Category: Books

— by Wombat-socho

I became a fan of Jerry Pournelle’s SF back in 1972, when I read “The Mercenary” in Analog, and for the next 40+ years I snapped up pretty much everything he wrote in the way of SF, and quite a few of the anthologies he edited as well. One of those books, in the summer of 1979, was Janissaries, in which Rick Galloway and a handful of mercenaries are saved from certain death in Africa…by aliens. The aliens take them to the planet Tran, where they find several groups of humans from different ages of human history, and things begin to go sideways for Galloway at that point as most of his men desert him in favor of the more experienced Andre Parsons. Things eventually work out for Galloway, who consistently chooses the hard right over the easy wrong, and over the next two novels (co-written with Roland Green) he makes considerable headway toward raising the tech level on Tran, maneuvering in the lethal local politics, and getting started on growing the madweed the aliens want. Unfortunately, the third novel in the series came out in 1987, and while Pournelle announced periodic progress, Mamelukes never made it into print until after his death. I have to say that I wouldn’t have minded seeing it finished sooner, but David Weber and Philip Pournelle did a good job of wrapping the story up seamlessly. I for one can’t tell where Jerry’s writing left off and David & Philip picked up, and if they choose to let the series lay at this point, I’d be okay with it. On the other hand, there are a few plot threads that could be followed into a fifth (and, perhaps, concluding) novel, and we shall see what the Pournelle kids want to do with it. We know Jennifer has the chops for it, and perhaps Philip could do the fifth novel justice as well. Very much worth your time.

Rick Partlow’s Contact Front is an interesting mil-SF novel. Instead of the usual wholesome hero, we get a Marine who chooses to join the Confederation Marines to avoid facing trial for murder, and while Cam Alvarez proves to be really good at mastering the powered armor suits, he’s pretty awful at being a leader, and his struggles with the concept of taking responsibility for his Marines take up a good part of the novel in between a couple of furious combat actions. This was a good read, and I’m looking forward to checking the rest of the series out. Available on Kindle Unlimited.

I’m probably one of the last people in the world to get around to reading Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels, about Chicago’s only wizard for hire and his uneasy relationship with both the Chicago PD, local crimelord Johnny Marcone, and his nominal superiors in the White Council – to say nothing of all manner of supernatural critters, demons, vampires, and just plain Bad People. Right now I have some extra cash and plenty of free time, so I’m starting from the beginning and digging into what may be the most entertaining urban fantasy since I discovered Larry Correia’s Monster Hunters International series. So far I’m only up to book 3, Grave Peril, and Butcher does not disappoint. Looking forward to getting caught up on the other…fourteen books? Well, after moving out to the middle of nowhere (a/k/a Tonopah, NV) I’ll have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and work on my continuing education for next tax season, so I should have plenty of time to work on finishing the series.

So far nobody has taken me up on my offer regarding Uncle Bob’s Pursuit of the Pankera, and that’s all right with me, to be honest. Life is too short to be reading crappy books, unless you’re getting paid well for the effort.

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— by Wombat-socho

Since the end of tax season, I’ve been making up for lost time. I’m a little behind on my Kindle Lending Library borrows, but on the other hand, I had some spare cash this month after paying bills, and I spent it wisely. On books. For my Kindle, because I’m still not in my own space – yet. SOON.

Going to start with an oldie but a goodie – Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which used to be a technothriller but is now an alternate history thank to the Great Politics Mess-Up. On the off-chance you haven’t read this, it’s a great recounting of the Third World War that never was, sparked by a massive act of jihadi sabotage against a major Soviet oil refinery. While Larry Bond’s name isn’t on the cover, Clancy gave him (and Bond’s game Harpoon) a ton of credit in the foreword, and rightly so. Clancy manages to keep several plot lines on both sides moving all through the book, and foreshadows the great work he’d later do on the best books from the Ryanverse. Highly recommended.

