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Book Blog

August 25, 2024

The Sudden Star (Review)

o the last time I went back to sci fi in the eighties, it didn’t play out so well for me. I didn’t enjoy it and gave it up at the midpoint. It was simply a dead horse. But in the same purchase, I’d picked up The Sudden Star by Pamela Sargent. Okay, so the premise here is that there are “white holes” (what black holes feed into (look, everyone in 1979 was all excited about black holes. They’d captured the imagination of the public back then. Even Disney cashed in), So we find Earth overlooked by this new star, […]
August 18, 2024

If Cats Disappeared From The World (Review)

his short little Japanese novel starts with a down-on-his-luck postman shuffling through a useless life, that is, until his doctor tells him he’s got a tumor and only weeks, maybe, to live. That would be a lot to take in. Whats more to take is the next day, when the devil appears and makes an offer  – if this doomed man agrees to it, the devil will remove one thing from our world. For each removed thing, the man gains a day. Okay, so the first thing is cell phones to which the man agrees. The next day on the […]
August 11, 2024

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (Review)

o image there is a “Roman” sort of empire, with a huge city and a privileged founding race (literally blue-skinned), an empire that spans most of the known world. Imagine you are a white-skinned “barbarian” who has elevated himself to a position of commanding a regiment of engineers – and hey, you like just building bridges. You also are a smart-ass and a realist with a touch of mild Tourettes. And then your content life of engineering and problem-solving is upset when you realize that a massive army has been moving around inside the borders of this empire. It has […]
August 4, 2024

Destroyermen 11: Blood in the Water (Review)

kay, we’ll start with the question I always ask at the end of Destroyermen reviews – where do the reptilian Grik get all their shit? The bad guys in the story (and the author) have been hinting that the Grik (and the crazy Japanese emperor-wannabe, Kurokawa) had a big surprise for the heroes off the east coast of Africa. And (spoilers ahead) did they ever – hundreds of planes. Three carriers. Working torpedoes. Where did they get all this shit? The thing that always makes me wince in these books is the fact that they don’t have railroads. Materials seem […]
July 28, 2024

A Closed and Common Orbit (Review)

his is a very loose followup to A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chamber’s breakout novel. I was very surprised to see the direction she took this – rather than stay with the ship Wayfarer and the interesting characters she’d developed, she went a totally different and interesting direction – centering on Pepper (the mech they brushed up against earlier in the story) and the newly rebooted (i.e. personality-dead) ship’s AI who needed to be removed from the ship. I was like where are we going with this? With a touch of but I liked the old […]
July 21, 2024

The Aquanaut (Review)

n interesting graphic novel by Dan Santat. It starts in a storm-tossed sea, where a ship is well into danger of sinking. It is a ship engaged in oceanographic research (specifically, animals) and its master goes down with it. In his dying moment, a hermit crab with a soda can for a shell comes to him and touches him in the fashion of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Somehow the creatures (the hermit plus his other little friends) gain sentience. Meanwhile, we cut to the master’s daughter Sophia, a young girl hanging around the expedition’s base, a failing park named Aqualand. […]
July 14, 2024

Night on the Galactic Railroad (Review)

his is an interesting collection of the works of Kenji Miyazawa, the son of a Japanese pawnbroker who wrote in the early 1900s. His stories and interesting mixes of astronomy and whimsy, tales of troubled heroes under starry skies. My favorite, one of the oddest of the bunch, is the story of Signal and Signal-less, a tale of lovers separated by an insurmountable distance of a hundred yards. You see, “Signal” is a train signal on a modern main line, while “Signal-less” is a signal on a nearby branch line. They are both rooted in their spots but can only […]
July 7, 2024

Monstrous Regiment (Review)

o yes, this was the book I gave to the young girl with the hankering for female-orientated fantasy, as detailed HERE. In this Terry Pratchett Diskworld novel, the small, pious and stupid country of Borogravia has declared was on just about everyone. They block the roads and burn down the Clack towers. And this state of endless “police actions” have depopulated much of their country of fine young men and produced many widows. Young Polly works in her father’s tavern yet she wonders about her brother who marched off to war just last year. There were one or two heavily […]
June 30, 2024

Queen City Jazz (Review)

o this is a story about a young girl in a world where nanotech ran amuck, where cities are now haves of nanotech, constantly building themselves anew, ever expanding, and infecting the humans around them with strange new personalities and improvements. And like Dorothy being drawn to the Emerald City (not “like” but rather “exactly”), a young farm girl brings her dead boyfriend and dead dog, preserved in status, to this place to see if she can possibly revive them (so that’s “Brain” and “Heart”, I guess). And I know that author Kathleen Ann Goonan went on to even greater […]
June 23, 2024

The Sins of our Fathers (Review)

ell, like fine wine, I’ve been saving the Memory’s Legion collection by James S.A. Corey to enjoy, sip by sip. And I just finished the last glass with The Sin of our Fathers. This collection was a great set of stories that acted as prequels and sequels to the popular Expanse series. In each, a character from the massive set is exampled in an often-new light, showing where he or she came from and where they ended. And in this final story, we find out what happened to Filip Nagata, the tug-of-war son between Naomi and Marco (who was the maniac […]