Category: Books

— by Wombat-socho

Welcome to another all-too-infrequent book post at The Other McCain. As you might have guessed from the post title, this post is mostly going to be about Charles Stross’ Laundry novels, which are about the adventures of “Bob Howard”, a rising star in the British agency tasked with defending Her Majesty’s realms against occult and extradimensional threats. An obscure survival of the Second World War’s Special Operations Executive, the Laundry is forever contending with not just horrors from beyond time and space, but the bureaucratic regulations afflicting the civil servants of Her Majesty’s Government, and as Bob rises in rank, it seems that he’s been spending almost as much time fighting the waves of paperwork as he has been dealing with things like the Sleeper in the Pyramid.

With The Rhesus Chart, Stross takes the focus off Howard and also stops writing pastiches of famous British spy novels, and in my arrogant opinion, the next four Laundry novels are a lot better for it. Most of the focus of The Rhesus Chart is on Bob’s former girlfriend Mhari and the unfortunate mathematical discovery that puts her and her (surviving) fellow bankers on the Laundry’s org chart, to say nothing of a duel that has lethal consequences for quite a few Laundry staffers we’ve come to know. This is followed by The Annihilation Score, wherein Bob has to pick up the workload of a certain Deputy Senior Secretary (or is it Deeply Scary Sorcerer?) and is mostly out of the picture; the protagonist of The Annihilation Score is his now-estranged wife and Laundry comrade Dr. Dominique (“Mo”) O’Brien, keeper of a certain very lethal violin – and new head of an office tasked with dealing with a sudden increase in superheroes (and supervillians) in England’s green and pleasant land. Just to add to her stress levels, the aforementioned Mhari is assigned as her executive assistant, and Ramona Random (formerly of the U.S. Black Chamber, last seen in The Jennifer Morgue), shows up as her liaison to the Deep Ones, and as if all that weren’t enough, her violin seems to be developing a nasty habit of showing up in her dreams…

Which brings us to The Nightmare Stacks. The Laundry’s senior staff has been decimated, their headquarters destroyed, and so it falls to new recruits Alex Schwartz and Dr. Peter Russell, D. Theology (the latter guiltily worrying about his parish while he’s on Laundry duty) to scope out a new location in Leeds, which unfortunately for poor Alex, is his hometown that he’s been avoiding like the plague. Little does he know that he’s about to meet a girl who finds his condition fascinating, because she’s not from around here…and from “around here”, I mean Earth. Great for Alex. Not so great for Leeds. Everything comes to a head in the latest book, The Delirium Brief, and we’re reunited with all our favorite characters from the previous books (to say nothing of a few villains) as the unthinkable happens – having survived PLAN RED RABBIT, Her Majesty’s Government needs a scapegoat, and what better way to sweep everything under the rug than by firing everyone at the Laundry and privatising the remains? Unfortunately, the PM and his crew haven’t realized that the Laundry is responsible to a higher authority, and with people like Bob, Mo, Mhari, Alex, Cassie, and the legendary BASHFUL INCENDIARY against them, HMG has definitely bitten off more than they can chew.

All in all, I like the last four Laundry novels a lot. They’re very different than the first four, and while they’re operating in the same urban fantasy space as Delta Green, the Dresden Files, and the Monster Hunter International series, having them set in the UK instead of the US gives them a very different flavor, quite aside from the middle-aged punk aesthetic that helps bring Bob and Mo together. Very much worth reading, all of them.

Also on my Kindle was Mark Wandrey’s Cartwright’s Cavaliers, a coming-of-age novel in which the protagonist has to rebuild the legendary mercenary company is mother drove into the ground. Fortunately, young Jim Cartwright has a few friends with some old but useful hardware, and with a little guts, a little moxie, and a lot of luck, he just might make a go of things. Nominated for a Dragon Award this year, and definitely recommended.

Also also, The LawDog Files comes recommended by The International Lord Of Hate himself, and rightly so, because this collection of tales about enforcing the law in the West Texas town of Bugscuffle is full of weirdness and hilarity, including the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. Well worth your time if borrowed through Kindle Unlimited or your money if you buy it straight up.