Kurt Schlichter’s Kelly Turnbull novels remind me somewhat of Clancy’s tales of John Clark, if Clark had less empathy and more of a tendency to get shot up…anyhow, I binged Wildfire and Collapse last weekend, and they’re both good reads. Turnbull’s mission in the former is to stop a bunch of jihadis from releasing a particularly nasty variant of Ebola Marburg in the People’s Republic while pretending to be a PBI agent. Bonus points for the many humorous parts where Turnbull turns the genderfluid transracial & transsexual craziness of the PR against its bureaucrats. The latter reads uncomfortably like a near-future technothriller in which the corrupt rulers of the PR’s Pacific States are selling out to Red China to save their own hides from the starving masses; initially, Turnbull’s mission is to smuggle in an ace hacker to trash the control systems for the reactor aboard the former USS Theodore Roosevelt, but as so often happens, he and the very unwilling hacker find themselves headed for San Francisco along with a team of Rangers and a somewhat demented demo expert whose dream of blowing up the Golden Gate Bridge is about to come true.

Jerry Pournelle’s heirs are getting his last works finished up and on the market. The last third of the Heorot trilogy, Starborn & Godsons, co-written with Larry Niven & Steven Barnes, is out (and on my reading list), and the long-awaited Mamelukes  (finished by David Weber & Philip Pournelle) is due out next month. In the meantime, there is John Carr’s memorial anthology for Jerry, The Best Of Jerry Pournelle, which contains some of the best of Jerry’s short work, some of it in collaboration with Larry Niven (“Reflex” and “Spirals”) and some of it previously uncollected  – there’s a Wade Curtis story that somehow didn’t get picked up before, and Jerry’s contribution to The Last Dangerous Visions, which is still going to be published Real Soon Now. This is an excellent collection just on the basis of the stories, but there’s also a lot of tributes from Steven Barnes, Larry Niven, and others. Highly recommended.

I am unenthused about the release of Uncle Bob’s The Pursuit of the Pankera. I thought the original version (The Number of the Beast) was terrible and was glad I’d just borrowed it from the library. However, if someone wants to shell out the $10 (or loan me the book) so they can get my opinion, I’m willing to tackle it.

On a more positive note, a bunch of authors I respect are having a Memorial Day Weekend sale. I’ve reviewed a fair number of these books over the last few years, and you could easily pick up a lot of good reads for five bucks without even trying hard. Go forth and browse!

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– by Wombat-socho

Well, technically it’s early spring here in Las Vegas, but I’ve been dragging my feet on getting this done for literally months, for which I apologize. For once in my life I’ve been too tired, busy, depressed, and/or sick to read, which pretty much NEVER happens, but this last month or so of tax season has gotten me back in the saddle. So, for your reading pleasure:

The Last Straw – John C. Wright
John C. Wright’s review of the execrable movie The Last Jedi reminds me of the legendary quip by Mary McCarthy regarding Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “This is not a book that should be cast aside casually. Rather, it should be thrown with great force.” This is not to denigrate Mr. Wright’s review, which is a work both hilarious and depressing, but the movie it reviews, which is truly one of the worst things to come out of Hollywood since the all-female Ghostbusters. The Last Straw is hilarious, because Mr. Wright is a fine writer with a keen eye for the ridiculous (and oh, Lord, there is so much ridiculous about TLJ) and is a skilled wordsmith on a par with Chesterton, but it is also depressing, because for every stupid sentence of dialogue, every witless/wasted character, and every cringe-inducing meaningless action scene, he shows us what could have been in the hands of competent writers working for a producer who loved the original Star Wars trilogy – an outstanding action movie, with young characters we could have cherished, exchanging witty banter while fighting desperate odds for a meaningful victory. Unfortunately, we got Rian Johnson’s hideous bastardization of a beloved franchise. Console yourself with this book; unlike the movie, it is well worth your time and gold-pressed latinum.

The Compleat Martian Invasion: Earth’s Defense Awakens – John Taloni
There’s a subgenre of steampunk, or perhaps more correctly, Edisonades, which is made up of sequels to H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. These range in quality from the truly awful Edison’s Conquest of Mars to the tragic early issues of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with a detour sideways into parallel worlds with George H. Smith’s The Second War Of The Worlds and Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars. I am pleased to say that John Taloni’s entry into this subgenre is a good read, having a lot more in common with Moore and Niven. The plot involves a mission to recover Dr. Cavor from the Moon and its hostile inhabitants, and the creation of a corps of female space fighter pilots using the liftwood technology developed by a certain Serbian super-scientist. Meanwhile, John Carter and Dejah Thoris fight the Tripods on Mars, the mysterious Time Traveller makes an appearance, and the crowned heads of Europe unite behind their cousin Louise, Queen-Empress of England…or do they? This is a fun little book, entertaining brain candy that’s worth the borrowing from the Prime Lending Library.

