Dave's Free Press: Reviews
type: channel
description: being why I think things suck and/or rock
language: en-us
date: 2013-07-21T18:10:45Z
items: Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis
items: Breakthrough, by Michael C. Grumley
items: Intrusion, by Ken Macleod
items: Already Dead, by Charlie Huston
items: The Apocalypse Codex, by Charles Stross
items: Rule 34, by Charles Stross
items: Railtrack and Other Letters, by John Hein
items: The Martian, by Andy Weir
items: How Firm a Foundation, by David Weber
items: Force Cantrithor, by Michael McCloskey
items: Euclid's Wall, by Michael McCollum
items: The Trilisk Supersedure, by Michael McCloskey
items: Lewis Carroll in Numberland, by Robin Wilson
items: Bitter Harvest, by Michael R. Hicks
items: Rapture of the Nerds, by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow
items: Season of the Harvest, by Michael R. Hicks
items: Man Walks Into a Pub, by Pete Brown
items: Fuzzy Nation, by John Scalzi
items: Wired Kingdom, by Rick Chesler
items: Wool, by Hugh Howey
items: I, Zombie, by Hugh Howey
items: The Trilisk AI, by Michael McCloskey
items: The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski
items: The Martian Race, by Gregory Benford
items: Halting State, by Charles Stross
items: The Meat Tree, by Gwyneth Lewis
items: The Emperor's Edge, by Lindsay Buroker
items: Gentle Reminders, by Martin Perry
items: Double Share, by Nathan Lowell
items: The "Synchronicity" Trilogy, by Michael McCloskey
items: The Trilisk Ruins, by Michael McCloskey
items: Basic Training, by Kurt Vonnegut
items: Through Struggle, the Stars, by John Lumpkin
items: A Dance With Dragons, by George R. R. Martin
items: Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn
items: 40K books
items: A Rising Thunder, by David Weber
items: The Translation of Father Torturo, by Brendan Connell
items: World War Z, by Max Brooks
items: Mission of Honor, by David Weber
items: Land of the Dead, by Thomas Harlan
items: Thirst, by Andrei Gelasimov
items: Black Out, by John Lawton
items: December 2011 in books
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Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 The last time I reviewed a book which smashed together the second world war and magic I was not very polite about it. I can say far nicer things about this one. To start with, the cover art is better. It's still not great, but it is at least better. It also has sympathetic characters with real relationships and the story makes sense. Well, it makes as much sense as any story involving magic can. The broad outline is that Evil Nazis created one of the Wunderwaffen before the war, by using training and electricity to create a handful of super-soldiers who have magical abilities. They all have different abilities, and look suspiciously like a comic book superhero team: there's the one who is super-strong, the one who burns things, the seer etc. The war goes badly for the good guys who have to, in turn, use magic to defend Britain. In a very nice twist which differentiates this from just about every other story involving magic, magic is not just something that some people can do like running fast or being good at drawing. It has costs. Very serious costs, which we see eating away at characters' consciences, bodies, and even sanity. I do have a few bones to pick though. The book suffers from American Author Syndrome. Much of it is set in London, but he gets enough little details wrong to be very jarring. In particular there is the mortal sin of not using road names properly: a character talks of "Shaftesbury" and not Shaftesbury Avenue, and of "Trafalgar" but not Trafalgar Square. If the people speaking were Yankees this would be acceptable - it's an error that they make in real life. But they're not. These characters and English and German, both of whom speak of their streets by their full names - and Germans speaking English carry this excellent habit over into the foreign tongue. I also have a problem with the inconsistent treatment of the seer's abilities, and what is done with them. She is shown as being able to foretell the future, but somehow this…
date: 2013-07-21T18:10:45Z

Breakthrough, by Michael C. Grumley
type: item
description: - Good: 3/5 This is, I think, the author's first book, and is self-published. I have to be honest, it shows that it's his first, with some fairly elementary and annoying errors. He says on his website: [I] dreamed of writing action thrillers the way he thought they should be written; stories with unique plots that move and keep the reader guessing until the very end. Enter Breakthrough, a story with a fascinating plot which takes the reader on an exciting ride and makes it virtually impossible to guess the ending. and he does a pretty good job of achieving that. This book's plot does keep moving and keep the reader guessing, it is an exciting ride, and the ending is unexpected. He's definitely got the right idea, but needs to work on the execution. Here are some of the execution errors that I noted in the first few pages. Much of the action occurs near the Bimini islands of the Bahamas. The Bahamas are not in the Caribbean, but in the North Atlantic, but I could live with that if he said they were in the Caribbean or in the Caribbean Sea. But we get the Caribbean Ocean. A speed is given in knots per hour, but it should be just knots. A vessel is described as a "nuclear class submarine", which is incorrect. There are many classes of nuclear submarine, which have class names like Trafalgar or Astute or (for the Yankees) Lafayette or Los Angeles. These are all little things. Tiny, even. But they're like midges - tiny, obviously wrong, and bloody irritating. An editor should have spotted them. I have a much bigger bone to pick with some of the science. One of the characters has her scientific reputation besmirched because people don't believe her "calculations" that sea level is dropping. It really is dropping in the story, dropping substantially, and it would be utterly trivial to measure it, but apparently no-one thought of, oh, I don't know, looking at a tide gauge. What happens near the end at Tristan da Cunha is ridiculous in itself, but its effects are even less b…
date: 2013-07-11T00:09:07Z

Intrusion, by Ken Macleod
type: item
description: - Excellent: 5/5 This horrible dystopia sits firmly in the tradition of British science fiction from the 1930s to the 50s. It's an exploration of a society that, while being on the surface far less intrusive, is actually as controlling and conformist as anything Huxley imagined in Brave New World. And while there's no Armageddon, it's concerned with the little people, the middle class, their family life, and their un-looked-for struggle to survive against overwhelming events, in the vein of John Wyndham and John Christopher's "cosy catastrophes". And to cap it all there's even a touch of Orwell's 1984 as the protagonists are tortured into conforming. One of the most important things to take from it is the idea that what might seem like restriction and control of just one section of society and so not something for everyone to be overly concerned about is actually a symptom of a far deeper rot and so we should all care. In this case it's women who are most obviously repressed, with an alarming lack of bodily autonomy and restricted from most workplaces because of the "dangers" of "fourth hand smoke" leeching out of the walls having been put there by smokers decades ago. The restriction is for the sake of their unborn, nay as-yet-unconceived children. This is, of course, justified. Using science! And that is my biggest gripe with the book. The justification is nonsense, and Hope, the protagonist, is supposed to be well-educated but blithely accepts it: 'But working in offices where people once smoked thirty years ago doesn't seem so risky [as compared to mining].' 'Oh, it isn't', said Crow. 'But it's still risky. That foul stuff leaks out of the walls and floors for decades.' 'Only in tiny amounts,' said Hope. 'Yes!' said Crow. 'That means it's actually riskier than smoking itself, because the amounts are so tiny. I mean, we're talking about femtograms per cubic metre. You know how small that is? It's smaller than a subatomic particle! When you had actual smoke partic…
date: 2013-07-04T22:49:04Z

Already Dead, by Charlie Huston
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 I bought this book because some other author recommended it on their blog. That's a great way to find good things to read, and you should do it too. Most authors, at least in so-called genre fiction, have one these days, and I recommend that you track down those of your favourite half dozen and read them occasionally. You'll learn a lot about reading and writing, about how the publishing industry and book trade work, but most importantly, you'll learn about more authors to read. In this case, I wouldn't have bought the book without a recommendation, because a cursory glance at the description on Amazon makes it look like a vampire book. And even worse, it's a mis-spelt "vampyre" book. The "vampyres" of this tale aren't, thankfully, some magic walking corpses, but are people with a disease - one caused by the also annoyingly mis-spelled "Vyrus" - which makes them crave blood and be unusually sensitive to sunlight. The hero of the tale, one Joe Pitt, is one of them, and manages to live alone instead of in one of the vampire "clans" that make up the criminal underworld of his city, by doing odd jobs for the clans and working as an enforcer and private investigator. So really it isn't a vampire tale at all, it's a noir crime thriller. It has all the clichés that you'd expect in that genre - the loner hero, violence, fast-talking, double-crosses, femmes fatales and so on - but rises above being clich&eacute by extremely sharp writing, great humour, and a wide variety of characters (there are few mere cardboard cutouts) with distinctive voices. There are a couple of somewhat irritating questions left unanswered at the end, for which I deduct a star, but perhaps they are answered in a sequel, of which there are four. Overall, I recommend this book.
date: 2013-05-26T20:50:34Z

The Apocalypse Codex, by Charles Stross
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 This fourth book in Stross's Laundry series is, apparently, like the previous ones, written in a pastiche of some other author's style, but this time it wasn't one that I recognized. It's also a damned fine read. Many series get tired after a while, as the characters stop developing or worse, develop into one-dimensional archetypes. This doesn't happen here. We learn and see more of both the characters and institutions. We also have a well-developed antagonist, one who is (of course, this is a Laundry book) utterly evil, but for the best of reasons and thinks he is on the side of the angels. However, I feel that the ending was rather rushed and not particularly believable. No sensible bad guy would leave one half of his Doomsday Device utterly unguarded, especially when he knows that the opposition are in the field. And the idea of the double double-cross and subtle but quick manipulation by the Black Chamber of institutions and individuals is frankly silly. For that I deduct one star. I'd deduct more except that the rest of the book is so gloriously fun to read, deftly combining horror, action and comedy as we have come to expect from the series. I recommend this book, provided that you have read the previous installments. If you haven't, then you should read them first.
date: 2013-05-19T19:07:21Z

Rule 34, by Charles Stross
type: item
description: - Excellent: 5/5 This is a sequel to Stross's earlier Halting State, although you don't need to be familiar with the earlier work to make sense of this one. It's a page-turner alright, filled with believable characters having an awful time for our entertainment, and the text sizzles with humour. You'll have to be a geek to understand all the little jokes, but that's not a pre-requisite for enjoying the book, you'll just get more out of it if you're from the right background. Unconditionally recommended for all but the most puritan of agèd aunts, as it gets a bit nasty at times.
date: 2013-05-13T19:50:51Z

Railtrack and Other Letters, by John Hein
type: item
description: - Excellent: 5/5 I read this between overs while having a rock 'n roll weekend watching cricket at a country house. It's good fun, but I'm glad it wasn't any longer than it is, as trolling gets boring after a while. Mr. Hein stops at just the right length.
date: 2013-05-07T13:09:37Z

The Martian, by Andy Weir
type: item
description: - Excellent: 5/5 "I'm pretty much fucked. That's my considered opinion." That's how this book begins, and it is, unfortunately, how you are too if you want to read it. It was available on Kindle, astonishingly cheaply, but is no more, as Weir recently sold publication rights to Random House. It is scheduled for re-release in February 2014. [update: 2014-04-28: and lo, it is available from the nice Mr. Amazon.] It is the tale of how, after an accident on a manned mission to Mars, one astronaut is left behind, his fellow crew members believing him to be dead, and how he survives. Our Hero, Mark Watney, is primarily a botanist, but has also been cross-trained as a mechanic and has some background in chemistry, and it's a simple story of how he uses these skills to overcome problem after problem, difficulty after difficulty, to survive, regain the ability to communicate, and eventually to be rescued. It is a paean to creativity, stubbornness, and to having paid attention in school. For the vast majority of the story Watney is the only character, and thankfully he feels like a real person. The few other incidental characters are also fleshed out enough that we can sympathise with them. The story bounces across the Martian landscape at a steady pace, and it's hard to put the book down. And Weir has a wonderful turn of phrase: " Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped. " I loved this book, and if only you could read it you would too. Make a note in your diary so that it reminds you to buy a copy next year when it becomes available again. In the mean time, Weir has several other works available on his website.
date: 2013-05-05T14:03:01Z

How Firm a Foundation, by David Weber
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 This book starts terribly. We are treated to sixty pages of incomprehensible gibberish in which sailors desperately thwart the top-gallants and abaft the mains'l while the sea larboards the weather side. Yes, we get the idea that they're in dire peril, but for God's sake GET ON WITH IT. At a 'mere' 800 pages for the whole book, far fewer than its bulky predecessor in the series A Mighty Fortress, which weighed in at over a thousand, this is approaching 10% of the book, and much of this nautical nonsense serves little purpose. Yes, what little of it is comprehensible to people without peglegs and clavicular psittaciformes is exciting, but it doesn't advance the story much, and certainly not by nearly 10%. Thankfully, normal service is soon restored and as well as interludes of exciting local action as navies smash each other to bits, the global story is significantly advanced. One particular advance opens the way for what I'm sure will be very dramatic events in the next volume in the series. Returning to my criticisms of the previous volume, the cover art is far less awful - it's still not great, but at least it's not offensively bad this time - and the internal monologues are kept under better control. They're still there, they're there in everything Weber writes these days, but at least they don't distract too much from events. The stupid names? Well, yeah, they're still there. It wouldn't really be possible to fix that now. But I still hate them. If it wasn't for the meaningless interludes of ahoying of spinnakers and the stupid names I'd just about award this five out of five shiny gold stars. It's not a great book, but it is at least thoroughly enjoyable, which matters far more to me than all the literariness in the world. Of course, this deep into a series it will make little sense if you've not read all the previous volumes, but with those caveats I recommend it.
date: 2013-05-03T23:52:29Z

Force Cantrithor, by Michael McCloskey
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Another month, another self-published novel from Michael McCloskey. He don't 'alf work 'ard guvnor. And again, he sent me a free review copy. I have been most remiss in reviewing it. He sent it to me in February, I read it at the beginning of April, and only now, a month later, am I writing my review. Bad David! First impressions were not good. In fact I'll go further than that. They were downright bad. It wasn't at all clear who the protagonist actually was, his role was unclear, but worst of all was the damned mind-reading. Telepathy smacks too much of magic, something I'm not particularly keen on in fiction, and especially when mixed with science. It's also far too easy to take telepathy too far and end up with an unfeasibly powerful character who is somewhat flat and one-dimensional. I've got a bit weary of telepathy in a science-fictional context from reading David Weber's series of Honor Harrington novels and so I was glad after a few tens of pages to realise that McCloskey doesn't make much use of it, and later on when he does use it there has been a plausible explanation. I was also glad that my initial confusion about who the hell the protagonist was was soon cleared up just enough to stop me throwing the book down in disgust. Well, from deleting the ebook anyway. In fact, his process of discovering who he is, what has been done to him, and what he can do is a large part of what made the book worth reading. Here we have a character who develops before our eyes, warts and all - and there are oh so many juicy warts! As usual, McCloskey does a great job with The Other. There are two of them: Our Hero, whose mental state is truly odd, and the evil looking beasties in the cover art. This isn't to say that the book is entirely without flaw. Some parts of the story are brought in very suddenly and don't quite fit, a sign that a bit more time may be needed on editing - I'd be willing to wait a bit longer between books for this. And I found the fema…
date: 2013-05-03T22:27:55Z

