Category: Books

— by Wombat-socho

You might think that with St. Patrick’s Day (or as we Irish like to call it, Amateur Night) coming up, this post would be about Irish authors, books about the various Irish Brigades, and suchlike things. Maybe next year.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Things have slowed up in the tax mines, so I’ve actually been able to get some reading done. The book I’ve been spending most of my time on these past couple of weeks is James Blish’s Cities In Flight, the classic collection of his novels about the Okie cities, entire Earth cities freed from a tyrannical Bureaucratic State by antiagathic drugs and the spindizzy, an antigravity device that can serve as a spaceship drive but is much more effective grouped together to lift an entire city and its industries. Written between 1950 and 1962, the four novels (They Shall Have Stars, A Life For The Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph Of Time) for the most part deal with the adventures of New York, New York and its mayor, John Amalfi, as they wander through human space doing jobs for various human colonies that don’t yet have enough of an industrial base to do those jobs themselves. They Shall Have Stars is a prelude to these adventures, describing how the last and greatest American engineering project, the Bridge on Jupiter, leads to the invention of the spindizzy and to the founding of the first extrasolar colonies. I personally prefer Earthman Come Home, which pits New York against several historical enemies of humanity: the rump of the Hruntan Empire, the legendary Vegan orbital fort, and finally, the most notorious Okie city of all, hiding in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. 

Thunder Run is the sixth of Peter Nealen’s Maelstrom Rising series of technothrillers, and it moves the action back to Poland, where apparently the Russians (at least some of them) may be getting more involved in the EU/Poland War, and not in a way that benefits the Poles. Haven’t finished it quite yet, perhaps because it’s a little too close to reality at the moment.

Inferno by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle is an audacious reboot of Dante’s Divine Comedy – well, the first third of it, anyway. Allen Carpentier is an SF writer who winds up in Hell after a stupid drinking bet goes awry, and he spends a good part of the book frustrating his guide by insisting that no, this isn’t really Hell…until he is forced to realize that yes, this is actually Hell, he’s actually in it, but there’s a way out. Along the way we meet all kinds of sinners, some of a kind unknown to Dante Alighieri but plenty that he’d recognize just fine, even if the sins have been slightly updated to keep up with the times. The sequel, Escape From Hell, follows Carpenter* on a second journey through Hell as he tries to guide other repentant sinners out. His companion is Sylvia Plath, who he has to free from the Wood of the Suicides, and they meet more Americans along the way down…including some folks from the first book (and otherwise) who have taken jobs in Hell and seem content to do so.  I find I like the sequel better than I did when it first came out, and wonder if I simply read it too fast to appreciate some of the things that happened. Well, the book (almost) ends with a bang when Allen and Sylvia meet a famous physicist in the Ninth Circle, but all’s well that ends well, and Escape From Hell definitely does. 

What can one say of the mighty P’thok, Gilgamesh of the Trea’nad people, who stole ice cream and cigarettes from the ferocious feral monkey-boys of Terrasol and changed his people forever? What can one say of P’thok, who singlehandedly (and entirely on purpose!) saved Christmas? One can say, buy the P’thok Chronicles and RTWT!  The best part of the book, of course, is that it is merely the introduction to Ralts Bloodthorne’s epic First Contact tale, which is over 400 chapters long at this point and can be found on the r/HFY forum of Reddit. Imagine a space opera full of high technology, evil on a scale barely comprehensible by the human mind, courage, cowardice, deranged humans cosplaying as Orks and Hello Kitty 40K characters and superheroes in real life, one last mad immortal cyborg warrior who just wants to be left alone, not one but several flavors of Berserkers…if Doc Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Keith Laumer, Gene Roddenberry, and Fred Saberhagen had had their brains uploaded to one mighty WordBorg, perhaps they might have produced something like this epic. Gloriously pulpy, loaded with violence both up close & personal as well as big enough to shatter entire stellar systems, and yet occasionally…there is tenderness, love, and tragic sacrifice to be found. I can’t wait for the whole thing to come out as a series of books someday.

*This is not a typo.  

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

These last few months have been largely taken up with getting ready for tax season, but now that the season is underway and I’m spending several nights a week in Las Vegas between shifts in the tax mines, I’m finding more time to read. Also, Amazon seems to have killed off the Prime Lending Library in favor of folding everyone into the Kindle Unlimited program, and I feel the need to take advantage of that.
Song of the Day
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

What with the election of the Potted Plant of the United States (PPOTUS) and his many Chicom connections, I had to stop reading Divided We Fall, because it was just getting too damned dark for me in the current circumstances. Not all of the stories are grim tales of struggle against a panopticon state whose tentacles control every aspect of life in a future socialist America, but enough of them were to make me decide to save the book for better times.