— by Wombat-socho

The last time I had the energy to do a book post, it was during a slack time of tax season, and since then things have been busy, seldom in a good way. For one thing, I lost my Kindle somewhere along the way back from Balticon, and I was also rear-ended down by the MGM back in April, which kept me from working for two weeks, and that put me behind the financial curve. Things are starting to get better, though, and I’ve been picking up a few books here and there besides the freebies from Amazon’s Kindle Prime Lending Library.

I want to talk about Kurt Schlichter’s Indian Country first. This is, of course, the prequel to his smash hit People’s Republic, and as he explains in the foreword, the events of last fall threw a monkey-wrench into his future history, written as it was in a setting Twenty Minutes Into The Future. So there are some minor tweaks. We start with Kelly Turnbull on active duty in Iraq, whacking terrorists with his comrades in the Iraqi police; afterward, he’s called in for a meeting where he’s sounded out about an unspecified role for an unnamed agency as the United States is on the verge of splitting up. Later, while he’s cooling his heels as commander of a basic training company in Oklahoma, he gets tasked to go into the People’s Republic and do the job he was originally trained to do – free the country folk of southern Indiana from oppression. It’s not supposed to be a combat mission, but the progressive leaders of The People’s Republic don’t know when to leave well enough alone…It’s a good read, and I recommend it.

Not quite along the same lines is the Frank Herbert classic Dune, which won the Hugo for Best Novel back in the 1960s when that actually meant something. This is essentially a coming-of-age novel that revolves around Paul Atreides, Duke of Arrakis after his father’s betrayal and assassination. Arrakis is a desert world, and the sole source of the spice so desperately needed by the Spacing Guild’s navigators, but Arrakis has secrets the brutal Harkonnen family never discovered during the years they held it in fief, and the tale of Paul learning those secrets has aged rather well. Dune’s sequels, Dune Messiah and Children Of Dune, were decent brain candy but nowhere near as great as the original.

Hans Schantz’ A Rambling Wreck is the sequel to The Hidden Truth, in which a young man comes across a global conspiracy that’s subverted science, rewritten history, and corrupted society – and lives to fight another day. A Rambling Wreck is what happens on that other day, as our hero makes his way to Georgia Tech to gain the knowledge he needs to fight more effectively and survive. I’m only partway through it, but so far it’s a good read.

Al Moe’s Vegas And The Mob: Forty Years Of Frenzy is a popular history of the Mafia’s involvement with the casino business here in Sin City, which didn’t start with Bugsy Siegel’s acquisition of the Flamingo right after the war. The book is written in a loose, conversational style and occasionally veers off on marginally-relevant tangents like the casinos in Reno and Tahoe (the latter mostly notable for Frank Sinatra’s involvement), the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the madness of Howard Hughes – which may have been more methodical than anyone thought, as his arrival at the Desert Inn began the decline of the Mob’s stranglehold on the casinos. Worth reading if you’re interested in the history of organized crime and/or Las Vegas; available through the Kindle Prime Lending Library.

— by Wombat-socho

First, some administrivia: I’ll be in Minnesota from tomorrow morning through next Tuesday night, and so there will be no daily bloggage, nor will there be an FMJRA this Saturday. Rule 5 Sunday will be delayed until Sunday, April 16, when we’ll have the Easter Sunday Double-Dip Edition, so go ahead and send in your links this weekend and I’ll collect them all on the weekend after I get back.

Given that it’s tax season, I’m not getting as much reading done as usual (and still less since Block cut my pay this season, the bastards) but I am getting some done, and I have a few opinions to share. I checked John C. Wright’s Somewhither out of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and just couldn’t finish it. It’s heroic fantasy, and very well-written, but I put it down one night and never picked it up again. Your mileage may vary. On the other hand, Marko Kloos’ Fields Of Fire, is a very different kind of book, seeing as how it’s the fifth book in his Frontlines series, and it does not disappoint. Humanity is striking back at the alien Lankies, with a massive invasion of Lanky-occupied Mars with everything including the kitchen sink, but as the blurb reminds us, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Kloos may have lined up with the Puppy Kickers, and there’s an occasional guffaw-inducing moment, but by and large this is a good book and I fully intend to pay for a copy once the cash flow improves.

