Category: Books

— by Wombat-socho

Most of you are probably unfamiliar with the National Fantasy Fan Federation, which has been around literally since the dawn of SF fandom. I myself thought it had died off, but evidently it is very much alive, and hard up enough for members and volunteer staff that they made me head of their Membership and Recruitment Bureau, which is why I drafted this blog post on why you ought to join the N3F. On a related topic, apparently Sasquan is still refusing to release to the public the Hugo nomination ballots – not the Hugo ballots themselves, just the nomination ballots. What could they be trying to hide?
Also, for those of you who missed the announcement a week or so ago, the Kindly Ones are collecting nominations for the 2016 Hugo Awards here.

But enough of fannish politics. I’ve been spending most of last week reading S.M. Stirling’s The Desert and the Blade, wherein Crown Princess Orlaith and Empress Reiko head into the Mojave in pursuit of the legendary Grass-Cutting Sword, one of the Three Sacred Treasures of the Imperial throne. Meanwhile, Orlaith’s mother, Lady Protector and High Queen Matilda, fears her daughter’s impetuous questing has endangered Montival, since there are factions within the High Kingdom whose loyalty died with her husband, Rudi. If you don’t like the Change series, that’s fine (but spare me the reminders in the comments) but if you do, be reassured that this is worth the $14 Penguin is extorting for the Kindle edition.

I hadn’t planned to pick up Robert Frezza’s Cain’s Land for a while, since in a lot of ways I think it’s the weakest of his Suid-Afrika trilogy, but there it was…anyhow, aliens have been discovered, and canny Imperial Commissioner Mutaro decides that the best man to contact them – and, if necessary, defeat them – is renegade Colonel Anton Vereshchagin. From there, the action matches the description one of Vereshchagin’s men gives of wars: “A little humor, a little horror, and a lot of sweeping up.” Well worth picking up, if not quite as good as the first two books. Not available in Kindle, sadly.

Some years ago, I met James Daniel Ross at Balticon, where he was flogging his new book, The Chimerium Gambit to various fans of combat SF, and indeed, he had some interesting changes to ring on the hoary old trope of futuristic mercenary troops. I haven’t read its sequel, The Key to Damocles, but I have read two of the shorter “Mission Files” stories, Restavek and Not One Word; they are every bit as good as The Chimerium Gambit albeit shorter and cheaper. Recommended.

I’ve been waiting a while for Brian McClellan’s The Autumn Republic to come out on Kindle, and so far it’s been worth the wait. This is the cap to the Powder Mage trilogy that began with Promise of Blood, and a damn fine trilogy it’s been. There may be other authors out there who can combine magic and Napoleonic warfare, but McClellan does it while juggling half a dozen POV characters and half again as many subplots. Cannot recommend highly enough.
So what are y’all reading?

— by Wombat-socho

I’m not sure when I first became aware of Tim Powers. It’s entirely possible that it wasn’t until he was Guest of Honor at Arcana, a small dark fantasy/horror convention in St. Paul that I can’t recommend highly enough. Anyhow, Mr. Powers was Guest of Honor for Arcana 34 back in 2004, and was a very nice, congenial fellow; he’s also a hell of a writer, skilfully manuevering between science fiction and the supernatural. He’s probably best known for his horror novel On Stranger Tides, which became one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (if you look carefully, you can see Mr. Powers as one of the extras), or if you’re a fan of Charles Stross’ Laundry series, you probably saw the reference to Powers’ Declare which like Stross’ novels blends Le Carre with supernatural horror. I am currently reading Earthquake Weather, which combines the legend of the Fisher King with the wild ghost story of Expiration Date and the mystical poker game of Last Call. I think part of what gets me excited about Powers is his gift for taking the ordinary everyday world of buses and taxicabs and day laborers and suddenly shifting your point of view to include all the things lurking in the spaces between, or perhaps right out in plain sight. From the Siege of Vienna (The Drawing of the Dark) to the wild adventures of Lord Byron among the vampires (The Stress of Her Regard) and to the modern day, where a father and daughter struggle to comprehend Einstein’s deadliest invention, more terrible than nuclear weapons (Three Days to Never), there’s not a clunker in the lot. For a while, his books were terribly difficult to find, but fortunately Del Rey has brought them out in Kindle editions. A wonderful man who writes wonderful books.

