As witness in the three short stories that make up the central […]
February 22, 2026
icked this up at a used bookstore in Norfolk on my sister’s store credit (which I cleared out). The cover is interesting – a young boy and some sort of ratty tiger robot looking out over ruined skyscrapers. So when she asked if she could borrow it from me, I pretty much had to agree. But she only got about halfway through before dropping it (she drops easier than I do). “Wasn’t for me,” she explained. So C. Robert Cargill’s novel, Zero Day, is a story about a young boy and his nanny robot that looks like a tiger, who suddenly […]
February 8, 2026
ell, this was a strange way to find a lost story. Was watching an Anime (it wasn’t that good) and in it, the idea of airlocking someone comes up. One of the characters makes a crack about The Cold Equations. I have to admit I was curious and found it online – it’s a scifi from Tom Godwin, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1954. And that made me dizzy – think about it. A lost story from before I was born ends up noticed in Japan, where it gets a shout out in an anime, which comes back to me through […]
January 4, 2026
hen the novel Wizenbeak came out, you’d probably walk into any mall, look through the one or two bookstores housed there, go to the fantasy section which was greater than the current Barnes and Noble, pick through the many selections and buy it (likely with cash). That’s a period piece of when this book was released (1986, currently forty years ago). Well, most books either come from Massive Amazon, pathetic B&N, or, in this case, a used bookstore. But enough of that. The titular character of this book is a wizard, complete with a troll-bat, who wishes to use his own water […]