Euclid's Wall, by Michael McCollum
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Michael McCollum has been self-publishing for many years - since at least 1997 - in both paper and alectronic formats. His books (this is the tenth I've bought) are mostly space opera. They don't really stand out from the crowd, but are entertaining enough. This, however, is a bit of a departure from his norm, being set on a post-Apocalyptic Earth. After an experiment into novel new energy sources went horribly wrong, Earth was wracked by terrible earthquakes and beset by huge tsunamis and civilisation fell. But as the years passsed, things calmed down, the survivors regrouped, and society is at roughly the level of the late 17th century by the time of the tale. The tale is one of exploration and a search for resources and information about the calamity that befell the "high civilisation", which turns into a desperate scramble to save the world. How convenient that European civilisation had managed to claw its way back up to a level at which it could save the world with an expedition half way around the globe, and at just the right moment! The coincidence that allows our heroes to be heroic is ridiculous, of course, but that is the nature of books that have heroes. Heroes are never believable. Everything else is plausible (fanciful, perhaps, but at last plausible) and it's a rollicking good story that you will want to polish off quickly, and so I recommend it. And the world he creates for this book would easily support a host of other stories, either in series or stand-alone. I hope that he writes them.
date: 2013-02-22T23:17:50Z

The Trilisk Supersedure, by Michael McCloskey
type: item
description: - Good: 3/5 This is the third book in an ongoing series, self-published by the author and available on the Kindle and also for other e-book platforms via Smashwords. The first in the series was cheap n cheerful fun, but with poor characterisation and dialogue. The follow-up was an improvement, and still jolly good fun to read, and while the author had sent me a review copy for free I would have been happy to pay for it. So what about this one? Again, McCloskey sent me a free copy, and I'd be happy to have paid for it. His people continue to improve - dialogue is more natural and characters, even minor ones, feel more solid - and he still does a fabulous job of creating alien aliens and ecosystems, and to a certain extent this is what saves this book, with some deliciously cynical back-stabbing and contingency planning on the part of the alien character who we're never sure is an antagonist or protagonist. However, I found the story a bit confusing. It wasn't clear to me what the relationships were between some of the factions that Our Heroes ran into and what they were doing there, even once I'd got to the end of the book, and at one point I almost just put the book down half finished in irritation. But I persevered and by the end my confusion was irrelevant. That lingering confusion leads me to marking this book down slightly from its predecessor, but it's still an enjoyable read (especially given the low price), and I recommend it if you've read the previous volumes. If you've not read the previous volumes, you won't get anywhere near as much out of it, but the stories are short and cheap so you can easily catch up first.
date: 2013-02-21T22:37:16Z

Lewis Carroll in Numberland, by Robin Wilson
type: item
description: - Good: 3/5, or - Very good: 4/5 for a student of the mathemagical art. To most people, Lewis Carroll is nothing but an author of childrens' books and a photographer of ill repute. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was also Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an eminent mathematician at Oxford, with most of his work being in geometry and matrix algebra. He spent much of his time teaching undergraduates, but also children in various schools around Oxford and private pupils, and published at least as much serious work as he did fiction and nonsense. It is said that after Queen Victoria read "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", she was so charmed that she demanded that she be sent a copy of his next book. And duly, she received "An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations" and was not amused. Much of his mathematical work, being pedagogical, is now out of date and sometimes even wrong. For example, much of his energy was spent on teaching Euclid to undergraduates, material that is these days covered at A-level in a completely different way, and he was so opposed to the study of non-Euclidean geometries as to waste time writing against them. But that doesn't detract from the fact that he was a great teacher of mathematics, to students at all levels from young children to the most learnèd. Of his works that are still relevant, his two-part "Symbolic Logic" appears (from its description in this short biography) to be worth looking at, for his method of figuring out syllogisms through diagrams, and how he expanded his diagrams to deal with showing the interactions of any number of sets, where Venn diagrams break down at six sets. In 1884 he published what is now an obscure work on psephology, "The Principles of Parliamentary Representation" in which he considers what it means for an election to be fair, and methods to achieve this in reality. I'm very pleased to say that he comes to the same conclus…
date: 2013-01-16T00:36:46Z

Bitter Harvest, by Michael R. Hicks
type: item
description: - Meh: 2/5 Bitter Harvest begins a year after the end of Season of the Harvest, with little in the way of introductory material for a reader who didn't read the prequel, and follows the same heroes as they find that they weren't quite successful enough in the previous book. This time round there's more action - a lot more shooting and blowing things up, at the sort of level that you might expect in a Hollywood vehicle for washed-up actors who need to come out of retirement to pay an unexpected tax bill. Something like The Expendables. And like The Expendables, it requires very little mental effort to consume, probably required little to write, and after a while starts to feel as if you've read this page before. There's just too much shooting and blowing stuff up. Unlike The Expendables, however, I doubt it'll be much of a crowd-pleaser. That dreadful film did pretty well at the box office, but yer typical cinema-goer has lower standards than yer typical reader. Even at £2.49 on the Kindle I can't in good conscience recommend that you read this, although I hesitate to tell you not to read it unless you've also not read the prequel. There's a third installment on its way called "Reaping the Harvest", according to the author's website but I'm not sure I'll bother. This installment in the trilogy left some unfinished plot lines, of course, but I wasn't left panting for more.
date: 2013-01-14T18:56:57Z

Rapture of the Nerds, by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow
type: item
description: - Meh: 2/5 I thought that Charlie Stross was like Christopher Lee: incapable of error. Oh how wrong I was. Revisiting what used to be an old theme of his - The Singularity - and in collaboration with Cory Doctorow, who is one of the great up and coming writers (supposedly - I've not read any of his solo stuff), this should have been not just entertaining but a good read too. Unfortunately it ain't. While it's chock-full of ideas, they're not used well, being just splattered onto the page with apparently little concern for the results, amongst cartoon-like one-dimensional supporting characters and leading to slapstick results. I came very close to not finishing the book. On the plus side, much of the writing is tight, clear and inventive, as you would expect from two established professionals, but that can't lift a badly plotted story. Not recommended, not even as a legal free download.
date: 2013-01-14T17:17:04Z

Season of the Harvest, by Michael R. Hicks
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Mr. Hicks is another of those self-published authors that the Kindle is so good for, and, as many of them do, he has released this, the first book in a series, for free. He has a few other series too, which also have the first installment available for free. Season Of The Harvest starts off as a crime thriller, in which a policeman's best friend - another policeman, of course - is killed while investigating a subversive group. Our Hero is told not to investigate the crime - he is, of course, too emotionally involved. But predictably, he does, he unearths corruption and then conspiracy, before being rescued from The Conspiracy by the very group he thought he was investigating. Of course, it turns out that that group are the good guys, he joins them, and saves humanity. So far, so not particularly original. It turns out that The Conspiracy that they are fighting against is very old, very evil, very powerful - and infeasible. There are only a dozen or so in the inner circle, with a large number of useful idiots working for them, and I do not believe that such a setup can be stable. Conspiracies always fail, because people are no damned good at keeping secrets, and doubly so when they know - and they know because they are being bribed or blackmailed - that the secret they are keeping is Bad and Naughty. But I can brush that under the mental carpet, as Hicks tells his story so very well. It's a real page turner, running at just the right pace to make you want to keep turning the page until oh dark thirty in the morning without resorting to vast amounts of spurious shooting and explosions, and even though the nature of the conspiracy, and much of the science underpinning it, is preposterous (the science is so silly that I thought quite hard before tagging this review as sci-fi), I very much enjoyed this book. It's trash, quite predictable, but it's very enjoyable trash, and at the price you'd be a fool not to read it. So why not five stars? The science. A…
date: 2013-01-14T00:02:12Z

Man Walks Into a Pub, by Pete Brown
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 There are lots of books about beer, but most of them are about how it's made, or about beers (and places to drink them) that are currently on the market. This book is far more interesting, a history of we English and our beer. Some of it will be well-known to many people, but much of it, especially how our drinking habits have changed over time and more importantly why they changed and what were the social motivators for those changes will not be familiar to many. Brown makes legislation and the economics of beer and drinking interesting, and I would recommend this book based on that alone. But he does a lot more, skewering several sacred cows and roasting them for us: he makes sense of pub architecture and provides what I think is a very fair view of CAMRA who manage to be at the same time both champions of great beer and enemies of innovative beer; champions of the great pub and enemies of any attempt to design pubs relevant to modern lifestyles and economic circumstance. If there is one significant problem with the book it is that its coverage of the Beer Orders and the changes resulting from them is woefully incomplete, for which I deduct one star. There is little, for example, on how pubs' supposedly free choice of "guest" beer are now limited by shady discounting tied to rent. At least some of this shadiness was apparent by 2003 when the book was first published, although its effects have become even more prevalent in the succeeding decade. But then, I write that with the benefit of hindsight. Writing the history of what has only recently happened is always tricky because you can't tell what's a significant long-term change and what's just a minor abberation that will disappear shortly. I read the first edition. There is now a second edition (published in 2010). I have made a note in my diary to look for a third edition in about 2020.
date: 2012-12-22T15:51:36Z

Fuzzy Nation, by John Scalzi
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Many years ago H. Beam Piper wrote "Little Fuzzy", a fine tale that has now, along with its sequels and its author, slipped into relative obscurity. Last year John Scalzi, with the blessings of Piper's heirs, released this "reboot", in which he tells broadly the same story with just a few little tweaks for a modern audience. There is more corporate wrong-doing and less government in Scalzi's version, for example, and more of people figuring out stuff on their own instead of government scientists. Scalzi's re-telling of the story is a fine piece of work, as I expected from reading some of his previous stories, and I recommend it to you.
date: 2012-12-22T15:29:50Z

Wired Kingdom, by Rick Chesler
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 I'd never heard of Mr. Chesler until some random stranger started "following" me on Twitter. I have no idea how he heard of me, I suppose that he reads the blogs of other independently published authors, one of them mentioned my book review. I often talk about how much I love reading some of the cheap self-published sci-fi that the Kindle Revolution has sparked, and so I guess that explains things. Anyway, I wondered who this random stranger was, followed a few links, read a description, and moments later, I had a book to read. And a jolly interesting book it was too. Now, let's get the bad bit out of the way first. The technology is a joke. To take just two examples: first, small portable satellite communications systems require a lot more power than would be available in the system described and have nothing like the required bandwidth; and second, water is opaque to GPS. But, despite some people saying that it's sci-fi, it ain't, and so I won't criticise the author for his bad science and engineering. It's really a crime thriller. It has all the right ingredients - a seemingly unsolvable crime, then shocking evidence that emerges, a race between the bad guys and the good to get hold of it, action, hidden motives, and of course some great deception so that both the good guys and the reader go down utterly the wrong route in trying to figure out whodunnit. I'd give it five stars out of five, but for one thing. The rabid animal-rights terrorist just doesn't fit quite right into the plot. Some of his actions are significant, it's true, but I think he could be fairly easily swapped out for a more believable character. His attempts to harpoon a whale[1] - to be the first sail-powered whaler in decades, as he points out - as a mere publicity stunt to draw attention to the plight of whales is not in the slightest bit believable. Sure, we all know that animal rights extremists are mad, but they ain't that mad. In reality they know that they can get away w…
date: 2012-11-08T22:10:34Z

Wool, by Hugh Howey
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 This is an omnibus edition of what was originally a series of five linked short stories. It shows, with four clear, evenly-spaced cliff-hangers, all obviously intended to squeeze another few quid out of the addict reader. It is a story of how hope and the human desire to explore can never be completely suppressed, and has strong similarities to Arthur C. Clarke's "The City And The Stars": both are set in worlds where the urge to explore and to push the boundaries has been almost eliminated; both have a population that is kept under control by limited information and fear; both populations consist of people whose roles in society are largely pre-determined. In Wool that fate emerges from a quite literally stratified society where moving up the social ladder is not only socially difficult (those from lower down are seen as very much the lumpen proletariat) but is also physically difficult. The people of Wool live in a gigantic underground silo, sealed off from the rest of the world which has become inhospitable to life. It's a huge silo, split over 140 levels, but I get the impression that each level in turn consists of several floors, giving a total of around two miles from top to bottom. And, because the place was designed with limited social mobility in mind, there's no lifts. And while there is electronic communication, it is deliberately made phenomenally expensive so people have to rely on porters tramping up and down those miles to deliver hand-written letters - written on rare, expensive paper. Science appears to not be practiced at all, with advanced technology not really understood by its users. It's really quite a nice little authoritarian setup. Howey does a great job putting you in other peoples' skin. He does it in "I, Zombie", and does it here again with great characterisation. He communicates bone-weariness, terror, pain, longing, and everything else that separates us from the machines that some characters wish people were. It's not pe…
date: 2012-09-07T22:44:28Z

I, Zombie, by Hugh Howey
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description: - Good: 3/5 There have been far too damned many zombie books and TV series recently, most of them not very good. They're a simple formula that sells: good vs evil, black and white, no shades of grey, and a cheap excuse for relentless action without much thought. There are occasional exceptions. Max Brooks's excellent "World War Z" pretty much brought the genre back to life, and was also the high point too, with everything since being at least unoriginal and almost entirely dreadful. "I, Zombie" breaks out of the mould, and is almost great. It could so easily have surpassed World War Z. But it doesn't. As its central idea it turns the zombie story on its head, telling it from the point of view of the zombie. This is, of course, impossible: we all know that zombies are mindless automatons, with barely more sentience than an arcade-game bad guy that you can trap in corners, driven solely by their insatiable all-encompassing desire for human meat and inability to do even the simplest of forward planning. Such creatures can't possibly be the view-point characters of a story. But Howey looks beyond the shambler and considers what happened to the person it used to be. In most zombie stories, that person is simply dead, but in I, Zombie, they're still there, experiencing everything but utterly unable to do anything, and forced to go along for the grisly ride. The book is redolent of genius. As the "locked in" characters can't interact with each other, or (at least intentionally) with their surroundings, all we are left with is their internal monologues, their memories, and their experiences of becoming and being a zombie. These are without exception handled beautifully. I would never have thought that you could get such fine writing about shitting yourself (zombies, of course, have no control over their bladder or bowels) or the feel of having fur stuck in your throat from the cat you just ate and not being able to cough it out, but Howey does this gloriously. So why only t…
date: 2012-09-02T20:09:26Z

