Review – Page 13 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 30, 2022

A Savage War of Peace (Review)

s you’ll recall, in the original book of this Ark Royal spin-off, Warspite, the crew of this experimental cruiser found a planet Vesy, which Russian defectors (who’d fled the initial crushing battle against the then enemy race, the Tadpoles, had settled on). Using it as a pirate base, they’ve been raiding shipping for supplies (and women) and slowly corrupting the indigenous people. Things heat up in this book, sub-titled as Warspite II. The indigenous race on Vesy live in small city states. Everything is about war, about knocking off rival cities and forming your own little empire. So since it’s […]

February 6, 2022

A Small Colonial War (Review)

o you’ll remember how in A Savage War of Peace, the Nation of India grabbed up the world of Vesy and forced the Great Powers out. Well, this book involves the second part of their plans. Moving their fleet (and two carriers quickly), they seize two British colonies and stall on the diplomatic front. Yes, where Warspite II mimicked the English conquest of India, Warpspite III is the Falklands War. The Warspite joins the force to take back one of the two colonies, it being thought that a short and decisive naval battle will end this thing. But the Indians […]

February 13, 2022

Bait and Switch (Review)

n the mid-nineties, I got fired from a job. The company blamed me to shield their nepotistic connections and even denied my benefits by perjuring themselves in arbitration. It stunned me how petty and retributionist they were. After four months of pointless looking, I found work on a furniture van and decided never to go back to the corporate world. But I had two more interviews to do. And, of course, I got them both (and went with contracting at Nasa). This directly led to my twenty year stint at an international transport company, a job I enjoyed and was […]

February 20, 2022

The Invention of Sound (Review)

id you know that psychopaths do not yawn, at least not when you do? And that all those screams you hear in movies – those aren’t the actors themselves but actually come from licensed recordings, used and used and used again, hundreds of times? Chuck Palahniuk, whom you might remember from Fight Club, recently dropped The Invention of Sound onto bookshop shelves. I found my copy in a curbside library (possibly thrust there by a reader with less literary constitution than I have). And I’m going to tell you up straight – The Invention of Sound is one of the […]

February 27, 2022

Peril (Review)

ut front with my thoughts, the book is as difficult to read as Old Yeller. But in this case, we’re not seeing the death of an old dog but rather our democracy. Peril, written by Woodward and Costa (two political writers with the chops to drill into this), looks at the final year of the Trump administration, the election, and the first year of Biden’s administration. In that, it reads like a slow car wreck, with Trump poo-pooing the virus, demanding corners to be cut to get it to market before the election, the “steal”, the moaning and carping when […]

March 13, 2022

Other Orlandos (Review)

‘m aware of Burrow Press, the local literary core for Orlando. They produce a number of books for this market, very local. You almost get the idea that deals are made in coffeehouses, and discoveries are made on poetry reading nights. Yes, I’ve read a number of their books, and enjoyed them, in general. Other Orlandos was an ambitious idea – publish short stories that involved Orlandos outside the city of Orlando, be it places, people or whatever. Okay. To me, I have an attachment to place more than to name but I gave it a try anyway. There were […]

March 20, 2022

The Space Between Worlds (Review)

n interesting little scifi tale about a post-corporate Earth where the environment is screwed for good, where rich whites live in their pristine city and beyond the walls, in Ashtown, all the poor people of color live in their dangerous squalor. But this Earth is a bit special – it is one of many Earths, various parallel universes with minor changes, over a hundred of them we can detect. But not only can we detect them – we can travel to them Sorta. You see, if you do exist on that parallel Earth, if you haven’t yet died, you’ll get […]

March 27, 2022

Soft Edges (Review)

can’t say I’m a fan of author Elizabeth Bear. I reviewed her recently in Undertow. It was an interesting-enough book, but either it the whole thing was too esoteric for me or it was the middle of a series and I didn’t realize it or whatever – it was good enough to finish but not enough for me to totally enjoy (and this isn’t a critique about Ms. Bear – sometimes readers and writers don’t match). So, that’s my prequel. Right now I’m plowing through a history of steamboats (does that whet your interest, dear reader?) and I had nothing […]

April 10, 2022

Steamboats Come True (Review)

ound this in our little corner bookshop, an old textbook which i stained with coffee and Tabasco as I read it over many mornings at Juniors. But it’s a fascinating and very detailed account of the development of the steamboat. And if you think that Robert Fulton did it all alone in some sort of vacuum of engineering, no, he didn’t. When you think about it, the steamboat was one of the most technologically amazing crafts men of the time could envision. Think about it – America had just gotten through its revolution. The wilderness still besieged the coastal seaboards. […]

April 17, 2022

The Butcher of Anderson Station (Review)

nother quick review out of the Memory’s Legion collection of Expanse tales. This one concerns Fred Johnson, Soldier for Earth who ended up as levelheaded spokesman for the Belt, running Tycho Station and repurposing the Mormon’s generation ship out from under them (and, good for that since it turns out they would have been literally wasting the time of generations). So there is a side story about Johnson, how he was involved in a massacre on a belter station. As I remember, the show has the belters attempting to surrender and Fred ordering them in. Well, it wasn’t quite like […]