The Last Dance – Martin L. Shoemaker
In the ancient mists of time, back in the 1930s, many SF novels were what’s now called “fix-ups”, collections of short stories knitted together to create a coherent novel. These days, with SF novels often being mistaken for doorstops, this isn’t as common, but Martin Shoemaker pulls it off nicely with The Last Dance, which frames several mysteries in the setting of a court-martial of what at first appears to be the 22nd-century version of Captain Bligh – Captain Aames, a martinet whose harsh criticism and rigid standards nonetheless attract a crew of spacers who would do anything for him, while giving the powers that be the cold shoulder. Shoemaker does an excellent job of writing a series of hard-SF mysteries while peeling back the onion of Captain Aames’ personality…and the old wound that helped make him the hard, unforgiving officer he is. Aames sounds like an unlikable asshole, but Shoemaker manages to make you see him as his crewmen see him, and that is a very different man indeed. Excellent book, highly recommended, especially if you like near-future hard SF.

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin – L. Jagi Lamplighter
As has been observed elsewhere, Ms. Lamplighter’s series of books about Rachel Griffin at Roanoke Academy have a very superficial resemblance to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales, but to dismiss them as just another knockoff of Rowling’s series would be a serious mistake. Jimbo’s review covers all the territory I would have, so RTWT. Then go read Rachel’s adventures. Well worth the time and money.

Komi Can’t Communicate – Tomohito Oda
I’ve become greatly enamored of this manga, which tells the story of Shouko Komi, a beautiful young girl who’s admired by all her classmates, who believe her aloof manner only enhances her beauty. What they don’t know is that Komi is desperately lonely and has enormous trouble saying anything to anyone , including her family. (There are indications that she may have inherited it from her father, but whether she’s merely excessively shy, autistic, or has some other problem is never explained.) This trouble begins to end when her classmate Tadano, perhaps the only ordinary boy in a class filled with weird kids, manages to engage her in conversation using the class blackboard. She expresses a desire to make one hundred friends during the year, and Tadano voews to help. A lot of us have had problems talking to other people, so it’s easy to sympathize with Komi, and the fact that none of her classmates except Tadano (and maybe “big sister” Onemine) have their heads screwed on straight makes for ongoing hilarity and occasional creepiness. I’m up to the fifth volume and am waiting with bated breath for the next one to come out in April. Highly recommended.

Today’s Menu For The Emiya Family – TAa
Bought this manga because I’m a fan of the mobile game Fate/Grand Order, and I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s kind of nice to see the various people and Servants of the series getting along and enjoying each others’ company – it reminded me somewhat of the parody Carnival Phantasm in that regard – but on the other hand it’s really just an illustrated cookbook with some useful recipes if you like Japanese food. The art is good, the story is somewhat lacking, and you already know the characters.

— by Wombat-socho

Yes, it’s time again to give Christopher Columbus his due, smack down Aztec apologists, and mock the weak and ungrateful Anglos who agitate for “Indigenous Peoples Day”. I say, if they don’t like it here in New Spain, they can go back to whatever endemonised Protestant hellholes their worthless ancestors came from. In the meantime, what better way to honor Columbus than by perusing his biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, written by the eminent naval historian, Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison? Speaking of Morison, you might also enjoy The Two-Ocean War, a distillation of his excellent fifteen-volume Official History of the United States Navy During World War II down into one volume.

It’s not often that an author can kill off his main character in the opening chapters of the novel and still make it work, but that’s exactly what Neal Stephenson does in Fall: or, Dodge In Hell, a sequel to his technothriller Reamde. Bluntly stated, this is a book about death and the afterlife, in an age when people with sufficient wealth can have their brains scanned and uploaded into computer networks. As the first man to have this done, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast finds himself with a lot of time on his hands but no idea what to do with it…at first. This book works on two levels – there’s the people trying to sort out the legal, moral, and practical aspects of dealing with people who are dead, but whose minds are very much alive on a network, and there’s the people living in the afterlife Dodge has made, some of whom are none too happy with it. That section reads like a bizarre riff on Greco-Roman mythology, with echoes from subplots in Cryptonomicon lurking in the underbrush. If you liked Reamde and its characters, you’ll probably enjoy Fall.

