Book Blog
April 24, 2022
anguard is the lead-off book for the third cycle in the Ark Royal series. First we had the supper carrier that pulled Space Battleship Yamato stuff with an evil race that boiled out of the black at us. And then we had Warspite, the experimental cruiser with the heavy plasma gun that fought the Indian nation in the colony worlds and blasted and Indian carrier. And now we have Vanguard, the first Earth battleship, built strong and built to last. But will that be enough? Our story opens with yet another alien race discovered. Without knowing anything, Earth sends a […]
April 17, 2022
nother quick review out of the Memory’s Legion collection of Expanse tales. This one concerns Fred Johnson, Soldier for Earth who ended up as levelheaded spokesman for the Belt, running Tycho Station and repurposing the Mormon’s generation ship out from under them (and, good for that since it turns out they would have been literally wasting the time of generations). So there is a side story about Johnson, how he was involved in a massacre on a belter station. As I remember, the show has the belters attempting to surrender and Fred ordering them in. Well, it wasn’t quite like […]
April 10, 2022
ound this in our little corner bookshop, an old textbook which i stained with coffee and Tabasco as I read it over many mornings at Juniors. But it’s a fascinating and very detailed account of the development of the steamboat. And if you think that Robert Fulton did it all alone in some sort of vacuum of engineering, no, he didn’t. When you think about it, the steamboat was one of the most technologically amazing crafts men of the time could envision. Think about it – America had just gotten through its revolution. The wilderness still besieged the coastal seaboards. […]
April 3, 2022
his one comes from the collection of short stories in The Expanse universe, all balled together in Memory’s Legion. It’s a collection of all the short stories and novellas the two writers who make up “James S.A Corey” have published in various platforms. But I’d not wanted to buy them for a device – I wanted paper. And now, thank God, I’ve got it! So Drive is the story behind Solomon Epstein and the creation of his ship drive that allows humans to spread out across the solar system in an easy and economic way (and not the months and […]
March 27, 2022
can’t say I’m a fan of author Elizabeth Bear. I reviewed her recently in Undertow. It was an interesting-enough book, but either it the whole thing was too esoteric for me or it was the middle of a series and I didn’t realize it or whatever – it was good enough to finish but not enough for me to totally enjoy (and this isn’t a critique about Ms. Bear – sometimes readers and writers don’t match). So, that’s my prequel. Right now I’m plowing through a history of steamboats (does that whet your interest, dear reader?) and I had nothing […]
March 20, 2022
n interesting little scifi tale about a post-corporate Earth where the environment is screwed for good, where rich whites live in their pristine city and beyond the walls, in Ashtown, all the poor people of color live in their dangerous squalor. But this Earth is a bit special – it is one of many Earths, various parallel universes with minor changes, over a hundred of them we can detect. But not only can we detect them – we can travel to them Sorta. You see, if you do exist on that parallel Earth, if you haven’t yet died, you’ll get […]
March 13, 2022
‘m aware of Burrow Press, the local literary core for Orlando. They produce a number of books for this market, very local. You almost get the idea that deals are made in coffeehouses, and discoveries are made on poetry reading nights. Yes, I’ve read a number of their books, and enjoyed them, in general. Other Orlandos was an ambitious idea – publish short stories that involved Orlandos outside the city of Orlando, be it places, people or whatever. Okay. To me, I have an attachment to place more than to name but I gave it a try anyway. There were […]
February 27, 2022
ut front with my thoughts, the book is as difficult to read as Old Yeller. But in this case, we’re not seeing the death of an old dog but rather our democracy. Peril, written by Woodward and Costa (two political writers with the chops to drill into this), looks at the final year of the Trump administration, the election, and the first year of Biden’s administration. In that, it reads like a slow car wreck, with Trump poo-pooing the virus, demanding corners to be cut to get it to market before the election, the “steal”, the moaning and carping when […]
February 20, 2022
id you know that psychopaths do not yawn, at least not when you do? And that all those screams you hear in movies – those aren’t the actors themselves but actually come from licensed recordings, used and used and used again, hundreds of times? Chuck Palahniuk, whom you might remember from Fight Club, recently dropped The Invention of Sound onto bookshop shelves. I found my copy in a curbside library (possibly thrust there by a reader with less literary constitution than I have). And I’m going to tell you up straight – The Invention of Sound is one of the […]