Category: Books

— by Wombat-socho

Wrapping up the leftovers from last week…Charles Gannon’s Trial by Fire has plenty of action to suit combat SF readers, and a healthy helping of interstellar intrigue, diplomacy and skulduggery to boot. Don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, but Gannon’s humans do a good job of faking the aliens (and the reader) out on the way to a mostly-satisfying ending.

Michael Z. Williamson’s A Long Time Until Now is fundamentally a tale of what a dozen soldiers (okay, there’s one airman and an ex-squid in the squad) do when they and their pair of MRAPs are dumped a few hundred thousand years into the past. It’s partially a tale of physical and psychological survival, but it’s also a tale of how modern soldiers interact with primitives, Romans, and eventually, a pair of scouts from the future who prove to be the key to getting our stranded troops home…after a detour more disturbing than their sojourn in the past. Excellent book; it’s going on my short list of books to nominate for next year’s Hugos.

I somehow missed Orson Scott Card’s Shadows in Flight when it came out a few years ago. This picks up where Shadow of the Giant left off; Julian “Bean” Delphiki leaves Earth with three of his children that share “Anton’s Key”, a birth defect that combines faster development and higher intelligence with giantism that will kill them at an age when ordinary humans would be in their prime; they hope to exploit relativistic speed to accelerate their search for a cure. After centuries pass on Earth and no cure is found, the children begin to despair – until the sensors show an alien ship in orbit around a possibly habitable planet. Good story, though a bit hard on the emotions.

Joel Rosenberg is probably better known as a Second Amendment activist and fantasy writer than an SF author, but from the short story “Cincinnatus” comes the novel Not For Glory, a tale of Am Yisroel in exile on the barren planet Metzada, where as the protagonist Tetsuo Hanavi remarks, “If nobody hires us to fight, my children will have to learn to eat rock.” So it is that the Metzada Mercenary Corps goes forth to worlds like Rand, Alsace, and Neuva Terra to fight (and usually win) other peoples’ wars. Hero, the sequel (though chronologically taking place before the events in Not For Glory), is the story of Ari Hanavi, Tetsuo’s little brother, and it’s not a cheerful tale by any means. Well worth reading, but don’t just take my word for it: David Drake and S.M. Stirling both thought highly of the MMC novels.

C.J. Cherryh’s Tracker is the sixteenth novel in her series about relations between the humanoid atevi and humans, this time with the added complication of the barely understood kyo arriving at a time when the atevi civil war has barely been won and refugees from Reunion Station threaten to throw matters at the joint atevi/human orbital station into chaos. If you enjoyed Cherryh’s previous novels in the series, you’ll like this one as well; coming into this one without reading the fifteen previous books can be done, since Cherryh is very good at supplying context without doing massive infodumps, but I personally don’t recommend it.

I also spent some time browsing through David Drake’s The Complete Hammer’s Slammers: Volume 1 and its two sequels; this time, I actually stopped to read David Hartwell’s introduction to The Complete Hammer’s Slammers: Volume 2, which in retrospect I wish more SF fans who don’t normally read combat SF had bothered to read. Welp.

Off to Balticon next weekend; not sure yet if there’ll be a book post this week or not, since I expect to be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

— by Wombat-socho

Now that the tax season is over, and all I need to work on is getting rid of dirtiness and mess (mind you keep your storage locker and yourself just so) before the move to Las Vegas later this month, I actually have the time and inclination to get some reading done. In fact, it’s going to be a real effort to keep from blowing gas money on books for the Kindle…fortunately, there’s always the county library.

Which is where I picked up the latest installment of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files urban fantasy series, Skin Game. I particularly wanted to get hold of this since Marko Kloos pulled his novel Lines of Departure off the ballot, and none of the other nominees (except maybe for Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem) look that interesting. Anyway, the latest adventure of Harry Dresden involves him getting a job from Mab, the Faerie Queen – a job that forces him to work with a deadly former enemy and shows every likelihood of bringing Harry’s career to an untimely and painful end. Previous Dresden Files novels struck me as okay brain candy but nothing special, but this one…yeah, this one is definitely Hugo-caliber writing, and unless Liu’s novel lives up to the hype, it’ll wind up getting my nod for Best Novel.

