Category: Books

— by Wombat-socho

 

Welcome back to the continued trashing of what may be the worst list of recommended SF not published on Tor.com. I’ve been noodling over this post for most of the week, cudgeling my brain for good space opera, because in contrast to Ryan & Finney, who broke their list into “A Place To Begin”, “Military Focused”, “Social Focused”, and “Mind Expanding”, I am keeping it relatively simple by denying that there is a difference between good combat SF and socially-focused SF, because as I said last week, the whole point of combat SF is to examine the effect of war on people and their societies, noting in passing that the “people” in question are not always human. There’s a rather famous Harry Turtledove story, “The Road Not Taken”, in which a bunch of aliens (who have developed anti-gravity and the stardrive but otherwise are stuck with 17th century technology) attempt an invasion of contemporary Earth, which fails horribly because muskets and pikes are no match for modern mechanized infantry, and their flyers are hopelessly outclassed by F-15s. 

So this week we’re going to look at combat SF that takes place in space, or as some folks like to call it, space opera. Like so many things in SF, space opera clearly begins with E.E. “Doc” Smith, and his two epic series. The Skylark novels begin as a kidnapped damsel in distress story and end with an apocalyptic war of oxygen-based life against chlorine-breathing aliens from a different galaxy in which psionic powers are used to teleport suns across millions of light years to trigger novae in the hostile aliens’ home systems. Along the way, we’re introduced to several alien races, most of them humanoid, and get a good look at their societies, which are inevitably changed (usually for the better) by the advent of our hero, Dr. Richard Seaton, and his friends. This gets expanded to a grander scale with the Lensman series, which begins with Triplanetary and really hits its stride when we meet Kimball Kinnison in First Lensman, which seems at first to be merely a tale of a galactic police agency fighting a war against a drug cartel, but turns out to be much more. 

Despite being heavily involved in the aerospace industry, Jerry Pournelle didn’t write about any space battles in the CoDominium/Empire of Man universe until The Mote In God’s Eye, but between him and Larry Niven, they turned in an outstanding example of the genre, especially if you include the deleted section later published as “Reflex”. Probably the only better such story set in that universe is Don Hawthorne’s “The Face Of The Enemy”, published in one of the War World anthologies, and in some ways a foreshadowing of our next subject.

Your fleet has been lured to the enemy’s home system under the pretext of peace talks, but during the talks the enemy executes the fleet’s senior leadership. The admiral commanding the fleet has left you in command, but you’ve just awakened from a century-long snooze in cold sleep aboard a survival pod. During that time your heroic last stand in the opening days of the war made you a hero to your people – their Arthur, their Holger Danske – and much of your fleet believes that you’ve been sent by the living stars to save them in this dark hour. What now, Captain Geary? So begins The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, the first of Jack Campbell’s excellent series about “Black Jack” Geary outthinking and outfighting the Syndic fleets as well as officers in his own Alliance fleet who don’t want to change the way they’ve learned to fight as the decades rolled on and things like fleet tactics were forgotten. There’s also a bigger problem (no, not the complicated relationship between Senator Rione, Captain Geary, and the skipper of the Dauntless, Captain Desjani, which does give our hero some serious migraines) that could spell the end of both the Alliance and the Syndic Worlds. Campbell does an outstanding job portraying the troubles involved in leading a fleet that initially acts more like a barbarian warband (as Raj Whitehall might say) than a coherent fleet, the headaches of logistics involved in operating behind enemy lines, and the feeling of desperately trying to get up to speed on a century’s worth of progress – and sometimes, all too often, regress. Highly recommended. 

No list of space opera would be complete without the Salamander. The tale of a far-future Horatio Hornblower begins with On Basilisk Station, Harrington’s first command and since then has expanded to fourteen books in the main sequence, two sets of prequels, and at least one other side series – forgive me, I pretty much lost interest and track of the Honorverse after Weber failed to kill her off like Lord Nelson at Trafalgar. So much the worse for me. Still, unlike Forester’s stories of the misanthropic Royal Navy captain, Weber gets heavily into the politics, not only of Harrington’s own Kingdom of Manticore but also her adopted world, the Protectorate of Grayson, on whose originally theocratic society she has a considerable impact. That having been said, while Forester rarely showed Hornblower in other than single-ship actions, Weber treats us to many, many scenes of squadrons, groups, wings, and fleets in combat described in loving detail, while describing in passing the effects of Manticoran and the Republic of Haven societies on their fleets. It honestly doesn’t get any better than this. 

