Book Blog
May 10, 2020
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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? […]
March 15, 2020
ot this one for the wife a Christmas or so ago, a little romance chick-licky story about a fifty-year old somewhat sexy but inwardly dead guy who sells books from a boat on the Seine River in Paris, who lives a zombie life, who has an empty room in his apartment he hasn’t gone into, and who gave a table from said room to his sexy but equally extinguished female neighbor which came from that reluctantly breached room, and who forgot about the letter in the table from the woman who broke his heart and left twenty years past. Yes, […]
March 8, 2020
picked this one up at that Madeira Beech bookstore I mentioned in another review. The cover shows New York, but if you think about the name of the book and look closely, you’ll see that a lot of the forefront buildings are actually standing in water (with boats moving about them). So yes, this is a tale of what it’s like to live in the Big Apple when it becomes the Big Sea Grape in a century and a half. Global warming a reality. The result of our sins. And actually, New York has largely recovered. Where streets were once, […]