In contrast to the preceding anthology, the struggle for freedom hasn’t been decided yet in Fortress Doctrine, the fifth of Peter Nealen’s Maelstrom Rising books. Pivoting back to the home front from the European theater action in Strategic Assets, the Triarii and local militia are trying to hold the Texas border against the cartels and possibly the Mexican Army, while Washington wrings its hands and los chales exploit their connections with the cartels and politicians willing to look the other way for a fistful of renminbi. Nealen is getting better with each book; like Tom Clancy before him, he’s able to keep the action rolling on the tactical level while keeping you in tune with the bigger picture. Highly recommended. 

On a more cheerful note, the Keith Laumer Super Pack from the Positronic Super Pack series is a good combination of Laumer’s Retief stories, some non-Retief stories such as “It Could Be Anything”, “Cocoon”, and “End As A Hero”, the early Bolo story “Night of the Trolls, and two complete novels: Worlds Of The Imperium and A Trace of Memory. Quite a deal for just $1.99, especially since it includes what may be the best Retief story, “Diplomat At Arms”. 

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— by Wombat-socho

Having completed my life or death struggle with the new microwave (to say nothing of the FMJRA), I greet you with some books suitable for what’s left of the long weekend. First out of the gate is Tom Kratman’s latest (and perhaps last) book in the Carreraverse, Days of Burning, Days of Wrath, in which the man formerly known as Patrick Hennessey exacts his final revenge on the people ultimately responsible for the death of his wife and children. As with Jerry Pournelle’s Mamelukes, it would be fine if Kratman stopped here, with the boot of the UN Fleet finally removed from the necks of the Terra Novan people, and revolution sweeping the Tauran Union into the dustbin of history, but the possibility of his son Hamilcar leading a fleet to liberate Earth can’t be ruled out, and would be most welcome.

After having read SPOTREPS, I went back to read Escalation, which is the first of the Maelstrom Rising series by Peter Nealen. It’s a very different book. First of all, unlike the anthology, which is full of stories about the U.S. sliding into another civil war, with the active encouragement of Red China, Escalation is more of a “20 minutes into the future” technothriller, with not much techno but plenty of thriller. A Triarii special ops unit in the Balkans to retrieve a captured American soldier runs into unexpected (and very lethal) difficulties as the European Union sucker-punches the American regular forces in Slovenia on their way to deal with the recalcitrant Slovaks. The Triarii have to nursemaid a horribly undertrained American mech platoon and the survivors of the EU attack on one of the American forward operating bases as they attempt to evade the EU forces and retreat to Poland. Very good writing in the tradition of Tom Clancy, and there were several points in Escalation that reminded me of Clancy’s Clear & Present Danger. Recommended.

Larry Correia’s Destroyer of Worlds, the third novel in his Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series, is out; I have a copy but haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet. Ditto for Peter Nealen’s Holding Action, the sequel to Escalation, and Cracked, which bills itself as an anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories. Hope it doesn’t lay an egg.  I’ll be on the road next week, traveling to the Emergency Holographic Convention in Clarksville, and may pick up more reading material there.In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read before then, there’s a 99 cent sale going on that may have something you like.

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— by Wombat-socho

Leonard Wibberley is best known for his hilarious Cold War comedy The Mouse That Roared, which was later made into a fine movie starring Peter Sellers, but today I want to talk about a more serious Wibberley novel, The Centurion. The novel is about the Roman centurion, Longinus, who appears at several points in the Gospel, most notably when he pleads with Jesus to save his dying servant, and again during the Passion when he bears witness to Christ’s divinity. Wibberley shows us the man behind the legend, a man with the thankless job of maintaining the peace in this troublesome province of the Roman Empire, filled with people who hate and fear the Romans only slightly less than they hate each other. Longinus has served Rome for decades, and when we meet him, he is a man without dreams or ambition, who just wants to do his job, but there’s this Jewish rabbi wandering around preaching and performing miracles…stirring up the people and making procurator Pontius Pilate worried. In addition to Longinus, we also meet Jesus and his disciples, the latter of which are a long way from being the saints and legends they’ll become. It is because Longinus seeks Jesus’ help that Pilate puts him in charge of the crucifixion detail, and ultimately, gives him charge of the detail watching the grave as well. It is not a cheerful novel; no account of the Passion could be, but it is nonetheless a novel full of hope, and one that will make you think. Recommended.

Give Me LibertyCon is an all-star anthology done as a benefit for the scholarship fund named for the late founder of LibertyCon, Tim Bolgeo. There’s a lot of Tuckerizing going on here, and I probably would have enjoyed the collection more if I knew who even half of these people were.

I’m not quite done with Noir Fatale, edited by Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell, because I can only read so much noir SF/fantasy at a time. If that’s your thing, you’ll really like Noir Fatale, and if not, you should look elsewhere. Maybe at SPOTREPS, a collection of near-future combat SF concerned with a low-intensity war between Red China and the U.S., with an expy for Antifa on the side of the Chinese and a motley crew of local police, sheriffs, and militia doing most of the fighting. Edited by Peter Nealen, SPOTREPS has stories by Larry Correia, Brad Torgerson, and my buddy Jonathan LaForce, who cleverly sneaks a romance into the middle of a militia forward observer team making the lives of the “assisting” Red Chinese miserable by reaching out and touching them with 155mm artillery. Recommended.