Also worth reading is Nick Cole’s Soda Pop Soldier, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin, a novel about a young man fighting for a soda company. It’s virtual warfare, of course, and unfortunately PerfectQuestion’s been on the losing side for a while now, which means life is hard and he has to scrape up money where he can – by fighting in the highly illegal Black. There’s also a mysterious fellow who wants to buy his help in dominating the world, the equally mysterious Grandfather, and a spy who’s selling out Perfect and his buddies. Cole does a great job of keeping all the plot balls in the air and bringing them together in a (literally) explosive climax. Five stars, will definitely be reading again. A heck of a bargain for $3.99.

This month’s blast from the past is Michael de Larrabeiti’s The Borribles, the first book in a picaresque trilogy that continues in The Borribles Go For Broke and Across The Dark Metropolis, which has the dubious distinction of having its publication delayed for fear it would exacerbate existing tensions between the police and Londoners. I suppose that technically these are urban fantasies, though there’s nothing magical in them but the Borribles themselves (and their Rumble enemies, a parody of the popular Wombles) who are street kids with elvish ears who never grow up or grow old, and live by petty theft and scrounging in the decaying older parts of London and other cities. The plot of the three novels revolves around the Great Rumble Hunt, an assault by a picked squad of Borribles on the headquarters bunker of the Rumbles with the aim of killing the twelve leaders of the Rumbles; this done, the two sequels deal with the consequences of the hunt – factional fighting between the Borrible tribes, and the rescue of Sam the horse from the bobbies’ Special Borrible Group. Worth reading if you haven’t already.

— by Wombat-socho

It’s been so long since I’ve done a book post, I can’t even remember when it was. Sometime last year, for sure. Anyhow, before we get any further into 2017, I want to cover some of the books I read late last year, since not everyone reads everything, and I may have picked up something you missed.

I’m going to lead off with the latest novels in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunters International franchise, Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge and Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners. These were written by John Ringo and edited by Larry, and it shows. They’re the first two books in a trilogy about (Oliver) Chad Gardenier, one of MHI’s top hunters during the Reagan years: a former Marine who dies in the Beirut bombing but gets sent back with a mission. Chad’s not a particularly likeable guy. As is pointed out in the foreword, he always had a huge ego and is therefore not the most reliable of narrators, and that ego is nigh-insufferable in Grunge, which is set in Seattle. Sinners, on the other hand, is set in New Orleans, where MHI’s relationship with the Federal Monster Control Bureau is (to say the least) very different than elsewhere in the country since people in the Big Easy believe in hoodoos and monsters, and a bunch of gangbangers is downright honored to have a “hoodoo man” in their turf. I liked Sinners a lot better, frankly, and I think that was the consensus of most folks in the MHI group on Facebook as well.

Next up, a pair of books that are almost mirror images of each other: Kurt Schlichter’s People’s Republic and Tom Kratman’s A State of Disobedience. In Schlichter’s novel, Blue and Red America separate amicably (mostly) but years later, Red America (the People’s Republic of the title) is collapsing under its own ineptitude, and a spec ops vet has to penetrate California to rescue a wayward Texas heiress. I found it to be a tense thriller, even though it was too short and most of the characters a tad on the cardboard side. Kratman’s novel, on the other hand, posits a President like Hillary Clinton who wants to use the Government’s expanded anti-terror powers against her domestic political enemies. When a Federal raid on a Texas orphanage goes awry (much like Waco, but on a smaller scale) the Governor of Texas decides that Texas needs to go its own way, and that’s when the shooting starts. There’s more political maneuvering and talk about logistics than one might expect, but then, Colonel Kratman is a professional.

You may recall that among the links a couple years back to Mitch Berg’s Minnesota politics blog Shot In The Dark were some chapters of his novel Trulbert!, which related how Minneapolis adapted to the end of the economic world as we know it. Violence, mayhem, libertarianism, gang war, the NFL, and church militias feature prominently. It’s an amusing little short novel, and you may recognize a few characters in the book as people you’ve run into online. Or hopefully not.