Next week, we’ll talk about the groundpounders, tankers, Mobile Infantry, and suchlike people.

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— by Wombat-socho

(A Bronkowitz Films Production)
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Salaryman Yoshida gets turned down by a woman at work and takes it hard – he promptly goes out and gets trashed in a local bar. On his way home, he finds Sayu, a runaway teenager sitting on the curb who offers to sleep with him in exchange for being allowed to stay at his apartment. Yoshida is revolted by the idea of taking advantage of Sayu and makes a counter-offer: she can stay at his pace, but she has to work. And no sex! Our hero is determined to get Sayu’s head screwed back on straight, but his problems are just beginning – his protégé at work seems awfully interested in him (and not in a professional way) and the woman who rejected him is having second thoughts. Higehiro is the manga version of a successful light novel series, and shows quite a bit of promise. 

Komi Can’t Communicate, on the other hand, is up to its 15th volume, and our heroine is making slow but steady progress towards her goal of making 100 friends – no easy thing for a girl that can barely manage to hold a conversation with her closest friends and communicates with most people by writing on her notepad. Her icily standoffish classmate Kiyoko is running for class president – will supporting her get Komi another friend – or a bitter enemy? I am enjoying this series tremendously, because I remember very well what it was like to be socially awkward in high school, and also because the slowly developing Komi/Tadano relationship is just so darn cute. Highly recommended.

She may not be a Japanese schoolgirl, but Richard Sharpe’s lady Teresa is in more trouble than usual – the fierce Spanish partisan “La Aguja” (the Needle) is trapped inside the French-held fortress of Badajoz, the object of Wellington’s attention, with her daughter by Sharpe, and the prospect of being in a city stormed by the British Army isn’t a pleasant one, even for the armed and very dangerous Teresa. As if that weren’t bad enough, Lieutenant Sharpe’s gazette to Captain has been denied, and his old enemy Sergeant Hakeswill has shown up with the South Essex’ new colonel and a captain who’s bought Sharpe’s position as commander of the Light Company. Still, this is Richard Sharpe, and you know in the end that the South Essex’ Light Company will be, as it always was, Sharpe’s Company. This is one of the better books in the series by Bernard Cornwell, and full of juicy historical tidbits from the Napoleonic Wars. 

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

As usual, the senile fool in the Oval Office tried to have it both ways, issuing proclamations celebrating both Columbus Day (yay) and Indigenous Peoples Day (F*** Joe Biden) and inevitably annoying just about everybody.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Meanwhile at Instapundit, the Blogfather links to and quotes from Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s epic biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which sadly is not available on Kindle – but you should really get the dead tree edition anyway, because the maps are a lot easier to read that way. To satisfy the people who are always yapping about that loser short-timer Leif Ericsson, I also recommend Morison’s The European Discovery Of America: The Northern Voyages 500-1600 A.D.,  which is a delightful book that includes not only accounts of the aforementioned Norseman’s voyages but also Henry Hudson, Amerigo Vespucci, and dozens of others. But wait! There’s more! As if that wasn’t enough, Morison also includes chapters on apocryphal/mythical voyages by St. Brendan and Prince Madoc of Wales, the Kensington Runestone, and imaginary islands of the Atlantic that appeared on many maps during the Age of Exploration and in some cases persisted into the 20th century.  