The Trilisk AI, by Michael McCloskey
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 A few months ago I reviewed several of McCloskey's books, including the prequel to this one, The Trilisk Ruins. I was not entirely complimentary - the book was flawed, but was also cheap and entertaining, so I gave it three stars and recommended that you read it. Recently, the author contacted me, having read my reviews, and asked if I'd like a review copy of the sequel. Well, of course I would! I ended my last review by saying I was looking forward to reading it. McCloskey said in response to a negative review written by someone else "if you give me a bad review, so be it. Authors have more to fear from obscurity than anything else" - and then sent the reviewer a copy of another of his books. I've found this to be a refreshingly common attitude amongst the new breed of good self-published e-book authors - I confess that the first time I ripped into one of their works I was half-expecting to have to ignore a whiney response, but so far all I've heard from authors has been things like "thanks, you made some good points, I'll upload a version that fixes some of them soon", and "thanks for the review, would you like a free copy of the sequel". Damn all you authors for stomping all over my cynicism gland! So, on to the book - is it any good? It's better than the previous volume in this series. Dialogue is improved, as is characterisation, although both could still do with some work. For example, when Our Heroine says "Big gold centipede-things scurrying around here. No idea how many. They scare the shit out of me" that's just it, she's saying it. Possibly in a robotic monotone. Even in context it's hard to get pant-wetting terror out of this sequence. There are also a couple of minor inconsistencies, things which the characters really should have - and would have if they were real - thought about. Not that those really matter. It's a good story, well-paced, we can empathise with all the characters, even the one designed to be thoroughly un-human (I've s…
date: 2012-09-02T19:22:43Z

The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski
type: item
description: - Meh: 2/5 According to the cover blurb, Sapkowski is "a European superstar". This is either untrue, or tells us nothing good about contemporary European fiction writing. This loosely connected collection of short stories contains a couple of interesting re-imaginings of standard European folk-lore (plus a whole bunch of monsters where all he's done is make up a name - they get mentioned in lists but never seen), but you're always left with the impression that very little is actually happening. What's more, you won't feel a single solitary thing for the only real character. If you're stuck for something to read then this might be worth paying pennies for, but that's all.
date: 2012-09-02T15:05:39Z

The Martian Race, by Gregory Benford
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Benford is a director of The Mars Society, an organisation set up by Robert Zubrin in 1998, just a year before this book was published and two years after Zubrin published "The Case for Mars". In that non-fiction work (which I recommend) Zubrin, an aerospace engineer, sets out why he thinks government-backed space agencies will never make any more meaningful moves for manned flight beyond low Earth orbit, why manned flight to Mars and beyond is essential, and then shows how it can be done using existing technology for not much money. When I read Zubrin's book, I was enthralled and was immediately convinced by his arguments. Benford obviously was too, because as well as serving on the board of the Mars Society, he uses Zubrin's "Mars Direct" mission design in this near-future fiction. What Benford wrote as fiction is becoming fact: the X-Prize, for the first private organisation to demonstrate a reusable manned sub-orbital spacecraft was won in 2004; we are on the cusp of private manned orbital space flight (SpaceX's Dragon capsule passed all the necessary tests less than a month before I read The Martian Race); and there is even a proposal for a manned Mars mission funded by, believe it or not, advertising and "reality" TV. The Martian Race's mission really is funded by investors hoping to recoup their capital investment by winning a prize, and making a profit and meeting operating costs through advertising and TV rights. So on the large scale, Benford's "fictional" world isn't just believable, it's true. On the smaller scale he also does well. It's full of the little details that make a world not just believable but real, as if you can touch it: little things like the danger of frostbite in your toes when standing on the Martian surface. Most of the book is a strait-forward story of the putting together of the mission, and the months spent exploring the new frontier. It really is a race betwen two teams to get there and back and do certain experime…
date: 2012-08-28T21:23:47Z

Halting State, by Charles Stross
type: item
description: - Excellent: 5/5 Stross has written several times in his blog of the difficulties in writing near-future science fiction. By the time a book has meandered on its way through being written, edited, and published - a process that can take two or three years - it can be out of date as the real world catches up with the world and the gadgets that the author imagined, or wanders off in a direction that makes the author's imagined world inconceivable. In fact, that happened to Halting State's sequel, so badly that he had to throw it away and start again. And then nearly had to do it again. In the four years since Halting State was published, the real world has indeed caught up in some respects. In particular there is now a thriving market in virtual goods from video games, and there really have been crimes committed - real world crimes - in video games. But it doesn't matter to the reader that this science fictional story isn't quite as science fictional as the author intended. Science fiction doesn't have to be about our future to be entertaining (Jules Verne is still a good read) or about wondrous technologies (Earth Abides has none), it's about modern (post-Enlightenment) people doing or creating plausible things and may explore the ramifications of technology and science (as does A Canticle for Leibowitz). Authors worry about their technologies and the characters' situations being novel because they don't want to appear - at the time of publication - to be incapable of coming up with new ideas, but readers should care mostly about whether the book is entertaining. And this one is. Stross rarely fails to deliver. I only really have one nit to pick. The political arrangements of Scotland, England, the UK, and the EU are obviously a bit different in the book than they are in our world, with Scotland having rather more independence, but also being somewhat tied to English apron-strings - and both are rather more subservient to an apparently federal Europe. The lack of cla…
date: 2012-08-23T21:06:59Z

The Meat Tree, by Gwyneth Lewis
type: item
description: - Excellent: 5/5 I'm a Londoner, and so I avoided the Olympics. I avoided them in north Wales, and on on the way there I needed to stop for a pee. I pulled over at the next place on my route that looked like it had a bog, the Erwood Station Craft Centre. It's a typical trashy little tourist-trap selling ugly, overpriced knick-knacks, and uglier, overpriceder bad art. But, having used their bog I felt it would at least be polite to have a cup of tea and have a quick look to see if there was anything worthwhile there. I was quite surprised to find that there was. Amongst dreary books about Welshism there was a small series of books which stood out by dint of having had an actual graphic designer work on their covers, and one of them in particular grabbed my attention because of its bizarre title. A quick glance at the cover blurb and a read of the first couple of pages sold it to me. Just about the only piece of Welsh literature of any significance is "The Mabinogion", a collection of mediaeval tales and myths, first translated into English in the 19th century. I've actually read it, and I can tell you that it ain't that great. It's not awful, just ... not great. It's so mediocre and hum-drum that while I do know that I've read it, I don't remember a single thing about it. "The Meat Tree" is part of a series supposedly re-telling the tales from the Mabinogion in a contemporary way, and is a science fiction short wrapped around the tale of "Math, son of Mathonwy". The original tale seems to be (based on a synopsis I read on Wikipedia) mostly present, and doesn't really make much sense, but the way that it is presented here works around that problem. In Lewis's tale, a badly matched pair of "wreck inspectors" board a derelict space craft and attempt to figure out where it came from and who its missing crew were. There's no sign of them, but there is a VR entertainment system, which just happens to have this weird mediaeval tale loaded into it, which they play in an atte…
date: 2012-08-12T22:24:58Z

The Emperor's Edge, by Lindsay Buroker
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Several months ago I reviewed Buroker's "Flash Gold" and "Hunted", two short stories that were nearly free on the Kindle. They were pretty damned enjoyable anyway, and at their price point I was willing to overlook any minor weaknesses. And, as has happened so often now, a cheap (or free!) short story introduced me to another great self-published author. The Emperor's Edge is similar to those shorts. It's not set in the same universe but it might as well be - it's another steampunky world with a little bit of magic, although this time the action is set in a city instead of on a wild frontier - and it has a capable, likeable central female character. There's grime, crime, corruption and heroism, and you almost (but not quite) believe in the setting. The action is exciting throughout, making it a good page-turner, but there are also clear boundaries between segments, so you won't be too upset at having to put it down at bedtime. Buroker's policy for her stories, it seems, is to give the first one in each series, including this one, away for free. I've always known that books are a drug, and in doing this she is following the honourable precedent set by many a dealer. I think I'd give it four stars anyway, despite there being little depth to the story or characters, simply because it's so damned entertaining, but at the price I have absolutely no hesitation whatsoever.
date: 2012-07-19T00:20:43Z

Gentle Reminders, by Martin Perry
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 Let me start with a very brief precis. While the good ship Annie is docked and undergoing repairs, a small group of the crew go and get drunk. One of them Mysteriously Disappears, and wakes up to find he has been kidnapped and tortured, but he has no idea why or by whom, and no memory of the event. He escapes from his kidnappers' underground lair through the sewers, is found by a crewmate, and returns to the ship. There is a brief flashback showing us why the ship is undergoing repair - it was attacked by pirates. Just before our brave crew continue on their journeying, the same group head into town to pick up some supplies, and to try to find out what happened earlier. They are ambushed, have a fight, win, and find out a Clue. They set off with a cargo to deliver to another port, which they do, but when they leave that port they are sabotaged by a stowaway, are wrecked on an unknown shore, and have to contend with Monsters. They learn from the stowaway that The Conspiracy is after something that the first crewman unwittingly has, and that his family are now in danger. The crew is like family, so they head off to defend their crewmate's family, discover what it was that the conspiracy was after, and beat off an assault by The Conspiracy that was chasing close on their heels. The End. Now, what genre do you think this falls under? Sounds like a maritime thriller to me. Well, I lied, just a little bit. One word of my precis is untrue. Change 'shore' to 'planet' and it's bang on. So while the setting of Gentle Reminders is indubitably science fictional, this is really quite a traditional tale of derring-do on the high seas space lanes, and it's a jolly well executed one too. It's a simple tale that is nice and evenly paced with a good mixture of page-turning excitement and character development, and the stars of the show are allowed the space to have personalities and relationships. There are a few lovely turns of phrase - one that particularly sticks …
date: 2012-05-30T22:49:11Z

Double Share, by Nathan Lowell
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description: - Good: 3/5 Back in November last year I read and reviewed the previous three volumes of this hexalogy, giving them three stars, and I've been looking forward to the publication of this volume. After a hiatus caused by trouble at the publisher, this was recently released. "Double Share" continues the story of Ishmael Wang, having skipped over a few years of what was no doubt tedious study not worthy of turning into a story. He is now a very junior officer in the merchant marine, just starting his first job after graduating from merchant navy officer school. The story is, as seems to be usual with Lowell, a good bit of entertainment. The setup is, I think, rather contrived - it seems highly unlikely to me that in a world where adherence to regulations is apparently enforced enough that the regulations actually matter, the sort of breakdown of law and order that plagues Wang's new ship could possibly go on for as long as it has, and the notion, that we learn right at the end, that a ship's captain can't be fired by the ship's owner except for breaches of technical regulations is just plain daft. It has always been the case, throughout history, that managers can be relieved of their duties by an employer, and especially so when they preside tacitly over active criminality. But I can ignore that. Wang is an archetypal hero, and so for his story to progress he needs an environment in which he can be heroic. And he is. Absurdly so, maybe, but no more absurdly so than in his phenomenally quick rise through the non-commissioned ranks in the previous books. And anyway, fiction about boring everyday people doing reasonable boring everyday things wouldn't be worth reading! Three stars, again, because there's still nothing new here, but it was still entertaining to read. I recommend the entire series so far to you.
date: 2012-05-25T18:46:01Z

The "Synchronicity" Trilogy, by Michael McCloskey
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description: - Very good: 4/5 I bought the first book in this trilogy on the strength of reading the author's "The Trilisk Ruins", and am reviewing them all together, as they are just three strands of the same story. If you read only one you won't fully appreciate it - indeed, the individual volumes don't work as well on their own, either not being properly resolved or not having a proper beginning. Thankfully, as with The Trilisk Ruins they're dirt cheap. They appear to be set earlier in the same universe as The Trilisk Ruins - the authoritarian government is present here too in a somewhat less overbearing form, and personal and military technology is similar too. While these books appear to be set earlier, I believe that they were written later. The writing is definitely more mature, with less hammy dialogue and more time taken to make the characters into people, and there were no immediately obvious plot holes. The three books largely run in parallel, with each one finishing a little later than its predecessor, each telling the story from a different point of view. It's a surprising device, but one that I found worked very well. It leaves the reader wondering at the end of the first and second volumes, but with good solid conclusions in later books to fill in the gaps that were left. Obviously this means you should read them in order: Insidious first, then Industrious, and finally Ingenious. While I have rated the series as a whole with four stars out of five, there are large differences between the volumes. The first is by far the worst, consisting too much of rather repetitive action sequences, but it is rescued by the second and third volumes which are much better. The third is particularly good: the antagonist (whose viewpoint we have in this volume) is unlike any I've seen before (McCloskey seems to do aliens well, the one in The Trilisk Ruins was good too) while still being something that humans can empathise with; and the final conclusion comes as a surprise, but is al…
date: 2012-05-25T18:14:17Z

The Trilisk Ruins, by Michael McCloskey
type: item
description: - Good: 3/5 This is another of those cheap n cheerful books by an unknown author that the Kindle is so good for. It, like most of his other books, appears to be only available as an e-book. As is typical of books like this, the writing is not of the best. Dialogue is wooden, there are a few minor inconsistencies in the plot, and characters are very flat. But, as is also typical of these cheap self-published (I assume) e-book only stories, it's a decent enough piece of light entertainment, and so gets three stars. It would get less if it had all the extra costs of "proper" publishing, but as it is you can still just sit back and enjoy the story. Oh, and there's an obvious setup for a sequel, which I look forward to reading.
date: 2012-05-25T17:45:32Z