David Drake’s Death’s Bright Day and S.M. Stirling’s Prince of Outcasts are the latest books in the RCN and Change universes, respectively, and if you like the other books in those series, then these books are something you’ll like as well.

Hajime Isayama’s Attack On Titan was a hit anime series a couple years ago, but the first volume of the manga left me cold; it was an action story that didn’t seem to move too quickly. John C. Wright’s Iron Chamber of Memory is not as annoying, but I’m having problems sticking to it. I keep getting distracted by other books.

Between Cirsova magazine and the bloggers at Castalia House, there’s a push on to bring back Pulp SF, which should delight every SF and fantasy reader not in thrall to the Puppy Kickers. However, I think posts like this one by Jasyn Jones are barking up the wrong tree. Isn’t there enough to loathe about the New Wave and post-modernist Pink SF without also trying to tarnish the legacy of John W. Campbell Jr.?

— by Wombat-socho

I was more than a little appalled to realize I hadn’t done any book posts since July, when I wrote about Don Surber’s Trump The Press, Jean Larteguy’s The Praetorians, and even some SF. So in this post I’m going to play catch-up and briefly talk about the new stuff I managed to get read in between sleeping, eating, and Ubering.

Probably the best thing I’ve read was John Ringo & Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter: Grunge, a prequel to Larry’s Monster Hunter International series starring a Marine turned Monster Hunter during the 1980s. It’s an interesting book, with just as much action (but not as much sex and politics) as Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows books, and fits in very well with the later Monster Hunter novels.

Also very good is Kia Tsakos Heavey’s Domino, an excellent little tale of the eponymous barn cat who has to confront a new cat in the neighborhood with some strange ideas…ideas that ultimately threaten not only Domino and his new family, but their entire neighborhood. Good for young adults, too.

There’s been a lot of excitement over Kurt Schlichter’s People’s Republic, which could in some ways be a sequel to Tom Kratman’s A State Of Disobedience in that it tells the tale of an America split between Red and Blue states, with a low-level state of war going on between the two. Kelly Turnbull is an infiltrator, a veteran who specializes in penetrating the People’s Republic and getting people out, and after one such exfiltration almost goes bad, he’s recruited by one of the richest men in Texas to get someone out – someone who may not want to come out. Plus, he has to take a blooded but inexperienced young officer with him. It’s a fun story, a grim look at how the blue states would most likely decay without the red states propping them up, and as with other such books, its main problem is that it’s too short. Hoping a sequel comes out soon.

I’ve also been reading There Will Be War Volume VI, which is every bit as good as the other anthologies in the series; John Ringo’s The Last Centurion (which I bought for the Kindle because my dead tree copy is still packed up) which goes a little too well with the Schlicter and Kratman books mentioned supra with its tale of epidemic flu and feckless politicians in Washington bungling the response and recovery. I’m also in the middle of reading John C. Wright’s Iron Chamber of Memory, Henry Vogel’s The Fugitive Heir (which is reminding me a lot of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy), and Adam Piggott’s Pushing Rubber Downhill, to say nothing of G.K. Chesteron’s Orthodoxy. Plus, I have Karl Gallagher’s Torchship Pilot waiting for me. Will I be able to wrap all these up, get my continuing education for next tax season done, and cheer my Nationals into the World Series? Tune in again next month to find out!

— by Wombat-socho

First, the obligatory commentary on the just-concluded Worldcon, which will be diminishing in importance from here on out with the advent of the Dragon Awards, from our Supreme Dark Lord and the International Lord of Hate. All I have to say is that I’m glad I didn’t waste $50 on a supporting membership, much less splurge on an attending membership, hotel costs, etc. With respect to the Dragon Awards, if you haven’t signed up and voted, why not? Don’t cost nuthin’.

The long-awaited John Ringo entry into Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter universe, Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, is out, and while there’s a lot less sex than your average John Ringo novel, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This novel is set in the 1980s, and its hero is an ex-Marine killed in the Beirut bombing – which is where the novel STARTS. If you liked Larry’s MHI novels, you’ll like this a lot. Two thumbs up and five stars.

