Category Archives: Books

Review: So You Created a Wormhole, by Hornshaw & Hurwitch

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This is satirical guide to time travel, and while the first parts of it were quite funny, the second half flopped down into repetition and lame humor.

The first parts included some theories on time travel, mixing farce with science and movies. It also gave us descriptions of the various kinds of time machines, the perils of the various flavors of paradox, and some ideas of what to do if you ever run into yourself or break your time machine.

The second half of the book, however, is a repetitive survival guide. It follows the same formula of what to bring, what to fear, and how to fix your time machine in time periods from the dinosaurs to the future. The first one or two time periods were OK, but after a while it started to get repetitive. Long before the end, I found myself skimming and looking briefly at the crazy diagrams.

So while it started strong, it almost seemed like they ran out of steam and used the Survival Guide section to pad it out another two hundred pages. So, it made for an OK gift, but I wouldn’t spend my own money on it if I had the choice.

Review: Cursor’s Fury, by Jim Butcher

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This is the third book in Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series, and I get the feeling that this is where the story really gets rolling. We learn more about two of the principal political players in the realm, and we learn more about young Tavi’s back-story. We also get a taste for what’s going on in the larger world.

I think what I really liked about this one, however, was seeing Tavi in action. Yes, we got some of that in the first two books, but here is where I think we really see him come into his own. You see, Tavi has never developed his “fury” powers, which are basically a magical mastery of the various elements (fire, earth, water, air, metal, plants, etc.). In that, he’s kind of a powerless freak in an unkind world, but he’s also a very intelligent powerless freak. So here, we finally get to see him use his intelligence to not only overcome his lack of furycrafting, but to outwit and outmaneuver those with much greater abilities.

The book also has some major revelations about both the past and future of the realm. The First Lord is old and without an heir, and this book finally opened up the door on some new possibilities of what is going to happen when the old man finally dies. It left us with a teaser, bordering on a cliffhanger, that has made me eager to get to the next one.

Review: WWW Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer

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I don’t remember how I first came across this one, but the basic idea is that the Internet becomes self-aware. It was an idea I have toyed with from time to time but never figured out how to turn it into a story. Sawyer did.

It’s mostly told through the POV of a blind teenage girl who gets an experimental implant to grant her sight, but there are also some other characters scattered around the globe playing their own parts. While the girl’s operation is at first deemed a failure, time changes that. I don’t want to say too much about that, because it’s a spoiler worth preserving, though I will say I was initially annoyed by what she sees via her implant. Still, I recognized it was required by the plot, but I was glad to see it go.

We also see some of the story told from the POV of the emerging sentience of the internet. While generally told in small snippets, I found that part very interesting. Over the book, it goes from a barely aware sentience to a fully self-aware, communicative mind. That in itself was an interesting journey.

So, overall I enjoyed it, with only minor points of nit-picking. It’s clearly the first in a trilogy, so I look forward to seeing where the rest of this goes.

Review: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

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I always felt badly that I had never read this classic book, that I was somehow not really an SF fan because of it. Eventually, guilt or shame brought it to the top of my in-pile, and I dove in. Now part of me wishes I had simply left it there.

The premise is that humanity of early 21st century is at war with a far-flung alien race. We’re not quite sure how it started, but it looks like they shot first. The only FTL is via some kind of wormhole, but there is plenty of slower-than-light travel to and from, and much of that travel is at relativistic speeds.

So, rather than leaving it as a pure space-navy war, we decide we need some boots on the ground. So who do we recruit as our cannon-fodder? Only the best and brightest will do. So we skim off the cream of our intellectual crop and send them off to battle. If only their commanding officers were as smart.

Which is leads me to the main complaint about this book. The people in charge were always extremely short-sighted and downright stupid. I recognize that to some extent this is a screed against the U.S. political/military leadership from the U.S.-Vietnam war, but it got really annoying as to just how stupid they were making these folks.

How stupid? Well, they planned their training with the expectation that half of the trainees would be killed or permanently maimed during the training. They also sent them on missions over the years (in fact, centuries) where the expectation was an average of 66% casualties per mission. But it’s not like we were stuck in the jungles, trying not to kill too many civilians. Nope, we were fighting over deserted rocks. What part of orbital bombardment did they miss?