In addition to his discovery of IndiaNew Spain, Columbus and his Spanish employers also gave rise to one of the wilder and most memorable episodes of history, to say nothing of dozens of movies and novels – the infamous Pirates of the Caribbean, which people have come to associate more with Johnny Depp’s rum-addled Captain jack Sparrow than, say, Sabatini’s Captain Blood, so memorably portrayed on film by Errol Flynn. But list now – what if I were to advert to you that there existed a book that told all the wild tales of buccaneering rolled into one with music by Korngold, villains more villainous than anything Sabatini or Farnol could have dreamed of, bodacious babes (some of them in quite fetching leopard-skin tracksuits) and insane acts of bravery all turned up to 11? Who, you ask, could possibly have the chops to carry off something so incredibly larger than life? None other than the creator of Harry Flashman himself, George Macdonald Fraser! The Pyrates is a ripping yarn, full of sly digs at English society (17th and 20th century), Hollywood, trade unions, and the whole genre of pirate tales & movies as well. If this book can’t cheer you up, consult a physician to see if you are already dead. 

It’s been a long time since I read Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series, so I downloaded Dauntless and Fearless this weekend and got stuck in. En route to a peace conference in Syndic space, an Alliance fleet finds a survival pod holding an officer thought dead for a century – Commander John Geary, whose sacrifice in an early battle led to his being posthumously promoted to Captain and turned into a legend – “Black Jack Geary”. While Geary slept, the war has eroded the Alliance fleet and its members – tactics and skills have been forgotten, ships built cheaply and quickly out of desperation, morals abandoned – and he finds himself very much out of place and very disturbed that everyone seems to regard him as a legendary savior. It’s not Geary’s fate to be allowed to adapt in his own good time, though – before departing for the peace conference, the fleet’s admiral puts Geary in charge in case something goes awry. Needless to say, it does – the conference was a trap, and the Admiral is shot down in cold blood, as the Syndics expect a decapitating strike will paralyze the Alliance fleet. Not with “Black Jack” in charge, though. The series recounts Geary’s journey back to Alliance space with his fleet, evading superior numbers of Syndic warships while wreaking havoc in their rear areas and bringing his subordinates and education in tactics and strategy to match their unquestionable (if occasionally excessive) courage. High-quality space opera with solid characters. Highly recommended. 

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— by Wombat-socho

When last we visited the Tonopah town library, I was fortunate enough to find Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files anthology Brief Cases; this time I found a copy of Galaxy: Thirty Years Of Innovative Science Fiction. Essentially a compilation of the various Galaxy Reader anthologies published throughout the 1950s and 60s, with some stories from the 1970s added, this is a good sampler of the kind of SF that Galaxy published until its demise in the late 1970s. Edited by former editor Fred Pohl along with Martin Greenburg and Joseph Olander, this is an all-star collection of stories from the magazine that was founded as a deliberate counterpoint to John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, and includes short stories by Isaac Asimov, Algis Budrys, Jerome Bixby, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and many other outstanding authors. Out of print, but used copies are widely available for cheap.

Alexis Gilliland is probably better known as a BNF* and cartoonist, but the man could write. In addition to the excellent Rosinante trilogy, he penned a fantasy trilogy about the adventures of the water mage** and (reluctant) adviser to royalty Wizenbeak. W.W. Wizenbeak is originally sent off to the northern wastes to found a farming colony for the kingdom of Guhland, but just as he manages to get things started, a civil war breaks out and he finds himself the target of the vengeful Witchfinder General and protector of the heirs to the throne. Managing to survive this and place his apprentice on the throne as Regent, Wizenbeak finds his troubles have only begun in the sequel, The Shadow Shaia, and they only get worse in the trilogy’s conclusion, Lord of the Troll-Bats.*** Unfortunately, the latter two books aren’t available from Amazon, but you can find them very easily and somewhat inexpensively through Alibris, which a lot of used book stores deal with in preference to Amazon. The flavor of the trilogy is more Three Musketeers than the usual medieval elf & dwarf crap (N.B.: there are no elves or dwarves in the trilogy, but there are dragons) and there’s plenty of political skulduggery if you like that sort of thing, and I strongly recommend it.

