James – Page 2 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

September 29, 2024

The Garner Files (Review)

‘m a little late to the party here. The Rockford Files played while I was in junior high and college, and that was D&D night so I never caught them. I do know that in my final year at Va Tech, my roomate watched these things and curious, I watched over his shoulder. I still carried an interest in this show for, what, forty years? Thus, in retirement, I took time to watch the series on Roku (which shows dedication, since it runs with lousy commercials that are no longer fun to dissect the tenth time around). Anyway, Garner plays […]

November 17, 2024

The Mercy of Gods (Review)

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 […]

February 9, 2025

Panzer (Review)

o we all have our images of Germany’s original push, the blitzkrieg, with well-run German tanks superior in technology and tactics to every nation they faced. Right? Well, as Matthew Cooper and James Lucas lay out in this 1976 book, no, not quite. The two authors make a pretty good case, showing how the successful (yet too little, too late) infiltration tactics of World War One led to the ideal of total mechanized warfare. You punch through a weak point. You drive hard, cutting communications and command, and rout the enemy. It’s how cavalry used to be used. And the […]