Maggie Hogarth, on the other hand, likes to write about aliens, and apparently does so quite well, though she came to my attention as a result of political tussles on LiveJournal some years ago. Which is how I wound up signing on to the Kickstarter for her novel/script Spots the Space Marine: Defense of the Fiddler, which concerns a middle-aged Marine reservist sent to reinforce a guard company protecting an extremely valuable target. It’s also how I became aware of her taking a quirky webcomic about art, business and life (that hadn’t really earned its keep online) and bringing out a print edition. I have to say, The Three Jaguars: A Comic About Business, Art, and Life works a LOT better as a graphic novel (for reasons that Hogarth explains) and has additional material not previously published online. It’s instructive, funny, and occasionally heart-wrenching (if you’re familiar with the lawsuit by Games Workshop after Spots was published, you’ll understand, and if not you should look it up) by turns, and well worth your money. Not quite as entertaining, but possibly more helpful in a specific way, is From Spark to Finish: Running Your Kickstarter Campaign, which takes you through the steps you need to follow to run a Kickstarter campaign to get people to support you while you’re writing something they want to read, or creating some other kind of art that people want to pay actual $ (and hopefully $$ or even $$$$$) for. There aren’t a lot of people who can write well, and in this degenerate age, it seems there are even fewer who can draw and paint well, but Ms. Hogarth is blessed with both those talents. Buy her stuff.

— by Wombat-socho

By now, everyone who’s been paying attention to GamerGate (happy first anniversary!) or the Sad Puppies movement with regard to the Hugos should be familiar with, or at least recognize the name of, Vox Day, Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil League of Evil. I doubt that anyone since George W. Bush has caused so many on the Left to completely lose their shit, and W was nowhere near as successful at getting his hapless enemies to do EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED. So it was with great interest that I ordered his new book, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, a book that is currently #1 in Politics on Amazon, further irritating the kind of people who need irritating. The book is an excellent tract on what kind of people SJWs are, what they do, and how to fight back – effectively. Vox chronicles the recent public shaming of people like Brendan Eich and Tim Hunt as examples how not to do it. He also chronicles in a brief but thorough manner the ongoing successful grind of GamerGate and the two-front war on the Hugos as illustrations of how to do it on a macro scale, and also includes helpful tips on how to take on and defeat SJWs in the workplace or in other organizations where one encounters these human cockroaches. Adding to the value of the book are not just a foreword but an afterword by Gandalf the Gay himself, Breitbart reporter Milo Yiannopoulos, who is almost always entertaining. Highly recommended; I don’t often say this, but this is a book you absolutely ought to read, especially in these wretched times when we’re beset by these deranged killjoys on every side.

I also picked up an older work of his, The Return of the Great Depression, which while a bit dated -it was published in October 2009- gives an interesting perspective into where we’re going, why we’re in this handbasket, and how we got there to start with. Vox is a fan of the Austrian School of economics, so if you also subscribe to that view, there’s a lot in here you’ll find familiar. If, on the other hand, you’re more of a monetarist or (God forbid) a Keynesian, you’re in for some rude shocks. Clearly written, well-sourced, and measured in its judgments, this book is one hell of a bargain at $1.99, and I also recommend it.

As I mentioned in my previous book post, I’ve been renewing acquaintance with some old favorites that I haven’t seen in, oh, almost three years now; some of them, it’s been longer, since I never did unpack all my books when I was living in Alexandria. I finally started emptying those boxes over the weekend, sorting through the paperbacks while playing a few hands on a sweeps casino app to pass the time. Anyhow, this week I reread Robert Frezza’s A Small Colonial War and Fire in a Faraway Place, the first two novels of his Suid-Afrika trilogy. These are the tale of a colonial world under an interstellar Japanese empire, settled by (mostly) Afrikaners and “cowboys” and dominated by a Japanese corporation, United Steel-Standard, which has let things get out of hand to the point where an Imperial task force is sent to restore order. One of the units in the task force is the 1/35 Rifle Battalion, originally from Finland and commanded by an unorthodox Russian officer, LTC Anton Vereshchagin. In the first book, Vereshchagin must find a way to defeat the Afrikaner Bund and its shadowy Order after they’ve successfully nuked most of the task force and its ships in the sky. In the second, set six years after the first, a new Imperial task force has arrived to put USS back in the saddle, and our plucky little band of Finns, Russians, “cakes” and Afrikaners are forced into rebellion. One of the reviewers made the claim that Frezza writes better than John Ringo, which I don’t think I agree with, but like Ringo, Frezza is not afraid to kill off characters when the plot requires it, even important characters. I found both books tragic, stirring, and very thought-provoking, and have a hard time believing that Del Rey has let them go out of print.