Also from the county library, Niven and Benford’s Shipstar, which concludes the story begun in Bowl of Heaven*, where a human starship intended to explore and colonize an alien world runs into a gigantic structure that uses a captive star for light, heat and propulsion. The aviform aliens in charge seem determined to add the humans to their collection of subject races, but of course the monkey boys and girls have other ideas – and as things develop, the Big Birds may not be at the top of the chain of command after all. Lots of interesting ideas to chew on, interesting characters, and a plot that keeps trucking along nicely. Recommended.

Speaking of Marko Kloos as we were earlier, his third novel Angles of Attack is out, and while it ties up a lot of loose ends from Lines of Departure and the sidestory Measures of Absolution, there were parts of it that left me feeling that it wasn’t quite up to the expectations set by the first two novels. Among those were the gratuitous suicidal destruction of the [redacted], the gay husband of the Russian combat controller who’s partnered with our hero for about half the book**, and a rather sizable plot hole involving elements of the NAC fleet. You’ll know that one when it comes by. Anyway, it’s an okay story, but somewhat of a letdown after Lines of Departure. Good thing I was able to borrow it from the Amazon Prime Lending Library.

Last, another fantasy, one which looks like it’s going to be wandering into the same gritty territory as the Dresden Files, even though it’s set in L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz. I am speaking, of course, of Ryk Spoor’s Polychrome, which some reviewers have compared to William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, from which they made this movie you might have heard of. 🙂 I’ll be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with Spoor’s Grand Central Arena, but this is looking very good in the early going. I’ll follow up next week and let you know if I think it lives up to the promise.

Oh, yes – voting for the Hugo Awards is underway. Read widely, choose wisely.

*Currently available on the Kindle for $3.99.
**Look, Russians aren’t down with the whole gay equality deal, and I don’t see that changing in the next century. Certainly nothing in Kloos’ sparse backstory on the SRA gives any indication that this is the case; this just gets dropped on you out of left field, and as somebody who’s spent entirely too much of his life wrapped up in what Russians think and how their culture works, it hit the floor with a resounding THUD and broke the suspension on my disbelief.

— compiled by Wombat-socho

For once, the New York Times Magazine got something right: when they profiled Jack Vance in 2009, they described him as “one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices”. This verges on understatement. Vance was equally at home in fantasy, mystery and SF, winning awards in all three genres, and his legacy also extends to role-playing games: it is no secret that the magic system employed in Gygax & Arneson’s Dungeons and Dragons is based on Vance’s The Dying Earth. Aside from his D&D connection, Vance is probably best known for his Hugo-winning novellas “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle”, in which human heroes must fight and outwit not only alien invaders but opposition from their fellow humans. This is a recurring theme with Vance; another is the astonishing variety of cultures and societies created by man on the many planets they settle across the universe. For a sample, consider the many worlds traversed by the implacable Kirth Gersen in his one-man war against the criminal lords known as the Demon Princes: the poisonmongers of Sarkovy, with their complicated tribal fetishes, who practice paranoia as a way of life; the inhabitants of Thamber, whose feudal city-states war endlessly among themselves for the amusement of the immortal Kokor Hekkus; the desert-dwelling Darsh, with their equally repulsive food and mating practices…I could go on for pages, and this is just one series of five books! Vance further illuminates his tales of adventure with amusing and (sometimes) informative footnotes and chapter-heading epigraphs, which help provide context…or distraction for people with very short attention spans. Of all Vance’s longer works, I like the Demon Princes novels the best and cannot recommend them highly enough.

Equally rich are the five Planet of Adventure novels, in which astronaut Adam Reith crash-lands on the planet Tschai, where he discovers not only four alien races but their human slaves, taken in Earth’s distant past. Reith must penetrate the mystery of each race in turn while finding a way off the planet to warn Earth, and the reader’s reward is to have each race and its human slaves displayed in turn as only Vance can. Truly, the fun is mostly in the journey, though Reith’s final [SPOILER] is [SPOILER] as well.