Basic Training, by Kurt Vonnegut
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description: - Very good: 4/5 I don't generally read literature, for the simple reason that most of it, while perhaps being beautifully written and plotted and with exquisite characterisation - despite all that, I just don't enjoy it. And given that I read for enjoyment it's understandable that I'm not going to spend my money and - more importantly - my time on it. I get my kicks mostly from low-brow "genre" fiction: sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, crime and so on. As some clever chap said, literary fiction is the fiction of introspection and changing the self, genre fiction is the fiction of doing and of changing the world. I like to think that it only says good things about me that I want to change the world to fit me instead of changing myself to conform to the world, and that I enjoy tales of others changing the world. So why did I buy this? First, it's by Vonnegut. He's one of those few literary writers who I'm confident of buying because I'm already familiar with and enjoy his writing. There are few other literary writers whose work I'd buy sight-unseen, and Vonnegut veers rather towards the fiction of doing in his literature! And then it was also cheap, immediately available, and I wanted something to read right now, and could have it delivered to my Kindle in moments. It's a short tale - equivalent to about 80 pages in print - of a lad sent to live with a stern disciplinarian relative, his rebellion, punishment, and of his forgiveness when he is willing to give up everything even for someone who he dislikes. Underlying this is the realisation that eventually dawns that when an adult controls and disciplines a child it isn't necessarily arbitrary and isn't done to mould the child into a clone of the adult, but is done from love and a desire to help the child learn. It's a bit slow to start, especially if, like me, your diet is mostly the "fiction of doing", but it's worth persevering with. You'll polish it off quickly and enjoy almost every minute of it. So why only four star…
date: 2012-05-09T23:48:17Z

Through Struggle, the Stars, by John Lumpkin
type: item
description: - Good: 3/5 ... or, as I immediately thought, Per ardua ad astra. An apt title for this story, and the Latin version even shows up in the text, with the institution bearing it being a direct descendant of the Royal Flying Corps, who are congratulated on their far-sightedness. It's a tale of a young man who enlists in the military with all kinds of gung-ho ideas about what he wants to do, but who ends up, sulkily and largely by accident, as an intelligence officer - and finds that he thoroughly enjoys it. The world-building is intriguing and largely consistent, but the characters are a little flat. But for less than two quid I can't complain. It was enjoyable, and even if it's a bit of fairly mindless cheese, it's good value for money.
date: 2012-05-09T00:06:21Z

A Dance With Dragons, by George R. R. Martin
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description: - Good: 3/5 Blimey, Martin don't half go on! This is the fifth volume in his ongoing epic fantasy series "A Song Of Ice and Fire". It was originally intended to be part of volume four, but because of Martin's uncontrollable logorrhoea that got split in two because it was simply too big to print. Once split, the first half, which became volume 4 "A Feast for Crows", was still a hefty 976 pages. We then waited five years for this, the second half. Martin obviously took the opportunity to fiddle with it and no doubt substantially rewrite parts of it. The resulting fifth volume ended up so big that in some editions it was itself printed in two volumes, called "Dreams and Dust" and "After the Feast". It's fairly clear where he's fiddled too. A Feast for Crows ended up being just about events and people in the southern half of Westeros (Martin's fictional world), and A Dance With Dragons was supposed to simply be the northern half of the same story, with events happening in parallel. It didn't work out quite that way. All of the first half (Dreams and Dust) and some of the second (After the Feast ) is parallel to A Feast for Crows, but not all of it, with action in the last third returning south and happening after A Feast for Crows had finished. Confused? Actually, you won't be. The temporal shenanigans are handled well. What is still a bit confusing is, just as I criticised in A Feast for Crows, some of the relationships between people. Us modern denizens of a democratic capitalist world just aren't used to keeping track of feudal relationships and having family and clan relationships be so important is alien to us. No doubt my primitive ancestors of four or five hundred years ago would cope much better with this than I can - those of them who could read! I occasionally found myself having to turn to the genealogies in the back. It's good that they're provided, but it's irritating that they're necessary. Characterisation is excellent. They are all real, as are the place…
date: 2012-05-01T18:31:54Z

Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn
type: item
description: - Very good: 4/5 In my review of the Kindle I mentioned Baen books's enlightened attitude towards Digital Restrictions Management, for the e-books that they sell are blessedly free of DRM, even those of other publishers that they sell through the Baen website. But they're even more enlightened than that. They also give some of their older books away for free in unrestricted digital formats, including this one through the Baen Free Library. The library's manifesto makes it clear that DRM is a solution in search of a real problem, and that giving away selections from the back-catalogue is a very effective way of both selling more books but also of introducing readers to new writers. If on the strength of my Kindle review you then use it to read lots of DRM-free books from Baen and Project Gutenberg, authors and progressive publishers will thank you! So what's this book like? It's a comedy in which Our Heroes get into and - of course - escape from all kinds of scrapes while being hunted by a parody Green movement in a Luddite dystopia. It is not, as some say, an attack on the Green movement, but only on its more extremist members and on authoritarians in general. But more importantly, it's a panegyric to science fiction readers, personified in the attendees at a sci-fi convention. I don't go to cons myself, and they really don't appeal to me, but I do recognise what it is that makes people go to them: shared enthusiasm for a topic, camaraderie, and most importantly fascinating conversations with interesting people all of whom can teach you something. It's one of those books that, while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I recognise that it's also trashy. I recommend it for hardened sci-fi readers, but not for mundanes.
date: 2012-03-25T21:47:48Z

40K books
type: item
description: - Meh: 2/5 40K is a new company based in Italy publishing e-books in English, some originally written in English and some in translation. So far they've only published short-form fiction in the form of novellas. I tried three of them out - Wikiworld, by Paul di Filippo, The Wooden Baby, by Graham Edwards, and If By Reason of Strength by Jamie Rubin. They cost £2.49 each on the Kindle, and cost is the problem. All three were decent shorts, but they're too expensive. At no more than a quarter of the length of a typical novel, they are a lot more than a quarter of the price, making them poor value for money by comparison. Things look even worse when you compare the price to that of a magazine like Analog or Lightspeed, both of which come out monthly for £1.99 and typically contain one or two novellas plus several shorter stories as well as factual articles and book reviews. At half their current price, I'd take the time to actually review the stories properly and probably give them quite high marks. At their current price, I won't bother buying any more of them.
date: 2012-03-25T15:49:09Z

A Rising Thunder, by David Weber
type: item
description: - Good: 3/5 Yet another Honorverse installment, and again, it's competently written and entertaining for those who've read the series and its spin-offs up to this point. The importance of the spin-offs is made especially clear on the author's own website, where the series up to "Mission of Honor" are listed in their own section, but this one, which follows directly on from Mission is listed in a separate section along with the spin-offs that I talked about in my review of Mission. In my opinion, Mission should also be listed there. And unfortunately (but as expected) that ridiculous Conspiracy that I railed against in my review of Mission is still there, still playing the puppet-master.
date: 2012-03-23T20:34:00Z

The Translation of Father Torturo, by Brendan Connell
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description: - Excellent: 5/5 One of the best works of fiction in the English language is Hadrian the Seventh, by Frederick Rolfe. It is shameful that it is so little-known. Connell therefore gets off to a great start when he dedicates this book to Rolfe "for the design which I so meanly twisted". In both books, a priest of somewhat dubious antecedents is catapulted into the papacy, embarks on a whirlwind of reform, and is ultimately offed. But that's about as far as the parallels go. Connell's Xaviero Torturo is a nasty piece of work. A bully as a child, but highly intellectual, he is mentored by a village priest who is himself somewhat dodgy - they both dabble in the occult and, in Torturo's case, in "black magic". Torturo is also a thief, a blackmailer, and he has at least four people killed, and may have killed two more himself. Rolfe's priest, George Arthur Rose is instead a paragon of virtue who merely wants to be a priest and finds his ascent to the throne of Peter to be baffling. Both, however, are quite competent popes - both spark something of a revival of catholicism, Rose by his piety and actually bothering to live by what it says in the bible, Torturo by fake "miracles". And both works - and both fictional popes - are scathing about the corruption both personal and institutional that is the Roman church. Torturo is, of course, happy to use that corruption for his own ends but is at least honest enough to see it as hypocritical. And finally, both fictional popes have mercifully (for the rest of the Roman hierarchy!) short reigns. Rose falls to an assassin opposed to catholicism, whereas Torturo's crimes eventually catch up with him. Torturo actually survives, being merely thought to be dead, and there are all kinds of delicious possibilities for the way things could continue after the book ends. Normally when this sort of thing happens, I am left shouting at the author "for god's sake learn to write an ending" but in this case, no. Things are tied up neatly, and yet …
date: 2012-03-18T22:27:59Z

World War Z, by Max Brooks
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description: - Very good: 4/5 With this book and its prequel "The Zombie Survival Guide", Brooks pretty much brought the zombie genre of horror back to life, if you'll pardon the expression. And it's jolly good. The author uses the conceit of documenting personal tales for a history of "the zombie war", as a counterpoint to the dry official history of facts and figures, and it consists of multiple "interviews" between the author and individuals from all walks of life who recount their experiences from immediately before, from during, and from the ensuing cleanup after the war. Most of the interviewees have very similar voices, but their experiences differ widely, and most of them have a strong human element to them. And while some are merely about killing zombies, many are about terror, fear, and hope. By being broken down into short interviews instead of one long narrative - although the interviews are arranged roughly chronologically and there is some interaction between them - it is particularly well suited to reading a bit at a time while commuting with all the other gray city zombies.
date: 2012-03-14T22:18:18Z

Mission of Honor, by David Weber
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description: - Good: 3/5 Weber's long series of books set in the "Honorverse" (NB: link may contain spoilers) is thoroughly enjoyable if you like "military science fiction". That is, if you like mind-cheese with lots of stuff blowing up. Unlike most other authors in this sub-genre, Weber even manages to make his characters believable and sympathetic, to sometimes have realistic conversations and motivations. And the universe he creates is, on the whole, consistent. The series went through a bad patch a few books back where there was lots of "jaw jaw" and very little of the "war war" that made the series so exciting. But I'm pleased to say that with the previous installment (At All Costs) and this one, he's back on form. I have three criticisms. The first is that the books will make little sense unless you've read the previous installments. That's fair enough. Authors writing series have to strike a balance between making later works accessible to newcomers and annoying their established customers with repeated material. In a short series, a bit of repetition won't do any harm, but in this one - 12 books so far, with at least two more in the pipeline and quite probably more to come - it would be actively harmful. The second is related to the first, but is, I think, rather more important. There are several spin-off series, also set in the same universe, which some readers may not have bothered with. Unfortunately one of them, the "Wages of Sin" series, turns out to be of vital importance, and the "Saganami Island" series is also of some relevance to this book and, to a lesser extent, to the previous one. Keeping track not only of a long main series with several parallel interacting plot threads (but at least they evolve alongside each other in a single series) but also of at least one and potentially several other series at the same time is hard. It's worth doing, but hard. And finally, remember how I said that the universe Weber has created is mostly consistent? The big economic …
date: 2012-03-14T19:16:33Z

Land of the Dead, by Thomas Harlan
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description: - Good: 3/5 On to book three in this series and series-itis still fails to rear its ugly head - indeed, it's probably the best of the lot so far. We get some more background on the world the characters live in and why it differs from real history, and for most of the book it is refreshingly free of mumbo-jumbo. However, it will again fail to stand on its own, even more so than book two - this one pretty much starts at the point the previous one ended, and gives very little personal background on the major characters. Some of those characters are developed some more, which is nice to see, but even so the author assumes that you already know who they are and what they've done previously. Remember how I said that for most of the book it is free of mumbo-jumbo? Well, unfortunately it really falls on its face in the last few pages. Sure, it's dressed up in rationalism, but if you are in the least bit sceptical, then you will just be plain annoyed at how the author seems to think that so many peoples' actions can be so carefully manipulated to make individuals do exactly what is needed. I'm afraid that that holds no water whatsoever. You can, of course, manipulate the actions of large numbers of people, giving them little pushes onto a new course - advertisers and politicians do this all the time - but to spend the last few pages of what had been an excellent story up until that point attempting to list all the people whose actions had been chosen in advance by the man behind the curtain is just silly and leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Not only is this explanation of what's been happening annoying, it shouldn't really be necessary. Harlan clearly needs to study human behaviour a bit more. I recommend Seldon's papers on the subject.
date: 2012-02-12T18:02:49Z

Thirst, by Andrei Gelasimov
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description: - Good: 3/5 AmazonCrossing is Amazon's new imprint for foreign language books translated into English. Originally just for Kindle books, they now also publish on paper. This is the first of their books that I've read, and is translated from the original Russian by Marian Schwartz. It is a short novel of a hideously maimed veteran of the Chechen war who, while he has a successful job, likes to spend his money by disappearing into a bottle. When one of his ex-army buddies goes missing, he and some cronies go and search for him - unsuccessfully - and, in the process, our hero is brought face to face with some of the roots of his troubles and in the process he regains the tender side of his humanity that he lost. I bought it because someone recommended it and it was cheap, but it's not really the sort of thing I normally enjoy: it's too serious and nothing much happens. I doubt I'll ever read it again. But it did make a refreshing change and is masterfully written and translated.
date: 2012-02-12T11:23:55Z

Black Out, by John Lawton
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description: - Very good: 4/5 This story starts off appearing to be a fairly hum-drum detective story, set in London shortly before the Normandy landings. As an example of its genre I thought it was pretty decent, but only pretty decent. But it soon got better, adding twists and turns as we learn that Our Hero isn't just up against a murderer. He's up against the Abwehr - no, an anti-Communist group in the OSS - no, a rogue OSS agent! These twists add spice. Unfortunately, the conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy gets a bit confusing, both for the reader and, I fear, for the author, and it falters terribly before a rather unsatisfying wrapping up of loose ends. As is unfortunately all too common for Kindle editions, there is some poor type-setting, as for the occasional accented character - in, for example, words like "voilà" - the wrong character encoding has been used. In this case, it comes out as "voil√✝". Overall, despite its ending (which, it seems, is universally the hardest thing for authors to write, perhaps because real world stories don't have an end), I enjoyed this book and recommend it.
date: 2012-01-21T13:45:59Z

