— by Wombat-socho
Or, Not Long Before The End
With a little more than a week to go before MidAmericon II closes up nominations for the Hugo, both the Kindly Ones in charge of running Sad Puppies 4 and Our Supreme Dark Lord have prepared lists for your consideration. Predictably, there’s been a rush of authors and editors pleading to be removed from the Sad Puppies List, and these have been rewarded with assterisks for their pains; as for Vox, he has already promised to turn a deaf ear to such pleas. His press release regarding the Rabid Puppies list is here, for your amusement. Also, professional Grauniad wanker and P-List author Damien Walters horked up some nonsense about John Wright’s career being over after Sasquan peed itself and No Awarded all the categories Mr. Wright was nominated in last year. The International Lord of Hate deals with this in his inimitable manner.
You would think that dystopias featuring the Global Caliphate would be a dime a dozen these days, much like tales about the world after the Nazis won World War II, but I can literally count on one hand the number of books set in that future: Tom Kratman’s Caliphate, of course, and Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers For The Assassin, but Kerry Nietz’ A Star Curiously Singing didn’t attract my notice until fairly recently. In some ways, Nietz’ book shows a worse future than the others, because in this one, the Muslims have won, and extirpated all other religions while imposing a high-tech panopticon state supported by kaffir debuggers with brain implants that strongly discourage disobedience. Sandfly is one of the best debuggers, and when he’s called into orbit to troubleshoot the Caliphate’s returned starship, he has no clue that what he discovers may be the greatest threat the Caliphate has ever faced. This is a nice little high-tech mystery, and I liked it well enough that I’m looking at picking up the rest of the trilogy. The first book is free, and highly recommended.
As previously mentioned here, Castalia House is republishing Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War Cold War combat SF anthology series, and I recently picked up Volume IX, originally titled After Armageddon. Most of the stories are set in California, or at least what used to be California, except for a grim tale by the late John Brunner and Don Hawthorne’s “The Contract”, where a train full of renegade Soviet Army engineers tries to patch things back together in Russia after the Gas Bug has eaten our civilization. This, and Pournelle’s own “Kenyons To The Keep!” deserve sequels, but I suppose at this point we’re not likely to see them. Also, Macaulay’s “Horatius At The Bridge” and a tale by Leslie Fish that reads like something straight out of a Fallout game. Recommended.
I have been re-reading John Ringo’s “Paladin of Shadows” series, which begins with Ghost, and my opinion on it hasn’t changed. Aside from the occasional BDSM scene and the concentration on what happens at the sharp end, these are pretty decent technothrillers a la Clancy, but with a lot less infodumping and high-level political stuff. I especially like the subplots having to do with the culture of the Keldara, which is gradually being revealed from novel to novel like peeling an onion. Hopefully once John is done fooling around in other authors’ universes, he can come back and dash off another novel in this series, his muse permitting.
back on the market in a spanking-new Kindle edition with a new cover. The Rosinante trilogy is about the trials and tribulations of an asteroid habitat originally funded by a Japanese zaibatsu and SCADIWA, a Southern California water utility, in the waning days of the North American Union. Gilliland, who retired after a long career in the Department of Agriculture, knows his bureaucrats, engineers, and military men well, and the trilogy also has scheming robots, pirates, and crazed revolutionaries of several stripes just to keep it all interesting. You should definitely pick up 
and 
as well, because these are slim novels that move quickly.
, the tale of a young country boy with an eidetic memory who wants more than anything to be a starship crewman; 
, a tale of a slave boy on a faraway planet who proves to be [SPOILER]; 
, about a teenager caught up in the revolution on Venus; and 
, about a telepath on a torchship sent to look for Earthlike worlds, which deals with the issues of time dilation and a few other non-obvious topics.*** They’re all good reads, especially if you have young children and want something suitable. 
(which actually isn’t, it lacks the Retief stories “Cultural Exchange” and “Courier”) and the Baen anthologies 
, 
, 
, and 
, in which modern masters of combat SF such as David Drake, David Weber, S.M. Stirling, and William Keith get a chance to spin new tales about the deadly, but utterly loyal, cybertanks that defend humanity against threats both alien and human. There are at least two more anthologies, and six new novels, but this is running long enough already.
, which was an oversight on my part. And this is how I rolled:
is a very, very detailed biography of the actress most famous for playing Morticia Addams on the original “Addams Family” TV series, but it would have benefited greatly from an editor who would have made sure the photographs didn’t slide off the bottoms of the pages. Pylant obviously did his homework, interviewing a lot of people who worked with Miss Jones throughout her career, and I doubt there’s anything he missed.
, which is the one uniquely done by both Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert, as Randolph died while this volume was in process. It covers WSC’s tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty in the opening years of World War I and his downfall, which was not solely rooted in the Gallipoli disaster – that hadn’t yet turned sour – but rather in vile partisan politics and the treacherous, erratic personality of Admiral “Jackie” Fisher, who Churchill had summoned out of retirement to serve as First Sea Lord. An excellent, excellent book.
, both of which were kindly purchased from my wish list by Loyal Commenters. 