Since I’m currently in a protracted struggle with the 1969 major league baseball rosters, it occurs to me that I should recommend a few of my favorite baseball books. starting with Bill James’ New Historical Baseball Abstract. This is a huge mulligan stew of a book, containing snapshots of baseball history through the decades, spiced with sly jokes, amusing and terrifying anecdotes about the players, and pages upon pages of comments about the hundred best players at each position. Since it’s not trying to be the exhaustive reference book that Total Baseball is, the Kindle edition is probably okay, more so if big thick books strain you arms and your bookshelves. Another excellent read from Bill James is Whatever Happened To The Hall Of Fame? Frankly, I liked the original title, The Politics Of Glory, better, but it’s not my book so I don’t get a say. Anyhow, this is a history of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the players elected to it, and how they got there, along with some ways of thinking about what players are likely to go into the Hall, what players probably should have been elected, and quite a few players who arguably don’t belong there but were lucky enough to have friends in the right places. All of the preceding will probably piss people off, along with his comments on the Negro League players (in the Hall and out), but like almost all of Bill’s books, it will make you think. 

There are three newer editions of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four out there, not to mention the sequel I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, which is mostly about the screams of outrage and other reactions to the original book, which is a fun and funny look at Bouton’s season with the hapless expansion Seattle Pilots and contending Houston Astros in 1969 as a knuckleball pitcher. The great thing about Ball Four, you see, is that Bouton told the truth – he didn’t sugarcoat anything, he didn’t lie, and quite a few people – not all of them his teammates – never forgave him for it. 

There has been very little good baseball fiction, in my opinion. Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association is the kind of self-indulgent mainstream garbage you would expect from a third-rate Professor of Literary Arts at a second-rate Ivy League school, so of course the critics loved it. The UBA is the creation of a miserable accountant who loses himself in a self-invented baseball game and becomes entirely too wrapped up in his fantasies about the imaginary players in the eponymous early 20th-century league. Couldn’t finish it. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is better, but still a downer with a depressing ending; the movie with Robert Redford is orders of magnitude better. On the other hand, W.P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is arguably better than his better known Shoeless Joe, perhaps because it’s less tied down to reality. A tale of one man’s quest to prove that a 2000-inning game between the 1908 World Champion Chicago Cubs and the amateur players of the I.B.C. actually happened, this surrealistic tale immerses you in the superstitions of the age and takes you on a strange trip into a fantastic world where a good-natured challenge leads to a seemingly endless nightmare – and yet, all ends well, for almost everyone concerned. I was also amused by his story collection Box Socials, which is mostly about small-town semi-pro baseball players and their lives off the diamond. 

*Big Name Fan.
**”Like a civil engineer, except with spells instead of bulldozers,” as one reviewer put it.
***How was this not a Meat Loaf album title? Jim Steinman, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, first some good news from Atlanta and points north: Larry Correia and John Brown took the Dragon for best Military SF novel with Gun Runner, while Eric Flint & Charles Gannon won Best Alternate History novel for 1637: No Peace Beyond The Line. (via Baen Books on MeWe). It looks like the intrusion of Pink Goo/Hugo/Nebula-style SF into the awards last year was a one-off thing, which is Good. Also, per David Drake’s newsletter, the good news is that he doesn’t have Parkinson’s after all; the bad news is that whatever ails him is affecting his interest in/ability to write, so we may not be seeing anything new from him for a while.*
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Thanks to the generosity of the commentariat, I bought a mess of books over the last couple of months and actually read many of them; in addition, I finally got around to visiting the historic Tonopah Town Library, about more which anon; suffice it to say for now that their SF section is a confused, eclectic mess, but bringing it up to speed and enlarging it is now on my rather lengthy to-do list; I am also looking into giving them the ability to lend out e-books, which they don’t currently have.

So let’s take it from the top. Kurt Schlichter’s The Split is the sixth of the Kelly Turnbull novels set in a future America where the red and blue states have peacefully gone their separate ways, but the peace is more de jure than de facto, which is where Kelly comes in. This book has him on a mission to Boston to recover a software package from a mad MIT professor, but other people are looking for it too, and soon enough he gets tangled up with some bank robbers from Southie and in some nasty infighting among the blue state factions. As usual in the Turnbull novels, a lot of people wind up dead, but in the end it all works out for the best. If you liked the first five books in the series, you’re going to like this one too.