I was looking forward to Rebecca Kuang’s The Dragon Republic with mixed anticipation and dread – on the one hand, her protagonist Rin is easy to sympathize with, but on the other hand, the fantasy milieu of a China torn by the ravages of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is pretty horrifying, perhaps more so if you’re familiar with the history of that war. So at the beginning of the second novel, despite having obliterated the invading Mugen Federation by unleashing the Phoenix Goddess, Rin and her fellow mages/shamans (there’s effectively no difference) are hiding out, doing odd jobs for the Pirate Queen and on the run from the vengeful Empress. A good part of the novel has to do with the intervention of the technologically advanced Hesperians, who intervene on behalf of a rebel warlord whose wife was raised in Hesperia and is a fanatic worshipper of the the Hesperian god, the Maker. Rin is forced to undergo tests and examinations by the Hesperian priests, and manages to escape with some of her friends when the warlord betrays her to the Hesperians. There’s a lot of action in The Dragon Republic, since most of the book involves an ongoing rebellion against the Empress and ends with a secondary rebellion by the southern provinces against the Dragon Warlord and his Hesperian allies. All this is very entertaining, and occasionally horrific, but I for one am starting to wonder if I’m cheering for the wrong side here, since almost all of Rin’s choices seem to make things worse.

Next time around, I have a few things to say about Robert Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein and a few other books besides.

Hey! I have some short stories you might be interested in!

— by Wombat-socho

I have a raft of new SF to plow through in the next couple of weeks, so I need to clear the decks and deal with the stuff I’ve been reading since the last book post.

“Yes, young man, I knew L. Ron Hubbard. Pretty good writer before he turned to crime.”

I was reliably assured by the late Jerry Pournelle that this was not, in fact, said by Robert Heinlein to brush off an overeager Scientologist, since Heinlein and Hubbard were close friends, but it does sum up how a lot of people feel about the founder of Dianetics and Scientology, and seems as good a place as any to start talking about Hubbard’s first and most controversial SF novel, Final Blackout. Serialized in Astounding in 1940, Final Blackout describes a World War II that follows the same bloody path as World War I…only worse. By the time we begin to follow the Lieutenant and his little band of survivors, seventy years of chemical, biological and atomic weapons have ruined Europe, leaving only scattered, fortified farmsteads and equally scattered bands of infantrymen skirmishing for the dwindling stocks of food. There’s no industrial base to speak of, no coherent governments, and no purpose for the remnants of the B.E.F. but survival…until a staff officer from G.H.Q. arrives to recall the Lieutenant and his skeletal Fourth Brigade. This is when the novel shifts into gear – instead of being a mere tale of survival, it becomes one of political maneuvering, isolated staff and inexperienced garrison troops against a veteran officer and his unkillable remnant. The book was quite controversial at the time, catching flak from leftists who hated that the British Communist party were the obvious villains, and from the right for casting the United States in a less than heroic light. Hubbard was wrong about the course of the war, of course; the generals had in fact learned from the last war, and so had the politicians. There were no weapons of mass destruction used in Europe, and even in Asia the Japanese didn’t dare unleash their stocks of chemical weapons. Nobody since has written a novel like Final Blackout; the closest approximations are General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War, in which the war ends with a very limited nuclear exchange, and the role-playing game Twilight: 2000, but even in the latter, where nuclear and chemical weapons are used in greater quantities, things haven’t fallen apart quite as badly as they have in the Lieutenant’s Europe.

I first read Hubbard’s other memorable Golden Age novel, To The Stars, back in the days when teenagers were allowed back in the Library of Congress stacks unaccompanied, which was fortunate for me since this was during the period when the Church of Scientology was pretending that Hubbard had never written any SF and all his books were long out of print. Serialized in the February and March 1950 issues of Astounding, To The Stars tells the tale of Alan Corday, a recently graduated tenth-class engineer trying to make his way to Mars and a well-paying position with the Duke of Mars. Unfortunately, Corday is bankrupt, and can’t find a ship captain willing to let him work his passage; even more unfortunately, he finds a bar occupied by the company of The Hound of Heaven, whose captain is playing a strange melody on a piano, a melody that draws Corday in. All too soon, Corday finds himself aboard the Hound on the “long passage”, being unwillingly trained to stand watch on the bridge and make repairs to the ship as it burns its way to the Centauri Suns at just short of light-speed. By the time the Hound finally returns to Earth, the fiance he was forced to leave behind is a senile old woman, revolution and war have completely changed society – and he realizes he no longer has any home besides the Hound. These days, such a book would have easily expanded to doorstop size, but Hubbard’s taut style and economical writing covey his grim message easily enough.