It’s been out for a few years, but Tom Kratman’s A State Of Disobedience seems unpleasantly more timely these days; this tale of a (mostly) non-violent rebellion by Texas against a Federal Government headed by a President very reminiscent of Grandma Clinton reads like it might be ripped from next year’s headlines. If you’re too cheap (or too broke) to throw me a couple of shekels by buying it on Amazon, you can also find it for free at the Baen Free Library, which also has a lot of other good SF & fantasy by great authors, offered under the proposition that “the first taste is free”.

I also re-read Frank Herbert’s The Dosadi Experiment, a tale of forced evolution, human/alien experimentation, and the law which in my opinion is better than its prequel Whipping Star. YMMV. Also re-read: Tim Powers’ Last Call (ridiculously cheap at 99 cents) and Expiration Date. Also also, Geobreeders, a manga that crosses harem comedy and supernatural thriller genres. Desperate salaryman Yoichi Taba winds up hiring on with Kagura Security – and finds out too late their mission is to hunt the lethal “phantom cats”…but he can’t quite bring himself to resign. Amusing, and one wishes both that Akihiro Ito had finished the manga and Central Park Media hadn’t gone bankrupt so they could have finished translating it.

— by Wombat-socho

So over the Memorial Day weekend I packed my bags and flew to Baltimore for Balticon 50, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary by inviting back all its former Guests of Honor, headlined by some guy who’s famous for writing a lot of medieval rape scenes. Frankly, I was more interested in some of the other authors, namely Michael Flynn (still recovering from a horribly broken arm, but cheerful) and Connie Willis, who always gives good panel, even at the hideous hour of eight in the morning. Since I was mainly there to socialize with my Washington-area friends, I didn’t catch much of the panels or other programming, but I got the general impression that the move to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from Balticon’s traditional suburban home at the Hunt Valley Inn went well, despite some unavoidable elevator problems and predictable whining from a minority of fans.

I hadn’t intended to buy any books while I was there, but nonetheless I came home with three: Drakas! edited by S.M. Stirling, which is a collection of short stories by other authors set in Stirling’s alternate history where South Africa winds up hosting refugeee Tories and Confederates and becoming the Domination of the Draka. You wouldn’t want to live there, and some of the stories are fairly horrific; others, surprisingly, are somewhat humorous, in a grim sort of way. I also picked up Michael Flynn’s Lodestar, which I thought was the first book in the series (it wasn’t) and which I’m setting aside until I get and finish Firestar, which is. Finally, I bought Breach The Hull, part of the “Defending The Future” military SF anthology series, which includes stories by James Daniel Ross, Jack Campbell, and others; the handful of stories I read while at Balticon seemed good to me.

On the way out to Balticon, I started and finished (hey, it was a four-hour flight!) Sarah Hoyt’s Through Fire, the sequel to A Few Good Men, and it’s just what it says on the label: a tale of a darkship pilot stranded on Earth who has to survive a rerun of the French Revolution and hopefully stop it in its tracks. If you liked the tales Hoyt’s been spinning in this series, you’re going to like this one, too. I also downloaded and started on A Meep In Manhattan, an autobiographical look back at New York in the 1990’s by Mary Pat Campbell, whose posts at STUMP on pensions and public finance are a frequent feature of In The Mailbox. Worth a look if you want to see how Manhattan has changed in the last two decades.

Also downloaded to the Kindle (and maybe, just maybe I’m going to find some time to read them this coming week) were Outies by Jennifer Pournelle, which is a sequel to The Mote In God’s Eye by her dad and Larry Niven, and The Praetorians by Jean Larteguy, which Penguin has finally republished after sixty years with a new foreword by General Stanley McChrystal. It’ll be interesting to see if I do manage to carve out any time for reading this week, what with the primary on Tuesday, the Electric Daisy Carnival coming to town next weekend, and the implosion of the Riviera Hotel & Casino next door forcing me to decamp for a day to the Circus Circus a couple blocks away. Fun week ahead, to be sure.