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Book Blog

May 24, 2020

The Blank Shot (Review)

’m running slow on my reading these days (this week’s DOG EAR will address that). I’m nowhere near finishing my current book. But on Saturday lunch, I pulled out a favorite book from a favorite author, Rafael Sabatini, a tale from the follow-up collection of short stories detailing the adventure of that most urbane pirate, Captain Blood. In The Blank Shot, we pick up the thread of our Irish captain’s narrative just after he stole the massive Cinco Llagas in in first book. His crew really still don’t know him and are prone to second-guessing him. And there are only […]
May 17, 2020

A Dove against Death (Review)

remember reading this book on the return flight after my first solo overseas adventure to England in the early eighties. And I distinctly remember thinking (as I closed the cover while we descended into ORL) two words: African Queen. So in this book, set in the same time and place (1914, Africa) as Queen, three English soldiers, the survivors of an attack on a German base with now-discovered radio capacity to direct ships all about the Southern Atlantic, attempt an escape. And it’s running and horses and a stick-up-his-ass German commander with a Quasimodo sergeant sidekick in hot pursuit. And […]
May 10, 2020

Invasion (Review)

his one was an old hardback from the shelves the cats selected for me by knocking it to the floor. Gave the dust a blow and thought, “Man, I haven’t read this in literal ages.” Yeah, it’s copyrighted 1980, so it’s as far from me today as it was from World War Two when it was written. Anyway, it was penned (probably, given the date) by Major Kenneth Macksey, MC (Retired), who spent twenty-seven years in tanks. So he knows his shit. This one is an alternate history study, a look at what would have happened if the Germans, looking […]
May 3, 2020

Fire and Bronze (Review)

kay, I might be a little biased on this. After all, I literally wrote the book. But I’ll do my best to give you an honest assessment. Fire and Bronze is the story of Princess Elisha of Tyre (a city on an island that used to be off Lebanon (as for why it no longer is, refer to my own Early Retirement)). At a young age her father the king passes and she ends up in a power struggle against her brother for the throne of Tyre (and her very survival). She opposes him with her own power faction, noble […]
April 26, 2020

Infernal Devices (Review)

ook three of the Mortal Engines series, a great twist to an interesting furture-screwed world where cities roam about on their wheels and tracks, devouring each other, and the planet has become a strange place indeed. So Anna Fang, aviatrix from the first book, has now been remade into a stalker – a mechanically animated corpse (a shame too, since I liked her). She (or it) has been leading the Green Storm, a strange spinoff from the original Anti-Traction movement she was involved in, now more of an eco-militaristic  force. And she and the mobile cities are fighting it out […]
April 19, 2020

Velocity Weapon (Review)

ot this in withdraw after ripping through Book 8 of The Expanse. Was in the mood for a new space series and this looked promising. So it starts pretty hardcore. Biran is graduating into the Keepers, a monkish organization who control the galaxy-spanning gate system and who have chips with gate design specifications installed in their heads. At the same time, his sister Sanda is leading her gunship squadron against the warlike Icarions, the inner-planet fascists who are rebelling against the Keepers with a total system conflict. But her ship is grievously destroyed, her pod deploys and is ejected into […]
April 12, 2020

Never, Never, Times Three Never (Review)

he where this story comes from – The End – is a collection of the best the late and much missed Jurassic Press had to offer. I loved their books, have a number of originals (with book number stamps) and had submitted to their contests (nearly made it). The End was their swan song, their going-out-of-business, best-of collection. This short story is from their collection (and more on the strange realization in a bit). This story takes place in a dystopian England, a place where supposedly nukes have detonated, civilization has fallen apart, and London is a walled city where, […]
April 5, 2020

The Dog Who Could Fly (Review)

kay, this one is a true story – Robert Bozdech, a Czech air gunner, is now flying with the French in 1939. The cold war is rapidly heating and while on a low-level reconnaissance run , German machine gunners shoot him and his pilot down in no man’s land between France and Germany. In a ruined farmhouse, they find a German Sheppard puppy. Robert almost leaves it behind (after he feeds the shivering, half-starved furball a bit of chocolate), but its pathetic howls bring him back. Tucking the dog into his jacket, they manage to make it back to French […]
March 29, 2020

The Sky Lords (Review)

nother one out of my molding book files, dating back to 1988, so good luck finding it. The Sky Lords deals with a world a couple of hundred years following the ‘Gene Wars’. Much of the world is covered in fungus growth or crazy designer monsters that have gotten out of control. Humanity is pretty much down to two classes – the people rooting out a living in walled cities and the Sky Lords, the privileged riding about in their high tech airships – the later praying on the former. And our story starts just as a matriarchal Minervan town […]
March 22, 2020

The Lives of Tao (Review)

kay, so the idea here is that an alien ship crashed here millions of years ago. The aliens are gaseous creatures who cannot live long in our air but can enter into living things (but once they do, they are stuck until death). They cannot really directly control those creatures but can speak to them using the magic of italic fonts. And with the rise of humans, now they have a chance to shape our race to their liking, to influence us to greater heights (and along the way, to build them a starship to return home). Kinda odd, right? […]