December 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In December 2011 I read the following books: 1. The Centauri Device, by M. John Harrison - Excellent: 5/5 Adventures are an entertaining series of unpleasantnesses that happen to other people. Those having adventure thrust upon them are, in real life, unaware at the time of the entertainment and have far more important things to worry about. That adventures are actually enjoyable for the participants is a significant difference between the worlds of fiction and reality, and to read something that breaks that mould is refreshing. John Truck, the nominatively determined protagonist (I dare not call him a hero, for he spends an awful lot of time running away) is the future's equivalent of a white van man, just scraping a living from his battered and barely legal ship, one of society's losers. A self-confessed loser too. For reasons completely outside his control he is bullied, cajoled and threatened by governments and cults who want the eponymous Centauri Device under their control. Of course, in reality it would all go horribly wrong and one of the antagonists would get their way, but Narrative demands that Truck win through - although unlike the traditional hero he does so entirely by accident and would really like to just be left alone to continue as a loser orbiting around the fringes of society. I suppose that in a way he's like General Flashman - he ends up appearing to be heroic despite spending most of the time wetting his pants with terror - although unlike Flashman he's not himself a bully and makes no effort to hide his cowardice. So we have a splendid, refreshing story, in which at least some characters are rounded, detailed and sympathetic even if some of the antagonists are a bit less well developed. It's already excellent and verging upon getting five stars. We also have the most superb writing. It's clear and direct, but peppered with biting commentary. For example, "he leered at a receptionist ... as l…
date: 2012-01-03T16:28:35Z

November 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In November 2011 I read the following books: 1. On The Beach, by Nevil Shute - Good: 3/5 I've got myself a Kindle, which I shall be reviewing later, and so most of my reading this month was on that. This book is also available on paper. Shute wrote this towards the end of his life, in 1957, and despite his having emigrated by then to Australia his writing is still very much that of an Englishman. His Australia, in which this book is set, is very much a middle-class Englishman's idyll, if only with slightly different plants and seasons. The plotting is also reminiscent of English science fiction of the time, being yet another example of the "cosy catastrophe" so beloved of John Wyndham, and Samuel Youd (aka John Christopher) in books such as The Death Of Grass, A Wrinkle In The Skin, and The World In Winter. In all of these stories, nice middle-class English men and their pretty wives are faced with an unstoppable disaster that utterly destroys their civilisation, which they face with admirable stoicism, often while all those about them fall into barbarism. My first impressions were not good. Shute's writing is detached from his characters, who consequently appear to have almost entirely suppressed all their emotions - the odd exception here and there being "womanly hysteria". Sentences are short and simple, and for a while I thought I was going to absolutely slate the book for simply being a sequence of "this happened. And then that happened. And then that happened." But over time it grew on me, and the very simplicity of the writing and the objective view in the end produced a rather touching tale. A wholly unrealistic tale, of course, in which people have no drive for self-preservation, but touching and enjoyable nevertheless. Dealing as it does with nuclear war, we can't really expect scientific accuracy - to start with, while we can model and theorise as much as we like, we have no actual experience of even a li…
date: 2011-12-02T18:39:16Z

October 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In October 2011 I read the following books: 1. Out of the Dark, by David Weber - Meh: 2/5 There's an awful lot wrong with this book. To start with, the setup of an alien survey of Earth done several hundred years ago, and then the invasion in the present having the crap kicked out of it because human technology evolved "unnaturally fast" has been done before, by Harry Turtledove - and as surprising as this may be, Turtledove did it better: Turtledove's aliens have far more of a back-story and they behave more like rational beings. Then all too often the book devolves into spec sheets for various weapons. There's at least a hint of Jerry Ahern's so-awful-you-have-to-keep-reading "The Survivalist" series in some of the characters. And the ending, where Vlad The Impaler and his army of vampires kills all the aliens in a couple of nights is not only stupid, it's badly executed too. Weber's vampires are so ludicrously powerful as to make what little we get of Dracula's back-story implausible. The idea of having the undead rise up in defence of Earth - in defence of their hunting preserve - is not a bad one, but the execution is awful. On the plus side, Weber knows how to keep you turning the pages, and it is at least entertaining. But one to get second-hand for pennies and read once, I think, no more. 2. Armageddon Crazy, by Mick Farren - Excellent: 5/5 After the first couple of pages I was sure I'd read this before. And I had, sort of. The setup is remarkably similar to that of Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100", and also bears resemblances to that of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale": modern America has tipped over the edge into a theocratic basket-case dictatorship. In order of publication, Heinlein was first, then Atwood, then Farren, and I'd not be at all surprised to learn that Farren had read both of the others. But that's OK. He has taken those same ideas and gone in a radically different direction, his story bein…
date: 2011-10-30T15:32:43Z

September 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In September 2011 I read the following books: 1. A Feast For Crows, by George R. R. Martin - Good: 3/5 Predictably, the quality is still dropping. Yet again, the number of people and factions is confusing, but this time the confusion is compounded by confusion over what they're all doing. Some key characters' personalities have changed drastically - for, perhaps, understandable reasons, but it's still a bit jarring when a previously amoral character "finds god", so to speak, or goes batshit-insane. Actions and events are confused too, as the war in the previous volumes has mostly fizzled out and the victors are mopping up the few remaining hold-outs and the land is crawling with displaced bands of soldiers from both sides, who have taken up a life of banditry. It's still worth reading if you've stuck with the series so far, but there's no way that you can read this without having read the previous three volumes. I don't mind long series of books, but I am somewhat surprised by the number of authors who write them without leaving any way for new readers to jump in half way through and to actually understand what's going on. It seems that in modern sci-fi and fantasy it is almost required that authors make their second and subsequent volumes in a series completely unapproachable for new readers! This isn't the case elsewhere. Consider, for example, the Poirot or Flashman stories, or for a series with more concrete links between them instead of merely sharing a character or two, Wilbur Smith's sequence of books set in ancient Egypt, or older sci-fi such as Asimov's Foundation series. 2. Glory Lane, by Alan Dean Foster - Good: 3/5 First impressions of this book - from the cover art and the blurb on the back cover - are not good. The cover art by Jim Gurney is similar to that of Josh Kirby on Pratchett's covers, only not as good, and the blurb makes it sound like just a bad comedy of one-dimensional automatons. So it's a…
date: 2011-10-02T11:30:30Z

August 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In August 2011 I read the following books: 1. A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin - Very good: 4/5 So, on to book three in the series, and as expected the quality is just a little bit less than the book before. It's still good, still enjoyable, but it's beginning to look a bit worn around the edges. Like the previous volume, the sheer number of people and factions gets confusing, and the amount of magic in the story is slowly increasing. Magic is a crutch for bad fantasy writers and for good writers who've run out of ideas, it's just Treknobabble dressed in bearskins. The first book didn't really have any of it at all, but in this one there's quite a bit. It's still stuck lurking on the edges, and not having any significant impact, but more importantly, it's not having any impact at all that couldn't have been achieved without. Therefore it only detracts from the book. 2. Stone Spring, by Stephen Baxter - Good: 3/5 I expected to hate this book. It's set in the Mesolithic, in an age when the North Sea was still mostly land, and tells an alternate history of how a tribe of primitives kept the sea back by building dykes. This is, of course, absurd. They lacked the productive surplus to support the workforce this would have needed. Baxter tries to address this by having them trade with other tribes for labour, but still fails to address the question of how to feed the work force. No matter where or when your story is, you can't ignore basic logistics and still have a world sufficiently realistic that a reader can immerse himself in the story. And that's not the only utterly absurd piece of Baxter's world. The tribe of tree-top dwellers are also ridiculous. But never mind that. Baxter salvages from his irreparably flawed world a decent story of inter-personal conflicts, intrigue and jealousy. Why only three stars? It's daft, and I don't think he can sustain it over the two sequels that are supposedly on the way.
date: 2011-09-03T10:52:56Z

July 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In July 2011 I read the following books: 1. Grunts, by Mary Gentle - Meh: 2/5 Sword n' Sorcery fantasy is a bit tedious. It's pretty much all derived directly from Tolkien with little originality, and you always know that the good guys are going to win. "Grunts" is occasionally touted as being an antidote to that. It's not a very good antidote though. It's still derived entirely from Tolkien - admittedly as a deliberate pastiche - and still not particularly imaginative. I could put up with that, if only it was funny. It isn't. Oh sure, there's a few jokes, but a few jokes don't make good comedy. I could even put up with that, but there's one more terrible problem. I don't know whether it's bad writing, bad editing, or bad printing, but a few times the action would leap completely unexpectedly and with no reason from one place and time to another, leaving stuff incomplete and seemingly dropping us into the middle of a scene. That took something that could have been a perfectly decent piece of mindless entertainment and made it just too annoying. Now, on the off-chance that it was just a load of printing errors, you should note that the book I'm linking to is a different printing of the one I read. Same edition, same ISBN, but with a different cover and, if it really was a printing error, maybe that's fixed. Caveat emptor! 2. Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers, by Sir Mortimer Wheeler - Rubbish: 1/5 Sir Mortimer, or, to give him his full name and titles, Brigadier Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler CH, CIE, MC, FBA, FSA, was clearly a splendid chap. He wore a handlebar moustache and smoked a pipe and was, back in the 1950s when this book was published, something of an archaeological celebrity, much like that hairy bloke with the funny accent off of Time Team. He published this through Penguin's Pelican imprint in 1954. It is, unfortunately, very much a product of its time, when communication of scientific knowledge to t…
date: 2011-08-01T23:22:58Z

June 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In June 2011 I read the following books: 1. The Last British Bullfighter, by Frank "El Inglés" Evans - Good: 3/5 The unmentionable Ryan Giggs, coward, idiot, philanderer and footballist, thinks that this book is "as mad and funny as Frank himself", which is not a particularly good recomendation to put on the cover. The deranged scribblings of mad men aren't particularly enjoyable and in any case a footballist can hardly be expected to be in a position to make an informed recommendation. Thankfully, I didn't know about the publisher's execrable lack of taste when I purchased this book online - I bought it on the strength of an interview with Mr. Evans on the ever-tasteful, erudite and educational Radio 4. Giggs is either a liar, has trouble with the English language, or didn't bother to read the book. There's nothing mad about Evans, nor is it at all a funny book. Evans is passionate, perhaps. Eccentric maybe. Driven, certainly. Evans is also not a very good writer. Most biographies flow smoothly from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and chapter to chapter. This one doesn't. It judders and jumps and pauses, but in doing so it mirrors real life. Real life is not a smooth progression, it is long periods in which nothing of note happens, just long slow change, punctuated by occasional shocks and memorable events. You get the distinct impression that Evans is telling the truth, because he clearly hasn't tried to construct a coherent easy-flowing tale. Bravo! I really liked this book, and I recommend it. It gets dinged a couple of stars for the naïve writing style, for the publisher thinking that we're idiots who will go "Ooooooh, Ryan Giggs", and for a coupla minor points where Evans assumes that we know more about him than he's actually included in the book, and which an editor should have caught. 2. The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi - Excellent: 5/5 Rajaniemi is a foreign chap, for whom English is a se…
date: 2011-07-01T19:35:49Z

May 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In May 2011 I read the following books: 1. Earth Strike, by Ian Douglas - Good: 3/5 "Military science fiction" has a bad reputation, because of books like this. The story is simple, characters are barely developed at all, and their actions are predictable. We know from the first few pages that the admiral will disobey his orders and save the day. We know that the fighter pilot that no-one likes will be a hero. It's all very depressing that so many peoples' opinions of science fiction are formed from reading crap like this. On the other hand, it is at least exciting. I had to keep turning the page, so polished it off in a coupla days. I doubt very much that I'll read it again, but I might read the sequel if I can find it cheap. 2. The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan - Very good: 4/5 This collection of short stories has been sitting half-read next to my sofa for months, but I've finally finished it. That it sat around for so long without being finished made me think that I'd write a fairly critical review, and I do indeed have some criticisms. However, the last few stories were excellent and so the collection as a whole gets 4 stars. There's no real stinkers in this volume at all. However, quite a few, especially earlier in the book, left me frustrated - frustrated that there wasn't more, frustrated at the wonderful ideas not fully developed. Wanting more is a clear sign of good writing, but when we're given so little in a short story that I am frustrated instead of just wanting to buy the author's other books, that takes away from the enjoyment, and when I review books, enjoyment is the most important aspect. But the next most important aspect in my reviews is "literary merit". Something supremely enjoyable will get high marks from me even if of dubious quality, but something of high quality but not particularly enjoyable will only rarely get my praise. But excellent writing will sway m…
date: 2011-05-28T20:01:54Z

April 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In April 2011 I read the following books: 1. In the Heart of Darkness, by Eric Flint and David Drake - Good: 3/5 This has all the flaws and all the strengths of its prequel, with one rather glaring addition. In the first book, there were a few hints, but they could be ignored, that there was some ridiculous time-travelling technological intervention going on. But now that has been made very clear, and I don't like it. It seems cheap and tacky. The fictional world actually made more sense when it could be seen as the good guys being guided by God against a Satanic foe. It's still a good read, mind, and I still recommend it. 2. Destiny's Shield, by Eric Flint and David Drake - Good: 3/5 It's a law of nature that any book called "X of Y" or "X's Y" is crap. Yup, that law is still true. This book is crap. That's not to say that I didn't like it though. It's fine entertainment, easily digestible in bite-size chunks suitable for reading for a few minutes on the bus. What little substance the story had in the previous two volumes in the series has gone, but there's still plenty of action and humour. The authors are clearly capable of laughing at their own work. 3. Fortune's Stroke, by Eric Flint and David Drake - Good: 3/5 This is getting a bit silly now. Still fun to read though.
date: 2011-05-14T18:35:57Z

March 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In March 2011 I read the following books: 1. An Oblique Approach, by David Drake and Eric Flint - Very good: 4/5 This is one of those books, common in the sub-genre of "alternate history", and also common amongst those published by Baen Books, which despite having all kinds of horrible flaws is great fun to read. It tells a captivating story of good vs evil, has a few well-realised (if somewhat cartoonish) characters, lots of action and exotica, and is a page-turner. Who cares, then, that it horribly simplifies the history it's meant to diverge from, does nothing to explain the motivations of the bad guys, painting them as being entirely one-dimensional? Who cares that the hero and his gang are oh-so-heroic and over the top, and that for no good reason and without communication good guys thousands of miles apart seem to conveniently come up with broadly similar ideas at the same time? It's a great read, and probably, like so many others by Baen's authors, is one that I'll return to despite all of that and despite now having the story seared into my brain. And, of course, being a Baen book, it's part of a long series. On to the next ...
date: 2011-04-02T22:03:50Z