Speaking of Larry Correia as I was previously, Monster Hunter Bloodlines is out, and while I really liked Guardian (which was mostly written by Sarah Hoyt), Larry is really at the top of his form here. MHI and the Monster Control Bureau are both on the trail of a powerful artifact that’s being traded from one batch of evil scum to another, but it gets jacked by a shape-shifting fifth party who turns out to be a half-Japanese teenage yokai with blood ties to MHI. Hilarity and violence ensue, a major battle at the MHI compound involving everybody from Owen and Julie and Earl to Melvin the troll and the legion of uplifted lab rats goes down, and the book culminates in an audience with a queen of the Fae in Brazil where we finally discover former Special Task Force Unicorn honcho Stricken’s true name…unless he’s lying. Guess we’ll have to tune in for book 9! Two gory thumbs up for Bloodlines, which was well worth the $31 I paid to get it autographed at Uncle Hugo’s, which is still raising funds for rebuilding. 

I thought from the description that Sarah Hoyt’s Other Rhodes was going to be a screwball comedy, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is a noir tale set in a future where cyborgs are illegal, harboring one is equally illegal – but Lily Gilden’s only clue to the disappearance of her private detective husband is the crazy cyborg in her airlock claiming to be a fictional detective from the videogame she and her husband used to play. The situation forces her to play Archie Goodwin to the cyborg’s Nero Wolfe, and plunges her into a nightmarish underworld she hadn’t even dreamed existed. Four smoking blasters out of five; available on KU if you just want to borrow and not buy.

Bob Zimmerman of the Behind The Black blog sent me a review copy of Conscious Choice, and I somehow managed to lose the damn thing. This was awkward, since I’d promised him a review, so I went ahead and spent the $4 in the faint hope that Murphy would reveal where the original was. (He didn’t.) Still, $4 was a real deal, because this by God is a righteous Swiss Army knife of a book. Not only is it a concise and very readable history of how and why slavery became an established part of society in the Southern states, it further explains why “the Peculiar Institution” did not also take root in the Northern states. Zimmerman never uses Andrew Breitbart’s line about politics being downstream from culture, but he doesn’t have to – his history of Virginia colonial politics in the 17th century pounds that fact right up your snout. There’s no way to avoid it. The failure of the Virginia Royalists to encourage solid family structures, supported by religious and educational establishments, led directly to the poisoned seed of slavery taking root in the Virginia plantations, and later in the rest of the Southern states as well. It may seem quite a jump from 17th century Virginia to 21st century space exploration, but Zimmerman’s logic regarding the many flaws of the Outer Space Treaty and its likelihood to produce equally poisoned fruit is difficult to argue against, and I for one am not even going to make the effort. This book is useful for refuting the lies of the 1619 Project, for understanding the breakdown of civil society and public order in America today, and ultimately as a call to arms against allowing the same defects to poison the final frontier. Buy this and read it. 

Sometimes you can’t go home again, and so it was with Don Pendleton’s Executioner series. I blew through the first two books but found the third a struggle, and since I was reading these for fun, I put it down and didn’t go back. I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of paperbacks when I find the box they’re in. 

Things From Outer Space, edited by Hank Davis, is a mixed bag – there’s some good stuff like David Drake’s “The Hunting Ground” and the original alien horror SF tales, Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out Of Space” and Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”, but there’s a lot of stuff that frankly just isn’t in the same league as the foregoing. 2.5 out of 5 tentacles. Brief Cases, on the other hand…Jim Butcher delivers. This collection of short stories from the Dresden Files is all thriller and no filler. They’re not all about Harry, but I think the ones about Molly may be the best of the lot, especially the one that takes her to Alaska for some OJT on her Winter Queen duties and an encounter with Warden Ramirez. That one hurt. 5/5; borrowed it from the town library, but may be buying my own copy soon. 

*I’m trying to be optimistic here.

