— compiled by Wombat-socho
I had originally intended to do these right after Christmas, since I’d been sent a few books to review and picked up some as well, but I came down with a bad case of what fellow conservative geek blogger Moe Lane refers to as “Fallout Flu”, which lasted well into the new year. And it wasn’t even the shiny new Fallout 4
So. First out of the box, we have Karl Gallagher’s Torchship
I am continuing to enjoy Vaughn Heppner’s Lost Starship series, though the third book, The Lost Destroyer
If you haven’t read Don Surber’s Exceptional Americans: 50 People You Need To Know
Unfortunately, not all the reading experiences have been good. I was sent a copy of Z-Minus
, her Hugo-winning novel about the three-way clash between Earth, the almost-renegade Earth Company Fleet, and the rebel stars of Union. This novel is the launching point for her vast Alliance/Union universe, which includes most of Cherryh’s work aside from her fantasy novels and the 
series. The first of these books that I’ve been reading is 
, which recounts the tale of a Union colony deliberately abandoned at the tail end of the Company War and its rediscovery by the Alliance. This is a depressing book for the most part; the Union colonists have no clue that they’re being deliberately set adrift, their azi workers are completely unequipped psychologically to survive the breakdown of the colony, and matters only get worse when the native, reptilian (and possibly intelligent) calibans become involved. A very disturbing novel; one is never sure whether the humans on Gehenna have become used to the calibans or whether the calibans are using humans for their own inscrutable ends. Unfortunately out of print except as part of the 
omnibus, which also includes the short novel Merchanter’s Luck
, which contains The Pride of Chanur, Chanur’s Venture, and The Kif Strike Back, and the remaining books, 
and 
which are available separately on Kindle and also as a two-book paperback collection which I can’t seem to find on Amazon. Anyhow, the Chanur novels are especially interesting because they’re told from the alien perspective of Pyanfar Chanur, captain of the hani merchant starship Pride of Chanur, which one day acquires a strange new crewman: a human by the name of Tully, whose very presence on her decks promises to destabilize the entire Compact between hani, mahendosat, stsho, kif, and the methane-breathing tc’a, chi and Knnn, who are difficult to understand at best and impossible at worst. Pyanfar finds herself unwillingly thrust into a position of political prominence among the hani – a Personage, as the mahedosat say – as she desperately copes with the political maneuverings of the mahendosat, the lethal infighting of the kif, the highly unstable and unreliable stsho, and the looming threat of a human incursion. Tully himself is a frustrating character – since the stories are all told from a hani perspective, most of the time you can’t tell what he’s trying to say any better than Pyanfar or Hilfy (Pyanfar’s niece) can. Tremendously tense novels, whose relationship to the rest of the Alliance/Union books remains unclear until close to the end of the original tetralogy.
, wherein Captain Maddox has to get his crew back together to rescue the missing Professor Ludendorff, repair the alien, millenia-old starship Victory, and help a beleaguered Star Watch fleet pull out a badly needed victory against the New Men. This is a step up from routine enjoyable brain candy, and I’m looking forward a lot to the next two books.
and 
, Rosenberg also did a couple of other novels in the setting of the Thousand Worlds, 
and 
. These are listed as books 2 and 1 of the Metzada series, but they really aren’t; there is a character in Emile and the Dutchman who is a Metzadan, and in Ties of Blood and Silver one of the characters talks about hiring a Metzadan as a swordsmanship teacher, but neither of these books is at all like the other two, and if you go into it thinking these are going to be about Metzada and the MMC, you’re going to be disappointed. (SPOILER – despite Ties of Blood and Silver, being set on Oroga, you don’t find out if Shimon Bar-El took the payoff or not, either.) That having been said, Emile and the Dutchman is a pretty good string of first contact stories strung together with some connective verbiage (letters from the protagonist, mostly) and Ties of Blood and Silver is…different. The cynical protagonist, who makes his living as a thief in the seedier parts of Oroga’s slums, finds himself with an affinity to the alien schtann, and most of the novel revolves around his gradual realization that belonging to the schrift of the precious metal workers is in fact his destiny. It’s a good read.
, the famous novel that bridges the First Indochina War and the Algerian War. Out of print for about half a century (and commanding huge prices in the used book markets), the book has nonetheless been recommended reading for American military officers because of its examination of a military at war with not just the ideologically-driven guerrillas in front of them, but the politicians and society behind them. The parallels to our own wars in Vietnam and Southwest Asia are obvious even to a blind man, but Larteguy isn’t just writing a polemic here – all the characters, French paras, Vietnamese nurses, and Algerian terrorists alike have their own fully-rounded backstories and personalities, concisely described and brutally honest. I suspect even the seemingly one-dimensional spear carriers would seem better rounded to me if I were as familiar with French society in the 1950s as I am with American society in the post-Vietnam and GWOT eras. I have been waiting for Penguin to republish this book for over fifty years, and it is an absolute steal at $10 for the Kindle. Its sequel, 
, is available for pre-order and is scheduled to come out next June. It’s going to be a hard wait.