And then there was the whole Malthusian situation back on Earth. I know there was a lot of concern about the rapid rise of population back in the 1970’s, but even growing up with that, I was never all that worried. The concern, as originally laid out by Thomas Malthus in the late 1700’s, was that our population would outstrip our food production, and that the only ways to combat this were draconian birth control of the less desirable or poorer populations or outright war and starvation to bring the population back down to a manageable level.

Some of offshoots of this back on Earth during the Forever War were an economy based entirely on calories. Then there were some civil wars and lawlessness that brought the population down. And then we had enforced and universal homosexuality. Maybe it’s because I now live in a world where most demographers realize we are not headed towards a Malthusian catastrophe, but frankly, I found most of this to be ridiculous.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to lay these criticisms on Haldeman’s 1970’s book, but its repetitive message that our leaders are stupid and we are all doomed was very tiring. I prefer more optimistic futurists because instead of complaining about all the insurmountable problems facing us, they tend to propose the solutions that actually solve those problems.

And my final complaint about the book was that the resolution of the war was very much deus ex machina. After centuries, humanity transformed into another form that was able to communicate with the warmongering aliens. No, we can’t explain to you how the communication works, but now that it does, everything is just fine. The war was a silly misunderstanding, and now everyone can live happily ever after. We thank you for your centuries of pointless sacrifice.

About the only thing I did find worthwhile in the book was the realities of relativistic travel, of skipping forward into the future. Friends and family age and die. Technology and society march on in unexpected directions. The realities of life, death, and injury change from one trip to the next. That, at least, was interesting.

But by and large, I did not enjoy the book.

Review: The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

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This is the third book in the Old Man’s War series, and it unites the storylines of the first two books. John Perry has been returned to human form, and Jane Sagan has been made human as well. They married and settled down on a world named Huckleberry, adopting Zoe, the orphaned daughter of a brilliant traitor.

Everything was going fine, and then the Colonial Union asked them for a little favor.

So John, Jane, Zoe, and the rest of their household are off to form a new colony on Roanoke, except this is no ordinary colony. It’s a mix-mash of divergent cultures and almost seems designed to fail. And then they get the rug pulled out from under them when it turns out the Colonial Union has been… shall we say, less than truthful. From there it’s an engaging story of setting up a colony under less than ideal circumstances, hiding from aliens, and discovering the truth about what’s really going on.

This was probably my favorite of the series so far. It was all fresh material, and there were lots of problems to be solved, both practical and political. John, Jane, and Zoe all did humanity proud, even if it wasn’t always what the Colonial Union wanted. They also peeled the lid off of a static situation, and I’ll be interested to see where the story goes from here.

So, if you faltered during the Ghost Brigades, pick this one up and keep on marching.

Review: APE How to Publish a Book, by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch

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In this case, APE stands for Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, which are the three roles you need to fill if you intend to self-publish in today’s publishing landscape. Since I’m self-publishing, I thought I’d give it a look and see if there was anything there for me. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much.

Certainly, the book is filled with lots of good information and primers. It would have been a great thing for me to read a year and a half ago. But now… most of the content of the book was stuff I’ve already figured out on my own. That doesn’t make me an expert, and I was hoping for more from these guys who supposedly are.

The Author section was mostly a collection of tools to use while writing (Word, Scrivener, etc.) as well as some arguments for pursuing self-publishing over the traditional path of submitting to a publisher. There was very little here on actual writing, but in fairness, that subject is too large and belongs in several other books on specific writing issues. Still, I felt pretty bored during the section and was eager to skip ahead.

The Publisher section was mostly about the nuts and bolts of taking your manuscript and getting it to the point where a reader could actually purchase it. This was pretty good, but I felt it gave too much credit to author service companies like those under the umbrella of Author Solutions without giving them the kind of critical analysis that the folks at Writer Beware do. Also, I would have liked to have seen more commentary on cover design as well as describing more mechanisms for creating e-book files. Nowhere did I see it mentioned that most e-book files are processed HTML and that the most reliable source format for the conversion is not Word or InDesign but HTML.

The Entrepreneur section was mostly about marketing. I didn’t see anything revolutionary here, just the same social media push that everyone else talks about. There was also a fair amount said about getting into the press via press reports, etc. I have mixed feelings about that. A lot of people tell you it’s a waste of time. Other people claim it gets them a lot of free publicity. Personally, I have a suspicion that it has less to do with your press release and who you send it to as it has to do with whether the recipient of that press release knows who you (or your traditional publisher) are.