You may or may not remember the War World anthologies, set on the world of Haven in Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium universe. They were very uneven in quality, written by authors ranging from Larry Niven and S.M. Stirling to Harry Turtledove and lesser-known folks like Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr, and are currently being reissued by Pequod Press and Baen in a more coherent series arranged in chronological order, and with new stories added. But I digress; after the original anthologies, some of the stories written by Stirling, Turtledove et al were put into a pair of fixup novels, Blood Feuds and Blood Vengeance, which melded the ancient tale of Oedipus Rex with the state of affairs on Haven three centuries after a shipload of Saurons arrived to take possession, climaxing in an apocalyptic assault by a massive army of tribesmen, Bandari, and the rebelling “cattle” of the Saurons themselves on the Citadel, center of Sauron power on Haven. Half the fun is watching various characters, Sauron and others, go through their paces and fall prey to mistakes they can’t avoid making by their very nature, while other characters are trying and failing to warn them off. The plotline involving the Sauron cyborg Sigrid is particularly amusing, in its own twisted way. Not Hugo material, but excellent brain candy, highly entertaining.

“The greatest difference in the universe . . . is the difference between nothing and something, between an infinity of darkness and a single point of light. . . . It is the difference between atheism and God.”
— Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

A decade ago, when my oldest daughter Kennedy was 16, I drove her and her friend Mandy to Creation, a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania. As we were driving along, something inspired me to start talking about Communism, and I mentioned that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, this was a miraculous event that answered the prayers of millions. Then I explained how, growing up a Baptist in Georgia, I learned to despise “godless Commies,” who had persecuted Christians in Russia, China and everywhere else Marxist-Leninist regimes gained power.

“You kids have no idea what it was like,” I said, attempting to explain the constant terror of growing up in the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the potential to annihilate humanity. As a boy growing up, I knew that my Uncle Casper fought the godless Commies in Vietnam, and when I was in second grade, the local park in Douglasville was named in honor of a hero in that war:

Robert Gerald “Jerry” Hunter left his native Douglas County to attend the Citadel, where he graduated with honors. He joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and was deployed to Vietnam. On May 25, 1966, Hunter was on his 34th combat mission when his F-105 jet was shot down near the Laotian border. He bailed out — his comrades saw the parachute — and it was initially believed that he had survived. The 25-year-old pilot was listed as missing in action, and the Air Force promoted him from first lieutenant to captain while rescuers searched for him. Hunter’s family, including his young bride Laura, prayerfully waited for word that he had been recovered safely. Seven weeks later, however, the sad news came that his remains had been found in Laos, where he had apparently died of injuries. First Baptist Church in Douglasville overflowed with mourners at his funeral and local businesses closed early that afternoon in honor of Captain Hunter, Douglas County’s first casualty in the Vietnam War.

Kids don’t know that history, and they are fortunate not to live under the shadow of the existential menace of Communism, the bloodiest tyranny in the history of the world. So on that summer day in 2005, I tried to explain to my daughter and her friend why the Soviet Union — the “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan called it — inspired such resolute opposition from Christians. Marxism is an explicitly atheist philosophy, and the Communist is bound by no morality whatsoever. Communists are always deliberate liars, who believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” justifies any deception necessary to advance their cause, and Communists kill without remorse, unrestrained by conscience. The disciples of that deadly doctrine were responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people in the 20th century. The collapse of the Soviet Union was achieved only after decades of conflict and tension between the free world, led by the United States, and the International Communist Conspiracy headquartered in Moscow.