I’m still following Komi Can’t Communicate, whose eighth volume is due out next week, because it’s a really touching story about a girl who can’t talk to people except through her phone or by writing on her notepad. There is the usual assortment of weird high-school classmates to lighten things up, but the main plot is about her normal classmate Tadano helping Komi reach her goal of making 100 friends.

As you all know, I’m hopelessly addicted to the mobile game Fate/Grand Order. If mobile games aren’t your thing, and you don’t want to wade through the jungle of visual novels, anime, and whatnot that make up the Fate franchise, I recommend Fate/Grand Order – Mortalis: Stella, the first in a series of manga that explain how little old no-talent you and your confused kouhai got drafted to (literally) save the world.  Does a good job of pulling together some details that aren’t immediately clear in the game or are dealt with there in flashbacks. Recommended. On the other hand, Today’s Menu For The Emiya Family is a weird combination of manga and cookbook in which the many characters of Fate/Stay Night come by and help with dinner. If you like cookbooks with slice-of-life stories in between the recipes, this is the kind of manga you will like.

Next week, if all goes well, the final (maybe) novel in Tom Kratman’s Carreraverse and some other stuff.

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

One of the recurring tropes in science fiction (and pulp fiction as well) is the Yellow Peril, the notion that America is in danger from the Asian hordes – originally Chinese, but later Japanese, and now Chinese again – whose fiendish plots are foiled only by heroic deeds, super-science, or both. Or neither; the literature is full of tales where the United States has been utterly defeated, and only scattered bands of Americans fight on against the Asiatic occupiers.

The most famous of these is, of course, Philip Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419, which introduces us to Anthony “Buck” Rogers, veteran of the Great War and hero of the Second American Revolution. Rogers wakes from a 500-year-long sleep induced by a radioactive gas pocket to find that the United States he knew is long dead, but scattered gangs of Americans carry on the war against the decadent Han, having developed new technologies to aid them in the fight. Rogers brings to the table forgotten tactics  that prove lethally useful, and provides a leader the mutually suspicious gangs can follow. Nowlan’s original novel and its sequel (The Airlords Of Han) are both available for free on amazon and through Project Gutenberg, but the Ace paperback edition combines them into one novel. Speaking of the Ace edition, when the Buck Rogers TV series became popular, Ace hired Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle to come up with a series of outlines for four sequel novels: Mordred (written by John Eric Holmes) , Warrior’s Blood, Warrior’s World (both by Roger McEnroe), & Rogers’ Rangers (by John Silbersack). Since these sequels are all based on Nowlan’s novel (with some slight tweaks from Niven & Pournelle) they don’t have much to do with the TV show, but that’s okay – the TV show didn’t have much to do with the book. Fun, quick reads for cheap; if they were doing them these days, they’d probably be a lot longer.

I really wanted to like Buck Rogers: A Life In The Future, by Martin Caidin. I really did. Unfortunately, Caidin plays fast and loose with the original plot, and instead of Anthony Rogers leading the gangs of America to victory against the Han, instead he gets dragged along on a number of pointless adventures and meaningless contests, and zzzzz…oh, sorry. The worst part of all this is that Caidin is a decent writer who’s written a bunch of exciting books, and this just feels like he phoned it in to TSR. Not recommended.

Meanwhile, back in the 1940s, Robert Heinlein wrote Sixth Column, based on an idea given to him by John W. Campbell, and the odds are even longer in this one than in the Buck Rogers novels. Not only are the conquering PanAsians well on their way toward setting up a global totalitarian state, the only opposition left is a handful of scientists and soldiers led by a former ad executive drafted into uniform. Fortunately, they have a super-science gizmo to end all gizmos, and that Old Time Religion. Sort of. It’s only Heinlein’s second novel, but you wouldn’t know it. Recommended.

The Bear & The Dragon was Tom Clancy’s last novel, and if I remember correctly the last 20% was actually finished by Mark Greaney, which might account for all the swearing and sex that some of the reviewers complained about…anyhow, this is set in the Ryanverse, with Jack Ryan as President, and an assassination attempt in Moscow is just the start of the bad news here, because Red China intends to succeed where the Japanese failed and seize the Northern Resource Area (Siberia) for themselves. This is a good, if dated, mix of spy novel and technothriller, culminating in a clash between Red Chinese mechanized forces and Russian/American armor while the U.S. Air Force and PVO Strany have a turkey shoot against the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. Not the best of Tom  Clancy’s books, even in the Ryanverse, but good enough brain candy.

Have a favorite Yellow Peril novel I’ve overlooked? Mention it in the comments!

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