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

It’s been a while since the last book post, and there’s good news for Civil War history aficionados, so let’s get to it.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

For the past few years, it’s been difficult to get hold of Bruce Catton’s Civil War histories unless you wanted to shell out for used hardbacks or paperbacks. Apparently somebody at Random House has come to their senses and recognized there’s a market for these newfangled e-book thingies, for Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War, which starts with The Coming Fury (an excellent analysis of the political fuckery that sparked the war), is now available for the Kindle. Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy is also now available, and Mr. Lincoln’s Army (Book 1 of the trilogy) is available on Kindle Unlimited in case you aren’t familiar with Catton’s style and want to dip your toe in the water. As if that wasn’t enough, his account of General Grant’s war years (Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command) is also available in a package deal. 

I am frankly unsure why Douglas Southall Freeman has the reputation he does. I tried reading Lee’s Lieutenants when I was younger, and compared to Bruce Catton, I found him turgid and prolix, on a par with the detail-obsessed official histories of the Army in WW2 that were nearly unreadable with their insistence on detailing what every single company of every single division was doing in (for example) the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest. Still, he had quite a reputation back in the day, and you can stick this, too, on your Kindle, and not throw out your back trying to lift the 400+ pages of the original edition.

On to things less serious. I am not much on mysteries, but I do like the noir genre, and the granddaddy of all the trenchcoat-clad private eyes out there is Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. Who is he? We never find out. The Continental Op is a nameless man working out of the Continental Detective Agency as an investigator. Murder is his business, and in San Francisco  in the 1920s, business is very good indeed. This collection of the fourteen stories involving the Continental Op is a good bargain, especially if you like this kind of thing. 

Then we have Sax Rohmer and his (in)famous Chinese super-villain, Fu Manchu. The Sax Rohmer collection by Halcyon Press includes 56 novels and short stories, but I had to struggle to make it through The Insidious Fu Manchu and when I was done had zero interest in reading more. Look, I cut my teeth on Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels,  so I don’t mind formulaic plots and cardboard characters, but the protagonists of the Fu Manchu novels are a couple of the biggest morons in adventure fiction. Granted, they are up against an extremely learned (and possibly quite ancient) SOOPER GENIUS, with an enormous army of criminals at his beck and call, but Nayland-Smith and his sidekick Dr. Petrie are constantly screwing up and carrying the Idiot Ball, falling into predicaments that would have left Mack Bolan or Frank Castle aghast at their stupidity. Frequently they are saved only through the intervention of Fu Manchu’s slave girl Karamaneh, who has inexplicably fallen in love with Dr. Petrie. You may like this kind of stuff, but it drove me nuts, and I plan on dumping it off my Kindle to make room for better stuff. Like War Against The Mafia. 

Returning to non-fiction, Ernst Junger’s The Storm Of Steel is not as well known as All Quiet on the Western Front, possibly because Junger’s book isn’t nearly as depressing as Remarque’s classic. Junger’s autobiographical account of his service on the Western Front in “The Great War” is horrifying, yes, and he spares you none of the horrors of trench warfare, but on the whole, he doesn’t regret having served and in fact considered it a transcendant experience. I’m not done with it yet, but it’s a good read. The link I’ve provided is to the original 1929 translation; there is a more recent “American English” translation, but in my honest opinion I think that’s a waste of money. 

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— by Wombat-socho

This was supposed to be done this weekend, but then I saw Hearts of Iron IV was on sale for a ridiculously low price, and I spent most of the weekend trying to revive the Roman Empire as Mussolini, because that’s who you get in the tutorial. Which ties in with the first book today, Peter Kemp’s Mine Were Of Trouble, an account of his experiences with the Carlist Requetes and the Spanish Foreign Legion. That right there makes it unusual; while Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia is merely the most famous of many accounts by various folks who fought for the Spanish Republic, Kemp’s is one of the few from a volunteer on the Nationalist side. A lot of what he says corroborates A.H. Lloyd’s Long Live Death, reviewed here previously, and it’s definitely interesting how his various aristocratic connections help get him into Spain and into an officer’s billet with the Requetes and then with the Legion, but what really sold the book to me is the episode late in the war when he tries to intercede for a captured Irishman who claimed to have been conscripted into one of the International Brigades.* I’ve read quite a bit about the Spanish Civil War, but nothing brought home the savage hatred of the Nationalist officers for the foreigners  who came to Spain to destroy everything they felt made Spain great in the name of Godless Communism as the lecture Kemp’s colonel delivers to him in the course of refusing to grant clemency to the prisoner – or Kemp’s discovery (via his company commander) that the colonel had sent men to see that Kemp followed his orders to execute the Irishman – and if he failed to do so, to shoot him as well as the prisoner. A rare and very interesting look at the Nationalist side, and well worth your time, even if Kemp initially comes off as Bertie Wooster without Jeeves. 

