Book Blog
February 28, 2021
his is the third book of the Old Man’s War series, a tale where John Perry and his resurrected (long story) wife Jane leave their happy colony home to establish a colony for the Colonial Union. Journeying to a planet named Roanoke (as terrible a colony name as that is), they quickly realize that (a) this is not the planet they were supposed to colonize, and (b) that the ship dropping them off is now disabled, and (c) they are under quarantine, and nobody knows where they are. It turns out that this is all Machiavellian moves to throw off […]
February 21, 2021
’d first heard of Lupin from the classic Japanese anime (and I do mean classic – it’s been running fifty years) – Lupin III. There, the main character, a master thief, claims he was the grandson of Arsene Lupin, whoever that was. Then there was the very recent series on Netflix, Lupin, where a modern French thief raves about “the Lupin books”. Well, you all know how I am with literary threads like this – I gotta unravel them. So into Project Gutenberg I went, poking around. And yes, there was a Lupin, a thief very popular in French magazine […]
February 14, 2021
kay, no mistaking this – Drone is one of those male fantasy books. Troy Pearce, our main character, is the CEO of Pearce Systems, a company that makes and flies drones for all circumstances including whale tracking and political assassinations. He apparently spends his time up in a cabin, running his company with occasional online meetings and mostly chopping wood (with his shirt off). His officers are all eclectic individuals who do their own research from various beaches around the world. No TPS reports. No budgets. No investor meetings. Everyone is sexy and provocative and perfect. The villains are pretty […]
February 7, 2021
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 […]
January 30, 2021
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 […]
January 24, 2021
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 17, 2021
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 10, 2021
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 3, 2021
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 […]
December 27, 2020
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 […]