Long – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

November 15, 2020

The Long Fall (Review)

’m currently plowing through a large 1907 drama, at lease a week out on that one. As a side-issue, I’ve been reading The Sam Gunn Omnibus, a huge collection of Ben Bova stories about his spaceman hero, Sam Gunn. I don’t think I’ve ever read any of these (or I may have in some long-forgotten collection perhaps). Either way, the stories are great – short and sweet and funny. So Sam Gunn is an astronaut. Unlike your usual hero, Sam is short, not that handsome, and loud. He’s just a bit of a nutball poised in the position to be […]

January 9, 2022

Fight for your Long Day (Review)

picked this one up on the fly from a used bookstore just around the corner, a tiny epic about an adjunct instructor teaching in Philadelphia who is living an ironic life – being a collage-educated professional making less that a bartender, with no health insurance or safety net thanks to the income inequities so common everywhere in America (and the globalized world) these days. I’m kinda torn on this. Parts of it I just loved (one of them I quoted in a recent DOG EAR). At it’s best, Fight for your Long Day spoke to me as Snow Crash and […]

July 13, 2023

After words (DOG EAR)

‘m not going to be specific on this event, lest someone spots the post and knows exactly who I am talking about. Be that as it may, my wife and I attend a class every week. It can be pretty difficult but afterwards we reward ourselves and walk across the street to get a pizza. We need to move fast since we finish at 8pm and the joint closes at 9pm. Of course, the waiter knows us so we cut down a lot of ordering time. Thing is, for this class, we had a visiting “export” who always likes to […]

June 16, 2024

A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Review)

nother Norfolk used bookstore find (someone tossed it, to my gain). The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a tale about a tunnel ship (that makes the warp paths other ships can use. In this universe, a divided human race (after our planet’s collapse there were those who stayed in system, and those who joined a refugee fleet) finds itself as members of the Galactic Commons, a sort of UN in space sort of thing. Rosemary Harper has signed up on Wayfarer to be their ship’s clerk. But she has a history, something she is hiding. But the […]