Book Blog
December 15, 2024
n popular culture, aliens are presented as either destructive pricks or bulb-headed benefactors. But what if they were fun-loving little creatures who love our greasy food, our discarded plastic, and above and beyond, our wasteland of television. This novel, written by Emily Jane, is a delightful story of aliens nosing around Earth, placing agents among us, controlling our cats, and generally being goofy and funny. Told from humans (who might be humans, but maybe not) the story starts with a dis-unified collective of characters and slowly works out their bonds and origins, explaining the oddball situations in ways that delight. […]
December 8, 2024
his is an interesting work on Alexander the Great. His adventures, driving across the known world and beyond, are the things that (used to) thrill the imaginations of schoolboys (back when they had imaginations). But the interesting aspect of this work is that it doesn’t do his entire life, not his youth, his father’s assassination (mentioned as an afterthought). And not (as I would have loved) the siege of Tyre. No, this is about his later campaign. It starts with him in Persepolis, with Darius III on the run and his primary objective (stated as revenge against the Persians, but […]
December 1, 2024
n interesting little time war story. It starts off with an operative from a future world who is trying to shape the destiny of the universe to suit her masters. She is pacing through the ruins of a titanic battlefield, scattered with space ships, tanks and corpses, surveying the carnage and pretty proud of herself. And then she finds an envelope labeled, curiously, Burn Before Reading. Inside, she finds a short letter from a counterpart of this time war, a playfully sneering letter from her nemesis. Of course, the two are heavily monitored and watched by their respective commands so […]
November 24, 2024
o what can I tell you about this series I haven’t yet? The way keeps expanding. We learn more about the League of Tripoli (the alternate fascists in the Mediterranean). And more about that maniac Kurokawa (the Japanese cruiser captain that chased USS Walker through the portal and into this crazy world). And all the crazy crap that’s been going on. The Japanese are playing for time. The Grik are expanding towards another mega invasion fleet. The League is up to no good. The Republic of Free People in South Africa finally got their thumbs out of their asses and got […]
November 17, 2024
o the creators of The Expanse series have closed it out and moved on to a new series. Or did they? The Expanse ended with (spoiler) the ring gates closing and hundreds of colony worlds cut off. Most of them were not established and probably died off. So in The Mercy of Gods, it’s loosely hinted that the humans on this world can find records of their DNA existence, including themselves, animals and plants (alongside more indigenous animals and plants with their own form of DNA). Records were, of course, lost. Nobody knows how they got there but it hints […]
November 10, 2024
kay, so back in the seventies, I really loved Alan Dean Foster’s stories. They were funny and exciting and great reads. And now I picked up one that’s a half century old, Icerigger. Of course, the question is, how does it keep up with modern scifi? Not StarWars either, but adult series like The Expanse. So in Icerigger, a passenger liner is making a stop at a colony world, one totally covered in a sea of ice. During ship’s night (as they orbit in) the main character, a merchant named Ethan Fortune, comes across a kidnapping in progress. The inept […]
November 3, 2024
companion book to a wild breakout novel, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, this book picks up a couple of months after the completion of the first one. Of course, you might have thought that the siege was broken in the first book, but no, that’s never mentioned and the barbarian leader Ogus, outside the battered walls, still wants everyone in the city dead (gruesomely). So this time, our story comes from an actor of plays and a playwright (he publishes them like he’s grinding sausages) named Notker. His other skills include witty impersonations of political figures. So he’s […]
October 20, 2024
hat makes this a creepy read is that Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) wrote this in 2018, two years before the real-world insurrection, and it’s yet as chilling and disturbing as our own. The story takes place with a wide collection of characters (hint: write them down so as not to be confused) with most of them involved in the overthrow. Working off an online unpopularity list of political and public figures, Adjustment Day finds the various state houses filled with machine gun toting radicals, who quickly kill off pretty much everyone on that list. To get credit for doing it, […]
October 13, 2024
‘ve always thought of writing a semi-fictional book about World War One aviation. I realized there is far more to know than just the planes. Did pilots use zippers or buttons on their flies? Did they drink coffee (could the Germans even get coffee by 1918?). What was the slang, the thoughts, even the haircuts. Think about your own life and the number of little items in it – now imagine trying to write a compelling story at some level of detail. In the end, I still love flying so I wrote a book about crows, an excellent book that […]
October 6, 2024
ou might remember me mentioning this, how I got interested in this book, only to find out that I already had it on the stacks. Amusing story HERE! So Jon Winokur wrote this 1987, a book which look on the art of being a curmudgeon and what societal role we play (I use the “we” form here – is there any doubt that I’m not a get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon). Of course, the Okay Boomer crowd sees it this way. To them, they are superior to us, what with their ability to speed and tailgate (with their parent’s insurance close at hand), […]