, though…I don’t really understand why this has been relegated to obscurity. Set in the quarantined Beta Hydri cluster, where a colony of humans has settled into peaceful coexistence with the alien, insectile majat, Serpent’s Reach is primarily a tale of revenge set against a backdrop of (literally) murderous political infighting, the effects of indefinitely prolonged human life, and the peculiar stratified society of born-men and azi we’ve seen in other Alliance/Union novels but with the terribly long-lived aristocratic Kontrin families atop the social and economic pyramid. Perhaps what threw people off is that the fast-paced action of the beginning and penultimate chapters is separated by a lengthy, seemingly purposeless account of our heroine’s progress toward the one planet where Alliance merchants are allowed to dock and trade – where she finds the lever she needs to shift not just that world, but all the worlds in the cluster. Perhaps not the best of Cherryh’s novels, but still a very good one.
, which combines a history of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown (and there’s some bizarre history behind it, as James explains) with an examination of the players elected and selected to the Hall, a dissection of the arguments – good, bad, and frankly awful- in support of various players, brief biographies of players who made it, players who probably should have but didn’t, and an analysis of some of the great controversies surrounding the Hall’s choices. The book was republished a year later as 
, which I think isn’t as good a title, but it’s not like they care what I think. Either way, if you’re interested in the history of baseball and/or the Hall of Fame, you really owe it to yourself to get this book. It’ll give you something to do besides 
, originally a book by Philip K. Dick, and now a TV series by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz for Amazon Prime Video. The book won the Hugo for Best Novel of 1963, back when Hugos actually meant something, and is an alternate history set fifteen years after the United States lost World War II in 1947. Most of the former United States are part of the Greater German Reich; the three Pacific states plus Nevada, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah belong to a Japanese puppet state, the Pacific States of America; and the remaining pieces of the country between are a neutral zone, sometimes called the Rocky Mountain States or more often, the Neutral Zone. I last read Dick’s book decades ago, and I have to say after watching the first two episodes of the TV series, Scott and Spotnitz have produced something better than the original book. The subversive novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is now a series of “newsreels” distributed by the Resistance, there have been some changes in the cast of characters, but above all, Scott and Spotnitz have introduced a sense of hallucinatory, paranoid surrealism that didn’t exist in the original book, which was a fairly straightforward alternate history along the lines of one of its inspirations, Ward Moore’s 
– which itself is worth reading, for its depiction of the Union as a Third World backwater in the wake of a Civil War defeat, if nothing else. Getting back to the series…what struck me most is that it has a cast full of unreliable narrators. Nothing the characters say can be taken on faith as correct, there is reason to believe that “past” is not what it is claimed to be, and there are strong implications that the “newsreels” are not homemade movies, but rather leaks from our timeline. Can’t wait for the next eight episodes to come out next month!
, a post-apocalyptic tale about a small village in Ireland facing a number of problems, security and the infertility of the local menfolk being the two most pressing. Enter Sergeant O’Meara of the Grenadier Guards and his stolen Challenger MBT…like the first reviewer, I came across some of the stories in this fix-up novel by way of Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War anthologies, and appreciated the sometimes dark, sometimes madcap humor in these tales. Decent brain candy.
, the first in a trilogy written by John Hemry before he took up writing The Lost Fleet novels and went with his birth name of John Campbell. Stark’s War was somewhat of a nightmare for a veteran NCO like me; the picture it paints of a military so isolated from its country that someone in the ranks who was born civilian and not mil is a very rare bird indeed, and an officer corps so addicted to micromanagement and apple-polishing that it no longer recognizes the realities of combat are just two of the many unsettling plot elements of this novel about an American hyperpower as it exists in the mind of the Loony Left: so dominant in terms of economic and military power that no nation or alliance of nations on Earth can stand up to it – which is why Sergeant Stark and his troops of the First Division are raiding foreign installations on the Moon. Good book, perhaps because of the premise and not in spite of it; now available for the Kindle, which is good.
is widely available on Kindle and in dead-tree editions, usually packaged with its sequel “The Airlords of Han”. For those of you that missed out, these are the history of the Second American Revolution, in which Anthony “Buck” Rogers, veteran of the First World War, wakes from a state of suspended animation due to radioactive gases and winds up leading the scattered bands of Americans to victory against the Han invaders, who conquered America early in the 22nd century. It’s a fun little pair of stories, and only an SJW would whimper about its roots in the “yellow peril” literature that was popular in the 1920s. It was rebooted by Martin Caidin (author of 
, which became The Six Million Dollar Man) in 1995 as 
.