Someday Larry Correia will write a book that sucks, or collaborate with someone who sucks, but today is not that day. Gun Runner is a departure from Larry’s usual bill of fare; while there are monsters aplenty on the planet Swindle (a place so lethal it would give Harry Harrison’s Pyrrans from the Deathworld series pause),  the worst monsters are the humans running the place – the Warlord in particular. Former mech pilot Jackson Rook, a one-time war hero, takes a job training the Warlord to use the ultimate mecha, but winds up fighting for his life on behalf of a revolution to set the people of Swindle free. I’m leaving out a ton of stuff, but Larry and co-author John Brown do an incredible job building characters you care about and putting them through some very rough times. Very good read. 

I reread a couple of classic Heinlein novels, Starman Jones and Time Enough For Love, on the way home from DC, and they were every bit as good as I remember. Starman Jones is about Max Jones, a kid scraping out a living on a backcountry farm until his stepmother remarries an oafish bully and Max decides he’d be better off elsewhere. Fortunately for Max, he’s got an ace in the hole – his astrogator uncle left his books behind after a visit years ago, and Max memorized every page. So he heads off for Earthport, hoping his uncle left him a legacy – only to have the books stolen and discovering that his uncle forgot to submit Max’s name to the astrogators’ guild, Max manages to get a crew berth aboard the starship Asgard anyway, with the unlikely help of the hobo who stole Max’s books and the reward money for returning the books. From there, Max works his way up to the bridge crew as an astrogator trainee – and finds himself the only man who can save the ship after the chief astrogator dies, the captain (possibly) commits suicide following a misjump to a hostile planet, and the remaining astrogator gets himself killed. It’s up to Max to get the Asgard back using his photographic memory, because the astrogation books are missing. It’s a Heinlein juvenile, so you know it has a happy ending, but the fun is in getting there.

As for Time Enough For Love, which is in my opinion Heinlein’s last great novel, it’s really three separate tales about Lazarus Long, oldest member of the Howard Families (last seen in Methuselah’s Children, way back in the 1940s) who is busy trying to die after a  life measured in centuries, only to be rudely interrupted by his distant descendant the Secretary of the Families, who manages to convince him that there’s cool stuff he hasn’t done yet – and therefore he has a reason to live on. The second part of the book are tales of Lazarus’ adventures on a couple of frontier planets, and the third is the tale of his return to Kansas City right before the U.S. enters World War I. In between, you get the “Notebooks of Lazarus Long”, a collection of advice on various topics. Now, the book reads a lot faster if you skip the passages about sex, genetics, and math; while there’s nothing explicit/pornographic in the book, there’s a lot of talk about sex, so much so that the book gave rise to not one, but two bawdy filksongs, “Clone OF My Own”, and “The Ballad Of Lazarus Long”, the latter of which spoils the ending and the former spoils the part right before the third section. Maybe I’ll quote them in the comments. Maybe not. Anyway, after all this time, it’s still a good read, and for my money better then Friday and the rest of the junk that came after it. 

*The International Brigades had been folded into the Peoples’ Army by the time of the Ebro campaign, during which this incident took place, but one can forgive Kemp and his fellow Legionaries for not caring about minor organizational details. Foreigners fighting for the Republic were assumed to belong to the International Brigades and generally shot out of hand, unlike Spanish conscripts whose surrenders were almost always accepted. 

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