On the nightstand

he second-parter to the first book, Yukikazi, written some 20-30 years after the first by a master of Japanese scifi, Chohei Kambryash. If you haven’t read my first review, linked above, the Yukikaze universe is one of perpetual (at least, three decades) war. An unknown race, the JAM, pushed through a hyperspace gate over Antarctica and attacked us. So we pushed them back to the planet “Fairie” and established bases. So we’re in daily air combat against the JAM, both sides upping their technology. Yet we are left with questions: Just what are the JAM? And how can we trust […]

ou might know this one as Edge of Tomorrow. Or you might not. It was a pretty good flick (saw it last night) but, as is true with all books and movies, the book is soooo much better. In this Japanese SciFi story, alien nanotech falls into our oceans and spawn with various creatures to make “Mimics”, starfishy things that are nearly impossible to kill and attack en-mass. All we have to fight them are battle armor, and that isn’t much good – a squad’s gotta pour on firepower to kill just one of these things. But this isn’t Keiji […]

his one originated off some beautiful (but confusing) anime I’d viewed. Having just read All you need is Kill (which I only now realize I haven’t reviewed yet), I noticed on their website that two Yukikaze books were available. Okay, so I’d enjoyed Kill so much (Japanese scifi) that I figured I’d pick them up. Enough about me. Yukikaze  is about our world, fifteen minutes into the future. A strange hyperspace portal appears over Antarctica and out of it comes the JAM. We’ve only seen their fighters and bombers, never figured out who they were or what they are. The […]

ute little story this time, out of the 40’s or 50’s, again, a Gutenberg find. It’s a little scifi story about a tiny mistake in, of all things, a coffin factory. Seems that a computer slipped a bit and suddenly their stodgy production orders are boosted. The marketing director, seeing what’s coming (and finding all sorts of money in his department because of the glitch) blasts an advertising campaign out, creating a marketing feedback loop where demand fuels supply fuels demand fuels supply and so on. It’s a humorous look at super marketing (something I did in my own Early […]

o back we go into the past (to a book written in the 1880’s) about a future (say, 2100 or so), another one of these casually fun penny-dreadfuls, back from when science fiction was trying to figure where we were going with steam and chrome and a whole lot of Victorian virtue. The author, Mr. Jefferies, begins by describing the plants and animals and how they are coming back. Fields are vanishing. Roads are slowly being erased. In the silos, the grain rots are is devoured by plagues of rats. Everything is unwinding. Finally, we are given various hints as […]

ou can use it as a doorjamb. Or to block the wheel of your car while jacking it up. If you drop it off a three story building, you’d kill someone with it. It’s 1200 pages long. And it’s the latest of the KingKiller Chronicle. Day two. Bring it on! Once more we follow the adventures of young Kvothe, as narrated by old (well, middle-aged, but under the gloom of fate) Kvothe. For those who didn’t read my review of The Name of the Wind, it’s the story of an exceptional lad who is a consummate jack-of-all-trades. Possessing skills in […]

‘ve mentioned the Flashman series elsewhere, but I wanted to read the initial book over again (I’m about to loan it out to a literary friend and want to make sure I can talk about it correctly). Anyway, what the hell is this thing, anyway? Harry Flashman is a character from the old novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a windy old moralistic piece. The villain, the bully Flashman, really gave the work its shine (what a name, so classic!). And Fraser, the author, picks up Harry’s life from the moment he’s tossed out of school (recounting in his diary that he […]

mentioned in Dog Ear how I wasn’t going to review this. I then decided, what the hey, a book’s a book, right? This kinda came to light in a recent rough patch in the relationship (like YOU don’t have them). I mentioned that I have problems with a depression (and how to tell if your’s are extreme – they certainly feel extreme, don’t they?). So the book was pushed on me. I swallowed it like I would caster oil. Ugh. Just dry medical studies, cases proving the good doctor’s point, and little inter-psychology battles he faced. At first I didn’t […]

his one takes me back to my days in college. Back then, the world was certain to end in massive atomic warfare. And the world would grow from it, different and mutated. And the mutations would be quick, varied, and exotic. Yeah, that was our thought, anyway, before we had The Road to show us what it would really be like. Still, it was like opening the box for Gamma World again and rolling up an RPG character who was a two inch tiger with psyonic powers, this sense of a crazy post-holocaust world. Hiero is a priest in what […]

‘ve read this before. It’s Bookish Vu. A huge carrier force blasts it’s opponents on the approach to the Hawaiian islands. Pearl Harbor get’s flattened. A landing is made on the north side of the main island. The defenders do what they can to stop it but are largely swept away, in part because of their enemies’ air superiority. Then the last of the desperate fighting, the blood, the tears, all that. Where was that? Oh yeah – Days of Infamy, the first book to this two-parter. Then, it was the Japanese turn. So our cast of characters from the […]