Finally, some history. Eric Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is a fascinating combination of biographies and history of science fiction – not merely the genre itself but the fandom around it from John W. Campbell’s birth to the death of Robert Heinlein in 1988. In addition to Heinlein, the book also follows the careers of Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard, and can’t help touching on the careers of other writers affected by Campbell such as Lester Del Rey, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague DeCamp, and a cast of literally hundreds. It is unsparing in its examinations of the (ample) personal defects of all four men; Hubbard in particular comes off as a liar, abusive husband, and mountebank even before embarking on his career of evil with Scientology. On the other hand, it seems very clear that without Campbell, Astounding as we know it would not have existed, and the careers of Asimov and Heinlein (at the very least) would have been considerably different. I might even go so far as to say that without Campbell, science fiction as we know it wouldn’t exist; his competitors at Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy came into existence so that other publishers could get in on the action. This is a worthy successor to Sam Moskowitz’ Seekers of Tomorrow, sadly out of print, which combines biography and bibliographies for twenty-one authors of the Golden Age.

Next time around, I hope to have finished R.F. Kuang’s The Dragon Republic and Neil Stephenson’s Fall.

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

Many years ago, when I was living in Minnesota and involved in an amateur press association yclept Stipple-APA, one of the other contributors used the term “brain candy” in reference to SF that didn’t make you think too hard, but was nonetheless entertaining, and didn’t make you feel like you’d wasted your time and money.

This week’s first contender in the brain candy category is an Ace Double I picked up at a local VA clinic’s exchange table, Mack Reynolds’ The Five Way Secret Agent/Mercenary From the Future. The first is set in a future where the negative income tax provides everyone a more or less comfortable living, but private investigator Rex Bader wants something a little more…and winds up in what comes close to being a screwball spy comedy where’s he’s hired to do a little espionage for a huge multinational corporation, the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, and a group of libertarians who can’t decide whether or not they really want to be revolutionaries. “Mercenary From The Future” seems to be set in a similar future to “The Five Way Secret Agent”, except caste lines have become formal and various legal disputes are being settled by combat. The rules limit the combat to pre-1900 technology, and our hero, hard-luck Captain Joe Mauser, deliberately signs up for what looks like the losing side in a corporate battle. Joe’s got a trick up his sleeve, but will it be enough to beat the legendary commander Stonewall Cogswell?

I have very mixed feelings about the late Harlan Ellison. From personal experience and what others have said, the man was a thoroughgoing asshole, but on the other hand, there was no question that he could write, and write well. I always thought of him as a horror writer who tended to use SF tropes, but most of his stuff was marked SF, and he’s known for doing the script for one of Star Trek’s most famous episodes, City On The Edge Of Forever. While unpacking some of my all too numerous book boxes, I came across Dangerous Visions, a collection of what were considered rather provocative tales from the New Wave. It hasn’t aged well, in my opinion. Most of the thirty-two authors in the collection are old hands like Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl; none of the “new talents” except Laumer, Zelazny, and Delany are remembered at all. One can regard Dangerous Visions as a typical artifact of the New Wave – a few mediocre literary talents bulked up by works by authors that were never really part of their movement. Partners In Wonder, on the other hand, being an anthology of collaborations between Ellison and fifteen (mostly) topflight SF writers, is a much more solid work, with very few disappointments, and I would definitely recommend it over the more famous Dangerous Visions.

Larry Niven’s N-Space is an interesting combination of short stories, essays on SF and science, and novel excerpts, plus a really thorough bibliography. I don’t know for the life of me why Tor hasn’t released it as an e-book, but then Tor does a lot of stupid things. Dragon Award Winner Brad Torgerson credits it for making him the studly hard-SF author he is today, and are you going to argue with the iron-thewed, clear-eyed Powder Blue Care Bear of the Evil League of Evil? I thought not.

Did I mention I have an anthology of SF short stories out?