February 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In February 2011 I read the following books: 1. The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang - Excellent: 5/5 The last time I reviewed one of Chiang's short stories I loved it, and I loved this much longer (but still short-form - I'm not sure whether it's a "novella" or a "novelette", or whether there's a difference between the two, and I don't really care) story for much the same reasons. It is grounded somewhat more in a feasible extrapolation from current technology and pastimes than Exhalation is, and is perhaps more immediately accessible for that. Where Exhalation is broadly speaking an exploration of himself by the only character, The Lifecycle of Software Objects looks primarily at two main characters (one of them an entertainment AI the other a human) and how their relationship grows and changes over an extended time. It's even better than Exhalation, but the quality is just as high - I can't think of anyone living or dead who writes better than Chiang, and precious few who match him. It's better only because that top quality writing, evocative as well as entertaining, is sustained for so much longer. I recommend that you buy it, because the author deserves his royalties, but it's also available online for free which is how I read it. But I have now bought it too.
date: 2011-03-09T00:00:39Z

January 2011 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In January 2011 I read the following books: 1. The Time Patrol, by Poul Anderson - Good: 3/5 This collection of short stories has a major problem. All stories which feature travel into the past have this problem, and these, which have it to a very large degree, it being the core of the fictional world Anderson has built, have it in spades. That is, it doesn't deal very well with paradox. Sure, paradox is something that the characters worry a lot about, but in the end they mostly ignore it, and go ahead and create the "causal loops" that they worry so much about, and apparently get away with it every time, which is Quite Irritating. Other than that, they're mostly "OK", but only "OK". There's only one story that particularly stands out as being very good ("The Sorrow of Odin the Goth"), and none that stand out as being very bad. At their best, these stories contain sympathetic, believable characters who struggle with internal conflicts between what they must do, what they want to do, and what is right; at their worst they are entirely predictable and would only serve as a brief diversion to read once and then forget, with all of the characters' casual breaking of the fundamental rules of their organisation forgiven. To his credit, Anderson generally portrays the cultures of the past sympathetically, with even Evil Conquistadores being shown to be people with motivations and not just thoughtless automatons that merely hack and slash and burn - they do evil because they think it's for a greater good, not just for kicks and greed. Anderson wrote eleven stories set in this world, of which nine are collected here. A later edition with a slightly different name apparently includes one more story, so you may prefer to buy that instead. And there is one other book-length story published seperately. However, on the strength of this book, I have no particular desire to buy either of 'em. 2. Scratch Monkey, by Charles Stross - …
date: 2011-02-01T23:15:56Z

December 2010 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In December 2010 I read the following books: 1. Incandescence, by Greg Egan - Good: 3/5 This is a book in at least two parts, maybe three, all of which work well on their own, but never really gel together. The first two parts, the two fictional ones, concern two parallel journeys. The first, and the most accessible, is by a post-human from a decadent galaxy-spanning multi-species civilisation of the far future. While he is on a journey and quest for knowledge he is ultimately rather a shallow creature - both shallow as a person but also rather shallowly drawn by the author. This is unfortunate, because I get the impression that a lot of readers will be completely lost by the second (and third) parts, find this one accessible but unfulfilling, and so rate both the book and its author poorly. I can't really blame them for this, but they are most definitely wrong. The second is by a thoroughly alien scientist from a much more primitive culture - one that is pre-technological even. She is something of a Leonardo, who, along with those colleagues that she recruits to the cause of Science!, discover Newtonian mechanics, calculus and even general relativity. Given the circumstances in which Egan has placed her race, I find this to be only a little far-fetched. This second journey is by far the more interesting, at least for someone with the requisite educational background. Unfortunately if you lack that background then it will be impenetrable and dull. It requires a thorough grounding in Newton's theories of motion and gravitation, and at least some in general relativity. Good luck finding that in yer average reader, Mr. Author! Good luck even finding the latter in yer average sci-fi reader! The third part that I identified is entirely contained within the second, but as well as being fine (if technically demanding) fiction, it would, with only a little editorial tweaking (mostly the translating of the names of the direc…
date: 2010-12-31T18:05:21Z

November 2010 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In November 2010 I read the following books: 1. Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, by Francis Spufford - Very good: 4/5 Unashamedly biased, this paean to engineers is written in much the same vein as popular science books are. In other words, it's light on detail and it focuses to a far greater degree than is strictly accurate on a few individuals, painting them as heroes battling against an enemy. This makes it good light reading. It tells a few short stories, and tells them well, aiming to give an overview of the purported renaissance of engineering. Unfortunately I don't think it does a particularly good job of telling what engineering is really like these days, seeming to concentrate primarily on a few small project teams and juxtaposing them with The Other of nasty large foreign concerns. But real engineering throughout the world - especially the best of it - consists mostly of small teams and small companies, the giants that we've all heard of such as Tata, Shell, and Boeing being very much the exception to the general rule. Aside from that there are two other glaring errors, both in the chapter which waxes lyrical about the justifiably famous early video game "Elite". Throughout the rest of the book Spufford does a very good job of explaining technical concepts in ways that are accessible to a well-educated layman. Unfortunately he fails, in my opinion, in explaining some of the concepts necessary here. Furthermore, this is the one place in the book where he makes a prediction, and he gets it wrong. In lamenting the passing of the "bedroom coder" in the video games industry, and opining that the future belongs to large studios, he missed one of the biggest events in recent video game history, namely the advent of the iPhone, which has many excellent video games developed by individuals or by very small companies. Some of them even work in their bedrooms. The fast pace of hardware innovati…
date: 2010-12-05T00:53:11Z

October 2010 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In October 2010 I read the following books: 1. Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, by A. E. Moorat - Good: 3/5 There has been something of a fad recently for mixing up "period drama" and zombies, the most well-known of which is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Moorat has done a pretty good job with his highly derivative - it's history meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer - story, and while the book has no discernible literary value whatsoever, it's still jolly good fun.
date: 2010-10-31T15:35:44Z

September 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In September 2010 I read the following books: 1. The Fuller Memorandum, by Charles Stross - Excellent: 5/5 I was expecting this to be good. Not just because it's Stross, although he does generally deliver the goods (some of my recent reviews notwithstanding), but also because I had it recommended to me by so many people. And they were all right. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that this is one of the best things I've read this year. It's a good mixture of action, investigation, plain old Lovecraftian weirdness and intrigue, with just enough humour to prevent it from being an all-out horror or spy novel. Well-paced throughout, there's always something to make you want to turn the page. From digging around in the archives of Charlie's blog, it seems that there may be a fourth installment in this series. It has got steadily better over time, without suffering from seriesitis, and I'm looking forward to it. 2. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein - Excellent: 5/5 You may be surprised that I'd not read this before, but I have been put off reading Heinlein by reports that his books were really just extended childish political rants. Those reports are, at least in the case of this book, wrong. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress does indeed contain something of a political manifesto, but it's not childish (I disagree with it, but it's not childish), and is only part of a well-told, gripping tale, with engaging characters: you could ignore the politics entirely and still have a good read, although it would, obviously, somewhat damage the characters if you were to remove some of their motivation! Talking of which, the four primary characters are fully-realised and believable, even if some of the lesser ones are a bit samey or a bit stereotyped and hence easy to confuse, but that doesn't detract from the story. They're background. They're not meant to require your attention, so the story works fine with that…
date: 2010-10-02T20:02:49Z

August 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In August 2010 I read the following books: 1. The Burning Land, by Bernard Cornwell - Meh: 2/5 There's not much to distinguish this from the previous four volumes in this series. In fact, apart from the geographic location there's nothing to distinguish it. Bleh. 2. Flash Forward, by Robert J. Sawyer - Meh: 2/5 There's some interesting ideas here, and the makings of a great story - actually, of more than one great story - if only the author could settle on one of them. Unfortunately he doesn't, instead writing a lot about not very much happening. And then to make matters worse, as well as ignoring the particularly interesting sub-plots, the ending feels terribly rushed and really rather derivative. Not a very good book at all. 3. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand - Rubbish: 1/5 I couldn't finish this book, it's that bad. I gave up about a fifth of the way through. It's at least five times longer than it needs to be, littered with overly wordy internal monologues. The characters are entirely one-dimensional and all are caricatures - even Rand's heroes who are supposed to demonstrate the rightness of her philosophy are laughable one-dimensional cartoon villains. In fact, the book reads rather like I would expect it to if it were written by a friendless nerd who was watched rather too much Star Trek and wishes people were a bit more like Spock. Rand clearly doesn't understand humanity, or if she does, it is utterly hidden by her incompetence as a writer. 4. New Model Army, by Adam Roberts - Good: 3/5 When this book is good, it's very very good, and when it's bad it's awful. Which is unfortunate, because there's a great premise here, even if a little silly. It takes the idea of the "wisdom of crowds" that is so fashionable these days amongst wiki-fiddlers and takes it to the extreme, and actually tells an entertaining and engaging tale. Unfortunately, the tale is interrupted a few times by rather dull philosophising on the na…
date: 2010-09-02T22:53:07Z

July 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In July 2010 I read the following books: 1. War in a Stringbag, by Charles Lamb - Very good: 4/5 The part played by the Fleet Air Arm in the second World War is little known, and this very accessible, clearly written autobiography by one of its pilots who served in some of the FAA's most important theatres does a very good job of bringing the FAA to greater attention. It breaks down broadly into two sections: first, Lamb's time as a Swordfish pilot, predominantly in the Mediterranean theatre; and second, after a clandestine mission to land a spy in Vichy-controlled French North Africa went wrong, his year as an internee of the supposedly-neutral Vichy French regime, during which he and his fellow prisoners were treated badly. In both he shows courage and significant independent thinking. This is then followed by a very short summary of everything that happened between his repatriation and retirement, including his role in the Pacific theatre and in the Royal Navy in the 50s, 60s and 70s. This is definitely a better biography than Wings on my Sleeve by his fellow FAA flyer, Eric Brown, as it actually contains a narrative story (well, two of them, one after the other, as noted above) whereas Brown's work (which is also worth reading, incidentally) reads more as simply a series of disconnected episodes: it comes close to being just a "shopping list" of planes that he'd flown. 2. Churchill's Cigar, by Stephen McGinty - Good: 3/5 This fairly short book - only 200 pages, with large margins and not-quite double-spaced - consists mostly of rather charming stories of people fawning over Churchill and giving him extravagant gifts. There's little about the man here, or about the war he led us through, and not even all that much about his cigars aside from the fact that he smoked an awful lot of them. Overall, there's little to recommend in this book, although it does make for a short pleasant diversion. 3. The Philosophical St…
date: 2010-08-03T20:43:24Z

June 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In June 2010 I read the following books: 1. The Star Fraction, by Ken MacLeod - Very good: 4/5 While this is the first installment in a trilogy, it still works well as a stand-alone novel, and, unlike many other first installments, it actually has a proper end to match its beginning and middle. The world of the story is not entirely explained, which leads to some of the politics that forms a major part of it being rather perplexing, which troubled me the first time I read it (and stopped half-way through as Real Life intruded and ate all my time) but this time, I worked through it, and came away satisfied despite that. Normally I slate books which spend as much time as this does on the characters' politics. But in this case, it's leavened with a constant stream of stuff happening and the politics of micro-states and collectives is intimately tied with the characters' backgrounds and personalities, so it serves not to obfuscate but to shed light - notwithstanding the sometimes perplexing ideologies. The only significant nit I can pick is that the end, the last thirty or so pages, feel somewhat rushed, while still tieing up most (but not all) of the loose ends. Where the vast bulk of the book covers only a handful of days, those pages cover several months. I can only assume that that will turn out to have been necessary in one of the sequels. Worth buying. 2. Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod - Excellent: 5/5 While the setting is really rather implausible, having two species with such similar social structures, this does make it easier for the author to create sympathetic, believable characters on both sides - and he does this well. Both refer to themselves as human, and both are human. The slow build-up to the final climactic meeting, told largely from the point of view of unimportant people, makes the book a compulsive page-turner, and highly recommended. 3. Replay, by Ken Grimwood - Excellent: 5/5 I suppose it's v…
date: 2010-07-03T13:40:59Z

May 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In May 2010 I read the following books: 1. Last And First Men, by Olaf Stapledon - Meh: 2/5 This is another of those supposedly great works ("science fiction's greatest ascent", according to Stephen Baxter) that is actually a load of pish. Sure, it's undeniably imaginative and even "epic". It's certainly a significant work - virtually none before and few stories since have been written on such a vast scale. But it is boring and repetitive, utterly lacking in humanity (even though it purports to be a history of humanity and concentrates, due to the author's background, on philosophical notions), and feels like it was written by a pedantic Victorian school-teacher. I can say a few things in its defence though. Even though much of the science is laughably wrong, it is at least pretty good for its time. For example, Stapledon describes plate tectonics (proprosed by Wegener, a meterologist, in 1912, to explain the shapes of Africa and South America and the similar fossils either side of the south Atlantic; not generally accepted until the 1950s or 60s), genetic engineering (although he skips over the details, for obvious reasons), stellar evolution. He is also entirely correct about mankind's utter insignificance on the galactic scale. But ultimately, it's the boring and repetitive nature of the book that stands out. Not worth reading. 2. The Things, by Peter Watts - Excellent: 5/5 One of my favourite films is The Thing, an adaptation of a novella by John W Campbell. Both the original novella and the film tell their story from the point of view of human protagonists. Why does no-one ever think about how the evil aliens feel? Well, that's what Watts has done with this short story. He's taken John Carpenter's film adaptation (yes, he's working from the film, not from the novella), and re-told it from the evil alien's perspective. And done a damned fine job of it. Highly recommended, and free to read (for now, at any rate) …
date: 2010-06-11T21:25:05Z

April 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In April 2010 I read the following books: 1. Jill the Reckless, by P.G.Wodehouse - Very good: 4/5 Like much of Wodehouse's work, this is a light-hearted, fairly short work, that you'll be able to knock off in a coupla days. It has such Wodehouse perennials as a domineering aunt, an uncle, and Bertie Wooster (although with a different name). I dare say little more without giving some of the essntials away, but you will enjoy this book. If you don't, you are broken. 2. Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross - Good: 3/5 This sequel to Singularity Sky would work just as well as a stand-alone novel, while also maintaining continuity of character and setting with the first. The style, however, is rather different. Gone is the humour, replaced with a much darker over-all feel, and with far more action. While this does make the book more immediately accessible, I feel that there's something missing now. It's still worth buying, mind. There is also room left for another book in the series, although Stross has no plans for one at the moment. 3. The Song of Phaid the Gambler, by Mick Farren - Good: 3/5 As Farren was so associated with the "counterculture" and "UK underground" you expect this to be an incoherent mess, but it's not. It still lacks overall structure, being more a sequence of events that just happen to involve the title character instead of an integrated whole, and relies on a few rather improbable coincidences and conspiracies. There's also a couple of plot-lines that are just left to fizzle out. Despite all that it's a mostly pleasant and diverting read, and worth buying second-hand. Which is good, because you can't get it new. 4. The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks - Excellent: 5/5 Narrated in the first person, this macabre tale hooks you early on and you jolly well stay hooked right up to the end. It's very short, but feels much longer than it really is because you don't expect such depth of character, or to sympathise s…
date: 2010-05-05T23:36:11Z

