City – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 30, 2020

The Lost City of Z (Review)

knew a girl, once, who dreamed of hiking across Brazil and the Amazon. If I still knew where she was, I’d send her this book if only to give her the relief of lost dreams. If you like outdoorsy things, backpacking and camping, you might find this book interesting. So, in the early part of the last century, the English were sending out explorers all over the globe, driven to fill in those blank spots on the map. You know, that whole “Dr. Livingston, I presume” stuff. And one of the most famous at the time was Percy Fawcett, a […]

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 […]

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 […]