Book Blog
November 27, 2022
icked this one from the best stocked used bookstore I know, my favorites shelf in my Florida Room. This was one of Roger Zelazny’s best, written all the way back in 1970 (while I was a tiny creature). I picked it up sometime in the early eighties, reading it in college and loving every page. So it’s been forty years and there I am looking for a book and there is my five volume set. And the book series, it really holds up. Written in that era when Fantasy was in the wake of the Lord of the Rings, when […]
November 20, 2022
o this one is a steampunk western. With magic. It’s even got an airship in there. Did we leave any genres out? And I love the tag line on the book “America was built on blood, sweet, and gears.” Very cute. So our hero protagonist in this thing is a loner-drifter guy up in the NorthWest in the 1870s or so with a bit of a backstory. You see, Cedar Hunt is a werewolf. And it’s that high-moon-riding time of the month. A boy has gone missing and Cedar wants to find him. The problem is, he’s got to find […]
November 13, 2022
od, I wish I’d had this book before programming TUSK tower, my computer-driven interlocking tower on my Tuscarora Branch Line railroad. More on that in a bit. So, Interlocking Towers are those control-tower-looking-structures you used to see along railroad lines. They came about because sending crews scrambling about in the middle of the night, in the rain, to align a route for the express sometimes ended up with hard feelings and smoldering causalities. Interlocking Towers were the computers of their era (from the 1880s to the 1960s). The operator, standing in his high perch, would use long levers to set […]
November 6, 2022
have to say this, but if you are an Ark Royal series fan and have not read this book yet (the 13th in the series), well, SPOILERS AHEAD. So we discovered in the last book that a virus has corrupted at least three races and is eager to add more to its fold. That generation ship that came into human space and was allowed to land on a colony world was lousy with viruses.Yes, we think it was contained but there are some freighters that called on the world are missing. And now HMS Invincible has been assigned a small […]
October 30, 2022
his book came to me through sad circumstances. One of our train club members passed away a while ago and his widow asked if we’d like his train books. What I didn’t know is that there would be two eight-foot shelves packed with books. It took three trips in a loaded Jetta to get them to the club (and yes, club members, I’ll pay for them). Anyway, the guy I was lugging loads with pointed this one out to me – Railroad Signalling by Brian Solomon. Now, I’ve gotten model railroad books about signalling that were kinda meh – all […]
October 23, 2022
an you believe it? I’m already at book twelve of the Ark Royal series! Anyway, true to author Christopher Nuttall’s usual way of doing things, we get a three book set with the latest British hull/class in spaceships. This time, it’s the Invincible, and England is trying to see how fast attack carriers (armored, and with fighters and big guns) will work. So, shortly after its shakedown cruise, Invincible is sent to a listening station at the edge of human space. So we’ve had Pearl Harbor alien contacts, Indian history alien contacts, straight out warfare with alien contacts, but this […]
October 16, 2022
his book, Zoe’s Tale, is the fourth book (and opener for the second 3-part set) of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series.Now, I’ll tell you that I loved the first set, the entire idea that when you get older, you can trade your old broken-down body (trust me on this – regardless of all the exercise and diet you work on, it still breaks down) and get a new body. The trouble is, this new super-body is yours if you work for the Colonial Defense Forces and fight for years. And never come back to Earth. Once you are all […]
October 2, 2022
guess I’ve been in a World War Two mindset these days. Saw Jeff Shaara’s The Rising Tide in one of those curbside libraries and it caught my eye. I’ve never read any of Shaara’s books and even though this is book one of three (and since it’s a used book, it’s doubtful I’ll stumble over the other two like this), I decided to give it a try. So The Rising Tide has an interesting premise – the author fictionalizes history just a bit, telling the stories of WW2 from the battles in North Africa to the Torch invasion to Sicily […]
September 25, 2022
hort story this time (since I’m deep in a World War 2 fictionalization right now), located in The Year’s Best Science Fictions Volume 2 (and Volume 1 brought me so much enjoyment). First story in the set, A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, was a crazy begining. This tale does a great job of unconventional storytelling – specifically email exchanges and purchases between a couple of robots. We have Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1- 09030) who has just come online and has been assigned a mentor bot – namely Constant Killer (C.k2-00425). The exchanges are funny and help define […]
September 18, 2022
n interesting idea for a book, a feminized version of The Magnificent Seven set in a scifi space opera. But instead of poor Japanese peasants or poor Mexican farmers, this time it’s an unknown alien culture that is hidden away in a planet where the only spaceport is surrounded by poisonous plants and dangerous animals, artificially placed by the indigenous race to contain the humans. But even as I write this, it feels awfully thin – nobody ever dropped so much as a probe elsewhere to confirm if the rest of the planet is such a hellhole? And the aliens […]