Category: Zeitgeist

— by Wombat-socho

Tax season ended for me on April 14; this was the first time since I started working for H&R Block that I haven’t worked April 15, but to be honest, this season has been enough of a pain in the ass for me that I didn’t mind knocking off a day early…well, a month and a day early, since the season was extended to May 17, but my contract ended on April 16 and I was in no mood to volunteer to work the extended season. Already done my part to keep the Las Vegas hotels afloat this year, thank you very much. Anyhow, before I pitch into the book reviews, a couple of links of interest to folks interested in SF and/or popular culture.
First, Nick Monroe does a thorough demolition of an idiot who blames the poor reception of the disastrous Star Wars sequels on Gamergate, Donald Trump, Q, white supremacy and God knows what all. Long but well worth reading, because this Rewriting Ripley is hardly unique – as those of us who were with the Sad Puppies a few years back can attest.
Secondly, Vox Day’s Arkhaven Comics has launched an alternative to Webtoons, Arktoons. The site aims to be competition not only to Webtoons but to the dying mainstream comics companies, who it certainly has beat on not only quantity of content but quality.
Thirdly, after neglecting the poor thing for far too long, I am updating Wombat’s Bookshelf, which is just what it says on the label: an index to the book reviews I’ve done here. I’ve gotten caught up through the end of 2019, and I should have 2020 and 2021 done by this evening. I invite you to take a look and see if there’s anything you missed; the site includes helpful links not just to the posts but to Amazon for the books reviewed. 
Finally, I don’t remember often enough to beat the drum for the National Fantasy Fan Federation, now celebrating its 80th year. In addition to the monthly newsletter, the N3F also publishes eight zines covering just about every aspect of geek culture, with a ton of reviews. Public (non-voting) memberships are free, voting memberships start at $6/year, and all publications come to your email box in PDF format regardless of your membership level. (Disclaimer: I am the treasurer & membership/recruitment-wallah.)
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Probably the best thing I’ve read in the last month or so is the H. Beam Piper Megapack, which includes just about all the SF Piper ever published (except, oddly enough, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen) plus two non-SF novels, Rebel Raider and Murder In The Gunroom. Now, if you have the Ace/Baen anthologies and novels from the 1980s, you already have most of what’s in this book, but for 99 cents it’s still a great deal – and a lot more portable than the paperbacks. 

I was not nearly so impressed with Marko Kloos’ Aftershocks, the first in a new series from him. We meet the protagonist as he’s being released from a POW camp, having been on the losing end of an interplanetary war – which somebody seems to want to restart. Regardless of George R.R. Martin’s opinion, this is not nearly as good as Kloos’ Frontlines series; there was nothing about it that made me interested in looking at the sequels, whether or not they’re free through Kindle Unlimited. Now, Orders Of Battle, on the other hand, that’ll be worth the $6 it’ll cost to keep it. The seventh novel in the aforementioned Frontlines series, this tale of a reconnaissance in force against the former colony planet Willoughby, held by the alien Lankies since the beginning of the war, grabs you and drags you in – perhaps because you know the protagonist (and his wife) very well after six books, and perhaps because Kloos is writing a straightforward space opera instead of farting around with skulduggery and secret plots. 

That’s something Peter Nealen does a lot better, quite frankly. Took me a while to finish up Thunder Run, which is the sixth in his Maelstrom Rising series, but when I did, it delivered. The story is still with the Triarii Grex Luporum teams in Europe, where the EDC is still trying to put the screws to Poland and the other Eastern European nations who are tired of their supranational shit. Things aren’t going well for the Poles and their fellow rebels, but the EDC isn’t having things all their own way, either. Nealen does a good job of covering everything from tactical combat up to and including the Big Picture, both military and political. I am looking forward to the next book, Area Denial, which is due out in September. 

Some of you may remember Moe Lane from his previous life as a political blogger; he’s given that up to blog about books, music, movies, and role-playing games, and is also writing books, like the most excellent Frozen Dreams, Set in a post-apocalyptic Baja California, it’s a fantasy that starts with the premise that magic has returned with rather brutal effects on the America we know and love. Officially, there’s no magic or magicians in New California’s Cin City, but unofficially, the cleaning ladies and stagehands know more than they’ll say about the subject, and that’s a good thing for Shamus Tom Vargas, who’s been Called to Clear a murder case. If you ever wondered what a mashup of noir detective film and urban fantasy was like, well, here’s your chance to find out. An excellent deal at $2.99.

Amazon Warehouse Deals

— by Wombat-socho

I grew up with Astounding/Analog SF, which for many years was the science fiction magazine, and am old enough to remember the end of John W. Campbell’s tenure as editor there. ASF and Campbell (and to a lesser extent, his successor Ben Bova) shaped my tastes in SF, as they did for so many other readers, and Campbell’s imprint on the genre as a whole is undeniable.

For the magazine he rescued from obscurity and built into the best SF magazine of the Golden Age to take a public shit on his memory like this is cowardly and vile. It is, perhaps, understandable in the wake of this year’s winner’s ignorant yawp about what a horrible person Campbell was by [CURRENT YEAR] standards, and the wretched soyboy Trevor Quachri’s desire to please people who cannot be pleased, but that makes it no less cowardly and vile. No, John W. Campbell Jr. probably wouldn’t be welcome in SFWA or at Worldcon these days, but I doubt Mary Kowal would have been welcome in the field back in the 1930s and 40s either, not least because her writing is terrible and not worth a penny a word on publication.