March 2010 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In March 2010 I read the following books: What I Love About Cricket, by Sandy Balfour - Very good: 4/5 I was given this by a friend who'd already read it and wasn't particularly impressed by it, on the condition that after finishing it, I pass it on. So I'll do that. Tomorrow I'll leave it on a train, and some random stranger can pick it up. And I'll do it regretfully, because I actually quite enjoyed it. Sure, it doesn't say much about anything - least of all what the author loves about cricket - and I can't remember a damned thing of any significance about it, but even so, it was an enjoyable read. I recommend that you buy it. Unless you find it on the train tomorrow. I'll be buying it too. A Mathematician's Apology, by G. H. Hardy - Good: 3/5 This essay by one of the great pure mathematicians is rightly famous, but not for the right reasons. The author's central thesis - that real mathematics is, like the other forms of art, wholly useless - was shown to be wrong shortly after his death. The "wholly useless" theory of numbers, in which Hardy spent most of his professional life, is in fact of paramount importance these days. When you buy this book from Amazon the only reason you can be assured that naughty people won't steal your credit card number in transit is because of work done by pure mathematicians, and Hardy's own work has proven to be important in physics. Hardy is writing for the non-mathematical layman here, so the book is very approachable, with only a minimum of elementary mathematics in it, which he provides as examples, and all of which should be accessible to anyone, including small children and Media Studies students. His intention is to provide a view into the mind of "real" mathematicians and explain the fascination that some people have with his "wholly useless" subject. And I suppose he does a decent job of that. But in my opinion, the best bit is the foreword by C. P. Snow, which first appear…
date: 2010-03-29T23:55:22Z

February 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In February 2010 I read the following books: 1. Acts of Destruction, by Mat Coward - Excellent: 5/5 I bought this on the recommendation of Ken MacLeod, and wasn't disappointed. While the story is set in the future, it's not science fiction, it's a crime mystery. The futuristic setting acts merely to provide a whimsical - and frankly a bit silly - backdrop. That backdrop is somewhat similar to that of Morris's Dystopia, showing that a good novel can be built on such an improbable foundation. One of the ways this is far superior to Morris's book is that there's far less tedious speechifying. Sure, that means we don't learn all the details about how The Process transformed society, but we don't care anyway, The Process merely provides Coward with justification for the situations he puts his characters in and then, like in nearly all other good novels, it is their navigating their way through their troubles that entrances us. The predicaments don't bear up to scrutiny, just as the society that spawned them doesn't, but by the time you notice, you'll already be entranced by the characters and have suspended your disbelief for the duration - although the rice-free curry house was pushing it a bit. I loved this book, and I'm sure you will too. If you're unsure despite my glowing review, you can read the first couple of chapters on the author's website. 2. Prime Number, by Harry Harrison - Meh: 2/5 This collection of short stories is, I'm afraid, rather disappointing. Sure, the individual tales are entertaining, but nothing really stands out. And combined together as a single book, it all gets a bit samey. There are a couple of places where Harrison's usual genius peeks out from the clouds, but not enough to make it worth buying. 3. When It Changed, ed by Geoff Ryman - Very good: 4/5 This is meant to be a short story collection that "puts authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-connect research ideas wit…
date: 2010-02-28T11:20:15Z

January 2010 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In January 2010 I read the following books: 1. Marrow, by Robert Reed - Meh: 2/5 There's definitely a fantastic story in here, and for the first three quarters of the book, that's exactly what you expect to get. It's certainly imaginative, and zips along at a fair old pace while still having time for those human moments that make the characters into people. But then we get to the last quarter of the book, and, like so many other sci-fi works that could be outstanding, that lets it down. It's confusing, both in terms of the sequence of events, but especially in terms of the characters' motivations, which seem to flip around seemingly at random. I still liked it, but it's only a "good enough" book.
date: 2010-02-13T21:52:40Z

December 2009 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In December 2009 I read the following books: 1. Gibraltar Sun, by Michael McCollum - Very good: 4/5 This is the middle book in a trilogy, and is self-published. The author used to be published by a "proper" publisher but is no longer. That is of course, a terrible recipe, and his work must, of course, be rubbish. But it ain't. Sure, it's not high art. But it's engaging and entertaining. And that's what ultimately makes a novel a good one. I've actually read this book before, but it was a coupla years ago, and given that the third and final part in the series is finally out, I thought I'd better re-read it to refresh my memory before tackling the last installment. And I'm glad I did. I polished it off during a 4.5 hour train journey, without getting bored even once. Worth buying. 2. Gibraltar Stars, by Michael McCollum - Good: 3/5 I've been waiting for this for a long time, and the wait was worth it. The only real shortcoming (bearing in mind that I knew it was going to be modern pulp fiction) is that the resolution of the whole three book series is dealt with very quickly, almost skipped over. We see it beginning to take shape, but the reader is left to assume that events proceed exactly as predicted by a numerical simulation. I'm afraid that I lack the necessary faith in computers to fully accept that! The author's "Antares" series has the same simulation problem, although events are at least shown happening after the simulation in the finale of that series. Even so, good book, worth buying. 3. A Wrinkle In The Skin, by John Christopher - Very good: 4/5 As was fashionable amongst British sci-fi authors of his generation (much of John Wyndham's work is fairly similar) this is a tale of a world-ending catastrophe, whose protagonist and other players are ordinary people to whom nasty things happen. There's no particularly happy ending and the author's explanation of events - and indeed the event itself that sets up th…
date: 2010-01-02T17:54:26Z

November 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In November 2009 I read the following books: 1. Bridge of Ashes, by Roger Zelazny - Very good: 4/5 I liked the Zelazny book that I reviewed previously a lot, despite it being confusing and not particularly well plotted - all down to the quality of the writing which was just beautiful. This is better. The writing is still as good, but the plot is clearer and the whole work is just so much less confusing and hangs together better. Mind you, the overall impression is, four days after finishing reading it, one of "wow that was good", but I'm buggered if I can remember what it was actually about! 2. Camelot 30K, by Robert L. Forward - Very good: 4/5 Forward was first of all a physicist, and only secondly a writer of fiction. His fiction tends towards the scientifically plausible, without much in the way of "God Tech", and his better works are characterised by, errm, good characterisation. The people on his pages really are people, with lives, conflicts, desires and so on. That holds true for this work too, with a few minor exceptions. The characters are generally believable, even if those who stay "off screen" and are only talked about are somewhat one-dimensional - but that can easily be ascribed to the speakers' bias and limited knowledge. After all, plenty of us can't truly describe our bosses as fully-rounded people. The technology and science used is also believable. However, that's only that which is used. That which is inherent in the people (and I do hope you'll forgive me for being somewhat vague - being too specific would give away the "reveal" at the end of Forward's magic trick) is, at least in two respects, rather implausible. But this doesn't really take anything away from what is overall a good story, told well, by a skilled author. I recommend it. If there were to be a sequel following the surviving character's new career at the end, I'd buy that too. And that, my friends, that wanting to read more, is th…
date: 2009-12-03T20:41:27Z

October 2009 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In October 2009 I read the following books: 1. 2 B R 0 2 B, by Kurt Vonnegut - Meh: 2/5 This very short story is available for free download from Project Gutenberg. "Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age." And yet the Utopia is utterly hideous. Once you read the two lines after those I quote, the ghastliness is obvious. And the line after that gives the rest away. Not worth reading. 2. Exhalation, by Ted Chiang - Excellent: 5/5 Yeah, I know, it's another short story. I'm cheating horribly in my attempt to get back on track and read four works every month. Anyway, it's great. This is what science fiction should be - an exploration both of the physical world but also of the meta-physical, mediated by technology. Technology is what every literate person in advanced societies these days is familiar with, so technology is a good substrate for great story-telling, much like in more primitive times the common substrate might have been country house parties and religion - which is why Jane Austen and her ilk's work and the Bible seem like utter crap now but were so popular back in the Dark Ages. Chiang brings out the explorer's humanity, painting him as a sympathetic being with troubles, dreams, desires, and most of all hopes. Hopeful stories are terribly rare in all of literature. I'm pleased to see that it won the 2009 Hugo for Best Short Story. You can, at least for now, read it for free online here. 3. A Colder War, by Charles Stross - Excellent: 5/5 I'm still a dirty rotten cheat. This is another short story (which can also be downloaded) and is another Lovecraft crossover. And it's done superbly well. If anything, the horror of Lovecraft's Elder Ones comes across better here than in the original, perhaps because I can relate more to the setting. The utter madness of Lovecraft's mythos fits all to…
date: 2009-11-10T19:50:43Z

September 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In September 2009 I read the following books: 1. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley It's hard to decide what I think of this - other than that it's great and everyone should read it. It is not, contrary to what many think, an anti-technological screed, nor an anti-communist or anti-capitalist one. If anything it is anti-conformity and pro-individualism. That the World Controllers enforce conformity through technology and consumption of consumer goods is neither here nor there - it is clear that conformity enforced through other means, such as hierarchical religion, was equally antithetical to Huxley. 2. A Journey in Other Worlds, by John Jacob Astor This example of early science fiction is certainly interesting as a view into the mind of cultured well-educated Victorians. They are violently racist, revelling in genocide to cleanse the world of "inferior races" for its population by white men and their eventual conquest of the universe; they are sickeningly religious and dabble in spiritualism. But in their favour, they seek scientific explanations for everything (even the supposed ascension of Christ is explained (badly) in scientific terms) and don't shrink from engineering. Indeed, the opening section is all about the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, which seeks to abolish the curse of seasonal change by pumping water back and forth between the Arctic and Antarctic thus redistributing the mass of the Earth. And if that's not an engineering project I don't know what is! Of course, a moment with a pocket calculator - or a Victorian slide rule - would demonstrate how utterly absurd such a project is. Much of the other science in the book is similarly silly, including homeopathy, arguing from conclusions, and so on. But there are some fascinating ideas buried in the dross. It's the first popular description I'm aware of of gravitational slingshots, for example, the first description of a practical speed camera, …
date: 2009-10-03T23:38:39Z

August 2009 in books
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description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In August 2009 I read the following books: 1. People of the Wolf, by Michael and Kathleen Gear This book could have been so much better. It is apparently the beginning of a series of fictionalised accounts of the peopling of the Americas, this first volume covering the arrival of the first humans. There's even a kernel of a good story in here. Unfortunately, it's just hopelessly incompetently written. Let's start with the handy map right at the beginning. It bears so little resemblance to what actually happens in the story that it's just confusing. Then there's a brief modern-day chapter about some archaeologists finding an appropriately ancient burial - which bears no resemblance to anything that happens in the story. More confusion and wasted pages. But even ignoring those flaws, the main bulk of the story is let down by the characters having really fucking stupid names which make it hard to keep track of who's who. Opening it at a random page and picking the first name on it, you can't even tell whether "Moss Stalker" is a man or a woman, or which of the opposing tribes he (or she) is from! For fuck's sake, even that old hack Jean Auel does better than this! And worst of all, the whole damned book is full of pseudo-religious mystical crap. I paid a penny plus postage to get this book second-hand. Never mind the postage, even the penny alone would have been too much. 2. Cachalot, by Alan Dean Foster On a well-fleshed-out world, we have reasonably strong characters - including most of the non-human ones - and an imaginative plot that gallops along at a nice pace. It's only really let down by two things, one at the very beginning and one right at the end. At the beginning the book is dedicated to, amongst others, "the men and women of Greenpeace". And the end wraps the story up rather too quickly and in an utterly ridiculous and implausible manner. "It's all down to alien mind control" just doesn't work, and gives t…
date: 2009-09-05T15:15:11Z

July 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In July 2009 I read the following books: 1. The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins I was surprised when I realised that I hadn't actually read this. I wish I still hadn't. It is tediously repetitive - for example, at the beginning of chapter 10 he says " This book is mainly about evolution as the solution of the complex 'design' problem; evolution as the true explanation for the phenomena that [William] Paley thought proved the existence of a divine watchmaker. This is why I keep going on about eyes and echo-location. " We already knew from the first few pages what the book was about! But not only does each chapter repeat stuff from previous chapters, each chapter also repeats stuff from earlier in the chapter. The editor was obviously asleep when this manuscript came in. Thankfully, it's not a very important book so you don't have to read it. The same author's "Climbing Mount Improbable" is a much better-written exposition of the same subject matter. 2. Utopia, by Thomas More (trans from the Latin by Paul Turnet) This short story is, depending on who you ask, an early Communist manifesto, or a Catholic apology, or a veiled criticism of domestic English politics, or ... well, just about anything really. Arguments for and against some of these are well-covered in the very accessible introduction, along with a brief portrait of the man himself - he looks like a jolly interesting (if occasionally barking mad) chap, so I shall have to look for a full biography. The work itself was influential enough to give its name (which means "No [such] place") to a genre - utopian works these days are those that purport to describe a perfect happy society. They are sometimes self-contradictory, usually fanciful, often ridiculous, and always betray the author's prejudices. The grandfather of them all has all of these flaws in spades. It's particularly interesting that while More was executed for opposing Henry VIII's split with Rom…
date: 2009-08-03T08:22:43Z