This history, and the sense of what it meant to grow up in the Cold War era, was what I sought to convey to my daughter and her friend on that drive through the Pennsylvania countryside. During this improvised lecture — something of a sermon, really — I kept repeating the phrase “godless Commies,” which subsequently became an inside joke between us. My daughter and her husband came to visit us over the past weekend, and her friend Mandy joined us for a family dinner, and I got a laugh out of them when, discussing recent news events, I asked the rhetorical question, “You know what the problem is, don’t you?”

“Godless Commies!” Mandy replied.

Yes, the battlefield has shifted, but the enemy remains the same, and this post-Cold War “twilight struggle” of the Culture War is what Michael Walsh examines in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Walsh’s choice of the word “subversion” is apt, because the effort by Marxists to subvert the culture of the West did not stop after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Godless Commies are everywhere in 21st-century America — in academia, in media, in Hollywood and in government. It is remarkable that Hillary Clinton, who certainly could be described as what anti-Communists used to call a “pinko” or “fellow traveler,” finds herself challenged for the Democrat Party nomination by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist. Clearly, this is not the Democrat Party I was raised in, because there is a world of difference between old-fashioned AFL-CIO liberalism (my father was a member of the Machinists union) and the neo-Bolshevik radicalism of today’s “progressive” Democrats.

The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is an examination of a subversive worldview that has been variously called “political correctness” or “Cultural Marxism,” which Walsh identifies by its academic moniker Critical Theory. Whatever it is called, this intellectual virus was brought to America in the 1940s by a group of left-wing refugees — including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — who are generally known as the Frankfurt School because of their former associations with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Embraced by the avant-garde of American academia, the ideas of the Frankfurt School has enormous influence after World War II. One of their key ideas, given a patina of “scientific” credibility by Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, was the belief that the traditional family was a breeding ground of fascism. This provided the Left with a trite pseudo-Freudian explanation of anti-Communism as rooted in neurotic insecurities. The Frankfurt School’s “diagnosis” of conservatism as a form of mental illness was notoriously echoed in 1964, when a left-wing smear offered the consensus of nearly 1,200 psychiatrists that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was “psychologically unfit to be President.”

However, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is not a dry factual history of the Frankfurt Schools ideas and influence. Michael Walsh is a highly literary man — a screenwriter and novelist, and former classical music critic of Time magazine — who seeks to evoke the humane impulses of artistic creativity in opposition to the soul-crushing forces that Critical Theory empowers. Exposing the hostility of this crypto-Marxist ideology toward that which is spiritual in man’s nature, Walsh appeals to the finest traditions of Western culture, deriving his book’s title from Franz Schubert’s first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss. Walsh’s book bristles with references to classical music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) and philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche), as well as literature and films, including Casablanca, High Noon, The Wild One, The Godfather and Independence Day. Adding to this arsenal of high culture, however, Walsh also dares to invoke the religious foundation of Western civilization, citing the Book of Genesis to explain the eternal conflict of human history: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die . . . ye shall be as gods.”

Believing this satanic lie made Original Sin our inherited condition, and human rebellion against God’s sovereignty began with the impudent desire to usurp divine authority — a “liberation” that results in violence, misery and death. Like the serpent in Eden, the godless Commies tempt us to imagine ourselves freed from God’s law, so that law is no longer a matter of transcendent morality, but is instead simply a matter of power. The destruction of religious belief is necessary to the success of this political wickedness, and the all-powerful State must also destroy the family, as Walsh explains:

Like Satan, the modern leftist state is jealous of the family’s preprogatives, enraged by its power, and it seeks to replace this with its own authority; the satanic condition of “rage,” in fact, is one of the Left’s favorite words (e.g., in 1969, the “Days of Rage” in Chicago) as well as one of its chief attributes. The ongoing, expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “family” is part of the Left’s assault. . . .
Soviet Communism . . . understood this well. Destroy the family, seize the children, and give the insupportable notion of a Marxist post-Eden replacement paradise a purchase on power for at least one more generation. American youth who grew up in the 1950s, as I did, heard numerous horror stories of Russian children who informed on their own parents. . . . Probably the most famous was the thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, an instantly mythologized Soviet Young Pioneer who informed on his father to the secret police and was in turn murdered by “reactionary” members of his own family, who were later rounded up and shot. Whether the story is actually true — and post-Soviet scholarship suggests that it was largely fabricated — the Soviet myth required just such an object lesson and just such a martyr to the Communist cause.