I have not had a subscription to Analog since the 1980s, shortly after Stanley Schmidt replaced Bova, and I needed the money more for other things (like a family). I wasn’t impressed by the few issues I saw, and I gather from the declining publication frequency and subscription numbers that I’m not the only one. There are still some good authors being published there, but most of the fiction is the kind of depressing crap I turned to SF to get away from. After this, I’m not touching anything having to do with Analog. The magazine and its current editor can die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.

On a happier note, Hans Schantz informs me that a number of conservative and libertarian authors have books for sale this weekend for 99 cents in honor of Dragon*Con. Your irascible neighborhood wombat says check it out!

As for me, I’ve been rereading some of the older Monster Hunter International novels: Monster Hunter Vendetta, wherein Owen Pitt is targeted for kidnapping and sacrifice by a bunch of necromancers working for the Old Ones, and Julie’s childhood playmate Mr. Trash Bags saves the day, and Monster Hunter Alpha, where Earl Harbinger goes to meet an ancient enemy in Copper Lake, Wisconsin, only to find himself having to team up with said enemy to prevent an outbreak of werewolves – and worse – from taking the little mining town as a springboard to apocalypse. Not going to lie, I enjoyed these a lot more the second time around, because some of the characters in them play much bigger roles in subsequent MHI books. Also reread Sharpe’s Rifles, Sharpe’s Eagle, and Sharpe’s Company by Bernard Cornwell, which are great adventure stories set in the Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon’s armies, and chock-full of historical goodness as well. Pity they didn’t stick with the Sean Bean-inspired covers.

— by Wombat-socho

I am probably the last person to find out that Dragon*Con, probably the largest non-comics convention in fandom, has finally bestirred itself and created its own set of awards – the Dragon Awards. This has been greeted with much glee by Sad and Rabid Puppies alike, with Declann Finn going so far as to declare victory. I’d say he and our Supreme Dark Lord are probably correct in predicting that the Dragons will almost certainly eclipse the Hugos, given the much larger voting base which makes any kind of gaming the nominations or the final vote futile. Looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Bosch Fawstin has attracted a fair amount of attention for being a “recovered Muslim” and outspoken cartoonist, currently engaged in annoying his former co-religionists by offering to draw Mohammed on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day for people who can’t draw. He’s also gained some notoriety for his comic book series The Infidel, featuring Pigman. I picked up all three issues (the other two books are War of Words and Reprisal) for the Kindle, and was pleasantly surprised that the Kindle Fire does an outstanding job of presenting comics. The Infidel itself is a complicated tale, being at the same time an examination of the divisions between Muslims (and ex-Muslims) played out between twin Albanian brothers and a superhero comic in which Pigman wages a violent counter-jihad against Muslims that comes to a climax in Mecca itself. Fawstin’s style is reminiscent of Frank Miller’s in The Dark Knight Returns, though Killian Duke has far less to work with than Bruce Wayne. It is disturbing, thought-provoking, and very well done; I hope Fawstin has more issues planned.

I wish I could say the same for Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I’m very glad I borrowed from the county library instead of blowing eighteen dollars (!) on the Kindle edition. While it starts with an interesting idea – the Moon is hit by a pair of fast, dense objects that break it into many smaller pieces, which threaten humanity with extinction, so a global crash priority effort to expand our presence in space rapidly ensues – the execution is sadly reminiscent of his previous SF novel, the clunky Anathem. Most of the book is taken up with the base of the story: rapid expansion of the International Space Station as an ark for humanity, selection of an elite group of kids from around the world, a tragic mission to retrieve a comet to provide water to the rapidly expanding orbital colony, and a disastrous attempt to reach Mars by a breakaway group of colonists. Many important (and not a few unimportant) characters carry the Idiot Ball in this part of the book, to the point where one begins to yearn for a Heinlein Individual of either sex to just start shooting the assholes causing all the trouble. This unfortunately doesn’t happen, and soon humanity in space is reduced to seven women and a genewriter, which over the course of five thousand years grows to several millions of men and women living in a greatly expanded set of orbital habitats largely built from Lunar rubble. We don’t get any exposition of that part, nor do we get any narrative covering the people hiding under mountains or at the bottom of the sea in submarines. What we do get, as in Anathem, is a hurried final section telling the tale of the orbital folks meeting the undermountain folks and then the undersea folk, with a fair amount of conflict between the two blocks of orbital folk. It’s almost as if Stephenson got bored with the plot and just decided to wrap it up and turn it in; frankly, I would have much rather he just stopped after the council of the Seven Eves. This has been nominated for the Hugo, but frankly, I don’t think it deserves it; if I bother to buy a MidAmericon membership and vote, I’m certainly not going to rank it very highly if I vote for it at all.

Speaking of my county library, apparently somebody in the purchasing department likes the combination of BDSM pornromance and technothrillers that is John Ringo’s “Paladin of Shadows” series, because they have the whole series from Ghost through Tiger By The Tail, which Ringo co-wrote with Ryan Sear. I checked them all out, because they’re decent brain candy, and the proportion of rough sex to balls-out violence diminishes as the series goes on. In addition, Ringo is parceling out information about the Keldara culture bit by bit, and I admit to being very fascinated with it. The series has all been out for a few years by now, so I’m not going to bore you with plot summaries, especially because it’s pretty formulaic: the US has a problem, usually involving WMD (although in Choosers of the Slain, it’s a missing daughter of a political donor with clout) and only the Kildar and his Mountain Tigers have the plausible deniability and sheer “git er dun” to solve that problem. And somehow, wherever they go, the Kildar keeps collecting loose women…many of whom turn out to be real people with useful skills, or at least trainable. Adds some occasionally dark humor to the tales of dirty deeds done in the nastier parts of the Third World…like, say, Disney World. At $6.99 apiece for the Kindle, I may wind up adding these to the electronic part of my library.