, by John E. Holmes, in which an aged Anthony Rogers must deal with his half-Han son, who is attempting to reverse his father’s victory; 
, by Richard McEnroe, in which it’s revealed that the Han are actually human/alien hybrids, and Rogers himself has been mysteriously rejuvenated by alien technology…but there’s a nasty catch to it. I don’t recall reading the sequel, 
, in which Rogers and the Americans must cope with an even worse threat triggered by their desperate assault on the aliens’ Lunar Base, but if it’s as good as Warrior’s Blood, then at worst, it’s decent brain candy. I haven’t found my copy of John Silbersack’s 
yet, but I definitely recall it being the capstone to the four books, with Rogers leading a motley crew of rebel aliens and human refugees back from a a secret base to liberate Earth from the aliens. As I said, not great books on the order of Ender’s Game or The Mote In God’s Eye, but decent brain candy, and used paperbacks can be had quite cheaply.
, edited by Mark Van Name. It contains stories by Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, John Lambshead and others, as well as tributes from Tom Doherty, Toni Weisskopf, and S.M. Stirling; in addition, the afterwords from the authors and Drake himself are outstanding. Did I mention there’s new Hammer’s Slammers stories, one of them by Drake? Not at all sorry I splashed out and got the limited edition, not at all, but I am sure the Kindle edition reads just as well.
; the second half, “Message to an Alien”, was republished in one of the Laumer anthologies Eric Flint edited for Baen, 
*, and stands on its own well enough – but it’s not the whole story by a long shot, and the first half, with its political struggles uncomfortably similar to the current day, adds a lot of depth to the character of Commodore Tancredi Dalton. John C. Wright has 
. This excellent combination of baseball history, biographical encyclopedia, and irreverent comments on all manner of things baseball-related (and sometimes not) is a real treasure, although it’s more than a little annoying that Simon & Schuster has the Kindle price jacked up to more than the paperback price. If you’re one of those baseball fans who is allergic to sabermetrics (i.e. any statistic not found in your local newspaper’s box scores) there is some of that, but it’s not nearly as obtrusive as it is in, say, 
.
, an unusually amusing homage to George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder characters set in the grim, dark world of the Warhammer 40K games. While I have that collection, the Ciaphas Cain novels I spent the last week or so with were 
and 
, both of which take place on the (largely) desert world of Perlia. The former involves Cain’s struggle to return to friendly lines after crash-landing smack in the middle of ork-occupied territory, in the course of which he becomes a planetary legend; in the latter, which is chronologically the last Cain novel, he comes out of retirement when Warmaster Varan and the 13th Black Crusade arrive on Perlia. Both great brain candy, and available as part of the omnibus 
along with a third novel, the short story “Traitor’s Gambit”, and a new intro by Sandy Mitchell.
with the Kelly Freas cover, even though it’s since been expanded into 
. That’s the exception rather than the rule, though, and I may well wind up having a garage sale of the surplus volumes by the time I’m done sorting everything out.
. Not everyone does humor in SF well, but Frezza carries it off in this amusing tale of Ensign Ken McKay, the tramp freighter Rustam’s Slipper (more commonly called the “Rusty Scupper”), interstellar drug smuggling, vampires, and the backwater colony of Schuyler’s Planet, where all the children are below average and their parents aren’t so hot either. Also, there’s His Rotundity Bucky Beaver, heir to the Rodent throne, his indispensable sidekick Cheeves, and the unfortunate matter of the Rodent-Human war that Ken accidentally sets off. Hilarity, deranged nurses, and occasional romance ensue. Another case where you can’t believe it’s not available on Kindle.
. The cover art is a little different, but the stories and non-fiction are the same, and there are some damn good stories in these collections, including Pournelle & Niven’s “Reflex”, which was cut from 
; the original version of “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card; “Cincinnatus” by the late Joel Rosenberg, and many, many others. Some reviewers have complained that the fiction and non-fiction alike are a bit dated, but personally I think of the whole series as a nice collection of period pieces which reflect the times in which they were written. 
, which tells the tale of a young GRU officer who resolves early in life to destroy the Soviet system in the only way possible – with a pitiless coup by the Soviet Union’s own deadliest soldiers, the spetsnaz. I think Moss does as good a job as any Westerner of depicting the gray, depressing life of the average Soviet citizen and how corrupt the system was – and how tempting it could be to defect. Young lieutenant Preobrazhensky remains true to his purpose, though, accumulating allies in the strangest places before finally dropping the axe. Alternate history now, of course, but still a fascinating tale. Was available on Kindle for a while, but not at the moment.