Nothing is more important to the Left than the political “cause” because no personal loyalty — not even to one’s own family — can be permitted to challenge the power of the total State, which arrogates to itself the authority to direct and control every aspect of our lives. Pavlik Morozov’s betrayal of his “reactionary” parents is a model for how the government school system now requires children to reject the moral authority of their parents. Teaching the child to hate Mom and Dad — to despise his parents as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic bigots — is the most important lesson of the modern public school, and this lesson is reinforced daily by the educational bureaucrats who are paid with tax dollars to indoctrine children with an anti-religious, anti-family, anti-American ideology. But I’m ranting again, eh?

Godless Commies! We can never hate them as much as they deserve to be hated, nor can we hate them as much as they hate us, because they hate us with a fanatical fury that a Christian cannot even imagine. It would be a sin to hate anyone that much, but the godless Commies don’t believe in sin, and so they are free to indulge their hatred, which is infinite.

The Critical Theory cult promises to create a utopia of “equality,” yet lacks any real creativity, because it is inspired by a spirit of destruction manifested in a limitless lust for power, with which to punish its enemies. Walsh points out how Herbert Marcuse “celebrated ‘polymorphous perversity,’ advocating the liberating power of sex” as a means to weaken “the foundations of the society he sought to undermine.” Yet this attack on sexual morality produced consequences that the prophets of “liberation” failed to foretell, as Walsh explains:

The attack on normative heterosexuality . . . invariably disguised as a movement for “rights” . . . is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory. . . If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men . . . then that poliitcal party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs. . . .
The result has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work n the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the “hookup culture” . . . to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male “rape culture” hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

This result was “predictable,’ as Walsh said, to those who understood human nature as a fixed quantity that could not be infinitely molded to fit the theories of godless Commies. Yet if the soul-crushing misery the Left has delivered is nothing like the paradise of “equality” they promised, the cult of Critical Theory has at least kept its promise to destroy the traditional American society that was always the target of the Left’s vengeful hatred. Very little remains of the America that triumphed in World War II and then endured the “long twilight struggle” to emerge victorious in the Cold War. Having captured control of the educational system, the godless Commies have relentlessly purged religious faith from our nation’s schools and colleges, so that no sincere Christian could possibly hope to be hired in American higher education, even if any Christian were willing to work within the satanic pulpits of academia.

Is there any hope at all? Can we defeat these godless Commies and rescue civilization from annihilation by the cult of Critical Theory? Michael Walsh believes there is still reason to hope, if only the American people can summon the courage to keep fighting:

Facing overwhelming odds at Thermopylae, the Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas responded to Persian demands that they surrender their weapons with these words for the ages: “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.”

We live in an evil age, and are confronted with the infinite darkness of oblivion, yet there is still hope in that single point of light that is the difference between atheism and God.

Powerful new book: THE DEVIL'S PLEASURE PALACE by Michael Walsh http://t.co/pXYvAKIXv4 Highly recommended! #tcot

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 1, 2015

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Could have sworn I did a book post last week, but apparently I was wrong. This fortnight’s haul from the library includes a couple of regrettable graphic novels, one of the Laundry novels by Charles Stross, a nice debut novel by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi, and the definitive Churchill bio by his son Randolph and the late Martin Gilbert.

The best of the lot is clearly Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, the first book in a trilogy about the post-human thief Jean le Flambeur. When we first meet him, le Flambeur is an inmate in the Dilemma Prison, where the Archon pursues a form of re-education where his prisoners are required to kill each other every day or (less frequently) cooperate to avoid being killed. Our hero gets sprung from the prison and taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, to complete his last theft. The Oubliette is a fascinating society where time is the only currency and those who run out of time become the voiceless Quiets, who maintain the city and defend it from the feral phoboi. In the meantime, they exchange memories (or bits of memory) while maintaining fierce independence and anonymity through use of the gevulot, high-grade cryptography that can literally make people faceless or unrecognizable. It compares very well to Stross’ disastrous Glasshouse, which deals with a similar post-human prison, and Stross admits as much in a rather gracious cover blurb. This was a very good read, and I’m looking forward to reading the next two.