Less well regarded, though still fascinating illustrations of Vance’s skill in showing bizarre human societies while still relating a tale of adventure of which Heinlein and Laumer would have approved, are The Anome, in which the musician Gastel Etzwane finds himself unexpectedly thrust into a position and responsibility when the ruler of Shant, the “Faceless Man”, diffidently refuses to confront the destructive invasion of the Roguskhoi; also, the Cadwal Chronicles, which begin with Araminta Station, where the aristocratic Conservancy tries to maintain the natural state of Cadwal against the humanoid Yips and their more “liberal” compatriots. Glawen Clattuc, an agent of the Conservancy’s Bureau B, must negotiate both politics on Cadwal and off-world adventures before the action reaches its climax.

For what my opinion is worth, Vance has no equals in his mastery of both description and action. His books are filled with desperate deeds and heroic acts done in strange landscapes and bizarre societies, and all of them excellently described. Probably his closest modern equivalent is Neal Stephenson, though Stephenson isn’t nearly as baroque as Vance, his cycle notwithstanding. 😉

— by Wombat-socho

It’s been a couple months since the last book post, I think, and with tax season being the usual pain in the butt that it is, I haven’t had time to do much reading – at least not of anything new. Let’s start at the beginning and work forward, shall we?

I apologize if the post title gives the impression that Space Battleship Yamato, which I saw on Amazon Instant Video, is a horrible movie. It’s not. It’s extremely faithful to the 1977 movie edited from the first season of Star Blazers. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, Earth is being slowly destroyed by a radioactive bombardment conducted by the Gamilons, against whom Earth’s most advanced weapons are useless. Bitter ex-pilot Kodai finds a message capsule while prospecting for scrap on the surface, and the capsule contains designs for powerful new engines, a new weapon called the Wave Motion Gun, and the promise of technology to reverse the damage done by the Gamilons – if Earth can reach the faraway planet of Iskander. Earth’s High Command uses this technology to rebuild the legendary battleship Yamato into an interstellar dreadnought to break through the Gamilon forces, and Kodai volunteers for duty aboard her – which puts him in immediate conflict with Captain Okita, who Kodai holds responsible for his brother’s death, and Yuki, a fellow pilot who despises Kodai for resigning and (she feels) abandoning his fellow pilots. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a very good one, and well worth the $4 rental.

John Ringo’s Strands of Sorrow is the concluding novel to his Black Tide Rising series about the outbreak of a highly infectious zombie plague and how the survivors manage to fight back and re-establish some semblance of civilization. Much of the plot revolves around the problems caused by the rescue of senior civilian and military personnel who aren’t well-equipped (emotionally or mentally) to deal with the zombie hordes, which eventually forces the Smith sisters (better known to their compatriots as Shewolf and Seawolf) into a desperate act to keep things from sliding back into Hell. Recommended.

Not quite on the same topic, but still decent reading, is Sam Schall’s Duty from Ashes, the sequel to Vengeance from Ashes. In this second book, Major Ashlyn Shaw and her Marines get to take the fight to the enemy…but there are forces behind the scenes that Major Shaw and her superiors don’t even suspect are there. Good brain candy at a decent price.

On a completely unrelated subject, there’s Mike Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, a collection of jokes, quips and occasionally serious material that much like South Park has something to offend everyone. if you follow Mike on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a lot of this before, but it is handy to have it all in one place.

Also in the non-fiction category is Stanley G. Payne’s Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Professor Payne has a reputation as the foremost American scholar of Fascism and its derivative philosophies, and if this book is any example of his other works, it’s a well-deserved reputation. He spends much of the book pointing out the differences in origin, philosophy, and effects of Italian Fascism, German Naziism, and Spanish Falangism, to say nothing of dozens of other movements often called fascist, whether they were or not. Worth reading, if only to gather ammunition against leftards abusing a term which has a very specific meaning.

Finally, one of the nominees on the Sad Puppies list is John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, and it’s true: this tale begins long after most other fairy tales end, with its hero a middle-aged man whose childhood adventures are a faded memory. I found Wright’s tale wrenching and touching by turns, and wish he’d spent more words showing us what happened instead of having Tommy relate some of the events as he’s talking to the friends he’s trying to recruit into another adventure; at times, the writing style verges on the Lovecraftian. Still, it’s a grand little tale, and I can’t recommend it enough.