Station – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

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 […]

September 18, 2022

Persephone Station (Review)

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 […]

March 10, 2023

On Sheet – Annunciator

read this little passage a while ago. It came from a little anecdote in a book on Southern Pacific depots in the 1950s. …I was busy with these customers when the annunciator sounded, indicating a westbound train was approaching… I’d never heard of such a thing. It seems that, in the fifties, there was some sort of relay switch to automatically ring a station when a train was inbound. Interesting. I filed it away and didn’t give it too much thought. Then we went into that piece from two weeks ago where I admitted my layout was more CTC than […]