Speaking of Stross, I finally found The Rhesus Chart at the library, and while I enjoyed MOST of the novel, I am furious at Stross for reintroducing Bob’s sociopathic ex-girlfriend Mhari, who is now a [SPOILER], breaking up [SPOILER], and worst of all, HE KILLED OFF [SPOILER]! I can’t remember being this pissed off at an author since Poul Anderson killed Dominic Flandry’s fiance in A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. I am assured by a fellow fan of the series that it’s really all for the best, but I am Not Pleased.

The man who could have been Duke of London was not always the beloved bulldog hero of his people, as one rather quickly discovers when reading Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874-1900, the first in the eight-volume series begun by his son Randolph and completed by the late Martin Gilbert. The first two volumes could have been a stultifying trudge through letter after letter from and to Winston and his contemporaries (including his parents) but is a rather easy read instead, as well as being an excellent history of England during Churchill’s time. A short but very necessary overview of Winston’s father Randolph’s meteoric rise and tragic fall in included, and properly so, since it is impossible to really understand Winston’s career without it. I was fortunate enough to get all eight volumes for free on the Last Lion’s birthday this year when Hillsdale College released them in Kindle format, but they are well worth the current price and then some.

I was very disappointed in Serenity: Those Left Behind and Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale, even if Joss Whedon wasn’t. I found the first confusing and the second one suffering from a major continuity error, and was damned glad I hadn’t bought either one myself. YMMV.

This weekend I’m going to fill out my Hugo ballot, and I’ll post that next week in case anyone is interested. There’s still time to sign up for a supporting membership, get the packet, and vote, by the way.

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Been a while since the last book post, for which I apologize; for obvious reasons, I’ve been trying to avoid picking up new books, and I didn’t get around to picking up a card for the local library system for a couple weeks after I got here. Now that I’ve done that, time to update you on a few books worth reading and one that isn’t.

Along with the release of the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt flick Edge of Tomorrow, the folks at Viz decided to release the original light novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill, under the movie’s title. My opinion of Edge of Tomorrow? Not only was the movie better, they would probably have done better to novelize the movie script, because the script is more coherent and has a better ending than the novel, which is your typical Japanese romance while trying hard to pretend it isn’t. There’s a manga version of All You Need Is Kill available, and the county library has a copy, but I wasn’t even remotely interested in picking it up.

Much better is Charles Stross’ Neptune’s Brood, a sequel of sorts to Saturn’s Children via the short story “Bit Rot”. The protagonist, Krina Alizond-114, is a posthuman cyborg searching for her sister and only gradually becoming aware that she may be on the wrong end of the biggest banking scam in history. It’s a decent read, though Stross’ tendency to infodump and his obvious fondness for Communism make a couple of sections rough going. Still, not bad for free.

Man-Kzin Wars XIV is the latest anthology of stories set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe, and there’s not a dull story in the lot. With peace having broken out -or so it seems- the monkey-boys and ratcats are coexisting and even cooperating, but that doesn’t mean things are all calm and peaceful. My personal favorite, Matthew Harrington’s “Leftovers”, involves my least favorite character in the series, ARM General Buford Early, trying -and hilariously failing- to outthink a Protector. If you liked the first thirteen volumes in the series, you’ll like this one too.

Thanks to the Amazon Prime Lending Library, I was able to check out Peter Grant’s Forge a New Blade, the sequel to his War To The Knife. It’s a worthy sequel, and Grant deserves praise for not succumbing to Clancy-Weber syndrome and expanding each of these books to 700-page doorstops. He could quite easily have gone into mind-numbing detail about what the dozen or so secondary characters are doing off-stage, but avoids this temptation and delivers a nice little compact novel instead. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series.

Finally, one from the vaults – Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg. I was expecting great things after reading Sears’ Landscape Turned Red, an excellent account of the extremely bloody Battle of Antietam, and I was not disappointed. You won’t be either.