June 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In June 2009, I was blessed with unemployment so had lots of time. I read the following books: 1. The Hidden Family, by Charles Stross Carrying on from where the first book in the series left off, this is really the second half of the story that the previous volume started. As such, it makes some things rather clearer which were just confusing in the first installment, although not all - but then, there are more sequels to come. Overall, this and its predecessor combine to make one satisfying story which I have no hesitation in recommending to you. But that's a recommendation for the two books together. This one won't work well in isolation. 2. The Clan Corporate, by Charles Stross Number three in the series, this book really takes its time to get going, but after a hundred pages of meh it picks up and is back to the pace and quality of its pre-decessor. Again, like The Hidden Family this is the first half of a larger story that got split for some reason, but the split is handled better this time, ending on a nice cliff-hanger but without too many loose ends. As the third installment in a large series, there is of course the problem of how to bring a new reader up to speed who hasn't read the earlier volumes, but this is done without the repetition being too irritating for someone who has started at the beginning. My only niggle is that some exposition is handled somewhat maladroitly as "transcripts" of bugged conversations, but these transcripts (and the organisations and people making them) aren't obviously used. Perhaps they'll show up in a later volume. But I can forgive this, as to a large extent these solve the problem I noted in The Family Trade, that the plots and schemes within plots and schemes are too opaque to the reader. These serve to remove the veils somewhat. Again, I recommend it, but with the proviso that it will work a lot better if you've read the previous two books. 3. The Merchants' War, by Cha…
date: 2009-06-30T20:23:04Z

May 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In May 2009, I read the following books: 1. Lord of Misrule: the autobiography of Christopher Lee There's not much to say about this, other than that it's a very accessible book, and a delight to read, unlike most autobiographies. Lee tells the tale of his life simply and with a gentle wit. Perhaps my only little complaint is that this is an expanded version of an earlier edition of his autobiography (previously sold as Tall, Dark and Gruesome) and the new material, largely concerning his roles as Count Dooku in Star Wars and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings lack warmth, appearing to be more like a third-party account of what happened, than a first-person view. 2. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter This is rightly hailed as a classic, being one of the clearest accounts of day-to-day Roman life for those outside the nobility and political and military elite during the Empire. And of course it is a fine example of political satire, with many subtle and not-so-subtle digs at public figures and writers of the era. All of this makes it a great academic read. And as such, I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it's a lousy novel. That's not the author's fault, but is simply because large chunks of the text have been lost over the last 1900 years so there are jarring gaps. While we can, to a limited extent, reconstruct parts of it, all that tells us is what the broad arc of the story might have been. It does not restore the text. You could cut chunks out of any good story, and then largely rebuild the tale, but if you were to read it with those chunks missing (which is the case with my copy of the Satyricon, which lacks even the briefest of inline notes about the missing sections) it would still not be a good read. It's almost a pity that the practice of translators/editors filling in the blanks themselves, making them up out of whole cloth, hasn't taken off, at least for mass-market paperbacks. But then, I suppose, there isn't a ma…
date: 2009-06-01T17:53:22Z

April 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In April 2009, I read the following books: 1. Alamein to Zem Zem, by Keith Douglas This first-hand account of the battle of El Alamein by a tank commander who was also a well-regarded poet is well worth reading. While it is rather more gung-ho, the closest parallel I can think of is some of Wilfred Owen's poetry from the Western Front of the previous round of Unpleasantness. I was particularly struck by something that is very common in real military memoirs but almost entirely absent from fictional ones: that soldiers - even officers - rarely know what's going on, are frequently confused, spend far more time waiting around than they do fighting, and that their biggest enemy is often the environment as opposed to the other side's soldiers. Some of the confusion seeps through to the pages. In a very short book, it is sometimes hard to keep track of who is who in Douglas's squadron, but whereas in a work of fiction that would be terribly important, in this true account it really doesn't matter - the overall impression is what counts. In short, this is one of the few books that I can whole-heartedly recommend to absolutely everyone, no matter whether your normal diet is great literature or formulaic pot-boiler thrillers. Buy it. Now. 2. The Iliad, by Homer This is the third time I've read this. Well, the third time I've started reading it, and the second time I've finished it. The first was when I was at school, when we had to translate the first book from Latin into English. I hated it because I resented "wasting my time" on Latin - something that I deeply regret now. The second was an English prose translation, and I hated it, for reasons that I shall enumerate later. This time was, again, an English prose translation (the Project Gutenberg edition, translated by Samuel Butler) and this time the things that I hated previously were merely irritating, although Butler introduces a new irritation. That new irritation is t…
date: 2009-05-01T00:09:24Z

March 2009 in books
type: item
description: Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In March 2009, I read the following books: 1. King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard After reading Haggard's other well-known work, She, a few months ago, I thought I ought to read this as well. It's better. There's less waffle (still, admittedly, some waffle, but not much) and its less jarring for modern sensibilities. Instead of the white men being obviously vastly superior to the evil black men, he paints both as being equally capable of greatness. Much of the language is of course not what we would use today (black characters are all kaffirs, for example) but this won't detract from the enjoyment unless you're one of those ultra-sensitive idiots who don't deserve to enjoy anything anyway. Strongly recommended, and available for free online. 2. My Life as a Miracle, by The Wizard of New Zealand Yes, that's really the author's name, and also his title, having had it bestowed on him by Mike Moore, who was (very briefly) prime minister of New Zealand. The Wizard is a great example of the British Eccentric, and this autobiography is a refreshing, and all too brief, read.
date: 2009-04-01T00:23:08Z

February 2009 in books
type: item
description: This review can also be found on Amazon. In February 2009, I only completed reading one book. I have been terribly slack: 1. Flash!, by L.E.Modesitt This is poorly structured and poorly written. Every single one of the characters is a flat cardboard cut-out, the world they inhabit isn't at all well-explained, and so the resulting story is mostly confusing and hard to follow.
date: 2009-03-01T22:16:14Z

January 2009 in books
type: item
description: I've decided to post book reviews every month instead of every quarter this year. Most of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In January 2009, I read the following books: 1. Island in the Sea of Time, by S. M. Stirling This is one of those books that is often said to define its sub-genre (modern people thrown back in time to live amongst savages - it's a surprisingly common theme in bad scifi/fantasy), by an author who is a giant in his genre (alternate history). And it was pretty much what I expected. It has no literary merit whatsoever. The people in it have such oh-so-conveniently chosen skills and attitudes, the heroes are suitably heroic, the good guys are ever-so-good, the bad guys are particularly nasty and traditionally one-dimensional, and the fools are especially foolish. The plot is broadly predictable. And it was thoroughly enjoyable. It could have done with a bit of trimming, perhaps - a few scenes are completely unnecessary - but I recommend this book. However, it has Sequels. I'm going to read them, but I'm not expecting them to be anywhere near as much fun. 2. Snowbrother, by S. M. Stirling Oh dear. There are so many things wrong with this post-Nuclear-Apocalypse fantasy. Let's start with the cover art, which features a buxom wench in armour waving a sword about. In the book, she's wearing a helmet in that scene, but she's drawn without one so we can see her long hair and tell that she's definitely a woman. Because the breasts on her cuirass aren't obvious enough. Then let's look at the two cultures that this fantasy throws together. The good guys are oh so very good, being basically mediaeval hippies in tune with nature; the bad guys are oh so very bad - they're descended from the survivors of the Apocalypse's "strategic high command", they live solely for glory and war, they rape their slaves, and their shamen are cannibals. Ugh. What utterly unimaginative stereotypes. Then there are all kinds of other little bits that niggle at me: the made…
date: 2009-01-31T14:56:42Z

2008 in books, part the fourth
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description: Most of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In the fourth quarter of 2008, I read the following books: 1. War For The Oaks, by Emma Bull I knew this wasn't going to be good after reading the overblown similes in the first two sentences - "By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal. People flow between its banks, eddying at the doors of office towers and department stores". Thankfully, it's not all like that - much more and I'd have just had to stop like I did with Moby Dick. Even so, it's a pretty piss-poor effort. The story doesn't hang together very well, characters' motivations are poorly explained and they feel flat, and the world is just nowhere near convincing. And yes, I did remember to flick my suspension of disbelief switch for a story about fucking fairies, elves and a rock band, but even with that it was not well-realised. But the worst bit of all is the "duel" at the end is to an extent recycled from the story told much better in Walter Hill's film "Crossroads". Yawn. Watch Crossroads instead. 2. Dogland, by Will Shetterly This fantasy is apparently semi-autobiographical. It's told from the point of view of a young boy - at the start of the book he's four, it ends when he's eight - albeit filtered through the adult writer's hindsight. He also admits early on that he's not sure whether he's writing what really happened or merely what he remembers. The author has woven in some "real fantasy" too which can't possibly have happened - the Norse world-tree Yggdrasil grows outside his home, the Christian Devil is a local businessman, and no doubt there are others I missed. But even if you're not versed in weird mythology, it doesn't matter. The child's wonder at what goes on around him and his odd (by adult standards) take on things is splendidly refreshing. There's enough magic in the mundane world as he sees it to satisfy the fluffiest of fantasists. My only niggle is with the last few pages where the delicate balance betwee…
date: 2008-12-31T14:19:54Z

2008 in books, part the third
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description: Most of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In the third quarter of 2008, I read the following books: 1. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge No, I haven't mis-typed the title. There's no apostrophe, and one of the characters in the book has a little grump about it. The background and the people are in many ways far more interesting than the story itself. The world that Vinge has built has a fair amount in common with some of his other work, in particular the ubiquitous networked computing that he elsewhere calls "localisers". The theme of surveillance is also something that readers of, eg, A Deepness In The Sky, will be familiar with. And what's more, a lot of the background is a reasonable extrapolation from the present day. Networked computing is becoming ubiquitous; augmented reality is in use in some industries and being played with by hackers the world over; and of course the Surveillance State is growing a-pace, all in the name of Stopping Terror - a justification that they use in this book too. Thankfully the Secure Hardware Environment that Vinge postulates doesn't yet exist, and something similar has proven to be a failure in the market so far, but I'd not be particularly surprised if something like it were to appear again soon. So the story is firmly rooted in the present. The actors are believable too, if pushed just a little to extremes. But such is the nature of heroes and villains in all fiction. As is often the case with good fiction, I was left at the end of the story wondering what their lives would be like afterwards. There are a few problems though. The "belief circles" - something that other reviewers have described as a blend of wikipedia, second life and augmented reality - don't make much sense to me, and while they only play a minor part in the story, serving as a distraction the bad guy manipulates to keep the "good" guys away, they could have done with more fleshing out, in particular explaining why individuals choose to put so much effort…
date: 2008-10-04T16:23:17Z

2008 in books, part the second
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description: Most of these reviews can also be found on Amazon. In the second quarter of 2008, I read the following books: 1. The Outstretched Shadow, by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory This is high fantasy - magic, unicorns, knights, demons, the works. I don't normally buy such things as my experience is that the genre is overwhelmingly unimaginative and poorly written. This was yet another of my freebies from Tor though, so given that I didn't have to spend any of my hard-earned cash on it, I thought I'd give it a go. And I was mostly right, it is unimaginative. But it's well-written. The authors have made the protagonist a whiny little shit of a teenager, and he really does come across like that. Of course, the story is flimsy with far too many coincidences and superpowers that just happen to manifest themselves at the crucial time - but this is fantasy, and there's magic, so just suspend your disbelief, alright? If you like fantasy, buy this. If you don't, then it's at least worth looking for in the library. I was sufficiently impressed that I'll track down the sequel second-hand at some point. 2. Blindsight, by Peter Watts Hard sci-fi with a dash of horror, where the tech is an integral part of the storyline instead of just being a backdrop. And there's also a wide range of characters, some likeable, some hateable, all feeling fleshy and real, and some interesting philosophical musings. The author backs it up with copiously referenced notes at the end about the science used, much of which has at least a grounding in current knowledge and research. The author has made the book available online under a creative-commons licence after not getting much distribution in physical form - why the publishers dropped the ball on this I have no idea. And by the way, since Watts put it online for free, demand has apparently soared, and it's been re-printed, so it shouldn't be too hard to track down a copy and pay money for it. Please do so. 3. Starfish, by Peter Watts Wow, Watts has pu…
date: 2008-06-28T18:11:18Z

2008 in books, part the first
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description: In the first quarter of 2008, I read the following books: 1. Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny Hard to follow at first, but worth persevering with. The story itself is nothing special, and could do with the confusingly named characters and objects being explained better, but the sheer quality of the writing more than makes up for it. In places, it's more like poetry than anything else. 2. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood God that was depressing! The author does a good job of bringing her character to life and describing the bizarre circumstances, it's just a shame that the end is so rushed and that it's not really finished. 3. The World in Winter, by John Christopher A good end-of-the-world story. It's very dated, both in the scenario and language, but remember, this is from before the worries about global warming and before calling black men Sambo and assuming they were inferior was thought to be perhaps not in the best of tastes. I refuse to judge a book badly simply because of when it was written. But unfortunately, it is let down by an unconvincing ending, in which the main character's motivations and the new life he has created for himself get turned on their head for completely incomprehensible reasons. Still worth reading though if you can find it for a few pennies second-hand. 4. Hunter's Moon, by David Devereux I couldn't help but think of Charlie Stross's Laundry while reading this. That's a good thing. Hunter's Moon is faster-paced, and requires more suspension of disbelief. I'm looking forward to reading the next one. 5. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville The author seems to think it far more appropriate to let us all know what a well-educated fellow he is by the use of overblown pompous classical waffling, than to tell the story. Avoid this book. 6. Prison Planet, by William C. Dietz Trash sci-fi. The ending is telegraphed right at the start, poorly executed when we get to it, and the last third of the journey is too contrived. The first two thirds make…
date: 2008-04-01T22:36:26Z

Moby Dick, or, The Tediousness
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description: I've just had another go at reading Moby Dick. I've given up again. The following section, very near the beginning, in which the author describes an inn, is why: It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose works I possess the only copy extant--"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals. But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to…
date: 2008-01-24T13:36:42Z

Book review: Backup and Recovery
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description: Author: Curtis Preston ISBN: 0-596-10246-1 Publisher: O'Reilly I contributed part of a chapter to this book, and so I got a free copy. I was expecting to take it home, put it on the shelf, and never use it. Today, less than 48 hours after getting the book in the post, I had to use it. The thoughtful comments and excellent description of how dump / restore work prevented me from looking like a complete tit on a public mailing list. I therefore recommend this book. More seriously, it does look jolly good, covering just about all the backupish stuff that I've heard of and lots that I haven't. But more importantly, it devotes lots of space to restoring your backups - complete with step-by-step instructions for "bare metal" recovery - and talks about things to do when your backups are broken. And it covers things that lots of admins don't like to think about, like Exchange and MySQL (and other databases; judging from a quick skim of the Oracle section I expect the coverage to be good). Buy a copy of this book for your friendly local sysadmin. He will love you for ever.
date: 2007-06-07T20:12:24Z