So like I said, I would have found this useful before I started down the self-publishing path, but if you’ve already done it yourself, there won’t be much new stuff here.

Review: Hounded, by Kevin Hearne

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This one kept popping up in my Amazon “also bought” lists, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s an urban fantasy with ancient Irish gods, fairies, and druids fast forwarded to the twentieth century which has picked up its share of modern supernatural guys along the way.

The protagonist is a druid named Atticus. Well, that’s what he’s calling himself these days, since not many folks in modern Arizona can handle his original name from sometime in the BC range. He runs an occult bookstore and tea shop, selling crystals and tarot cards to the wannabes and the occasional arcane text to the real practitioners. His lawyers (a vampire and a werewolf) keep him out of trouble – or at least try – but there’s not much they can do about his god problems.

And what would those be? Well, it seems he stole a sword in an epic battle a few thousand years ago, and its self-proclaimed “rightful owner” has been hunting for it ever since. Now those efforts have shifted into high gear, and Atticus is getting tired of hiding. Throw in a few witches and the occasional incarnation of Death (some sexy, some not so much), and it’s a regular menagerie of the supernatural.

By and large, I liked it, and I might continue reading the series. I suppose my only complaint is that the magic seemed too easy. That may just be the result of this druid’s thousands of years of practice, but for just starting into the series, he was a little too accomplished for my taste. It’s not that I require all my magical heroes to start off as neophytes, but it’s nice seeing them stumble and survive during those early years. It makes them seem more human rather that arrive as demigods on page 1.

Review: Burden of Proof, by John G. Hemry

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This is the second book in Hemry’s legal-centric space opera, something of a JAG in space. I had a few complaints about the space portions of the first book, but those are pretty much gone in this one. The space stuff was pretty good, and again the legal side was fabulous.

In this book our hero Paul Sinclair has made it up to Lieutenant J.G. and has mounting responsibilities for various shipboard activities and still has that extra role of legal officer hanging around his neck. So when an onboard accident kills a crewman, he gets pulled into the investigation, not only as the legal officer but for his own actions.

But not only to the investigation results not add up, they point to him as having been at least partially to blame while some admiral’s slacker son is praised. Sometimes it’s best to just lie low, but Paul can’t do that. He begins his own investigation, and it leads to some very unpopular places.

So, on top of dealing with shipboard accidents, the angry father of a girlfriend, and the court martial of another officer, he’s got to figure out if circumstantial evidence is enough to meet… yeah, I’m going there… to meet the Burden of Proof.

All in all, this was a strong second showing for this series, so I’m definitely going to pick up the third at some point.

Review: Erinyes, by Scott McElhaney

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I was really disappointed by this book, all the more so because the premise was so intriguing. A man wakes up from cryogenic freeze to discover that not only has his cancer been cured but that he’s untold thousands of years in the future and on a ship exploring another galaxy. The mystery of why they wanted him and a few other “popsicles” for this mission was enough to pull me forward through the story.

Alas, I found most of the other characters frustrating as their moods flipped around unpredictably, and the rest of the backstory around their mission and what’s happened on Earth was not very compelling. Then the story seemed to run out of steam and jump to the climax without much of any build-up, and when the mystery of why they wanted these 21st century popsicles for the mission, I was sadly disappointed. I won’t spoil it here, but I found myself saying, “Really? That’s the best they could do? Who the heck planned this mission?”

With better characters, better plotting, and a better explanation for why these guys were there, this could have been an awesome book. But it wasn’t. I hate to write bad reviews, but this one just didn’t work for me.

Review: Ship’s Boy, by Phil Geusz

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This was an odd little space opera about an anthropomorphized rabbit named David Birkenhead. That’s right, he’s a rabbit walking around in clothes an interacting with humans. (If any of you remember the comic strip Hepcats from the 80’s, it’s a bit like that.) Now, it’s not as odd as that makes it sound. He’s a member of a genetically engineered slave race, designed to be dumb, compliant labor for the ruling humans.

And he gets dragged onto a nobleman’s starship as it is fleeing an invasion, and along the way he manages to prove himself capable, and as the crisis escalates further, he even gets to step up to the plate and be a hero.

I suppose my only complaint was that it was a little short…

… so I went ahead and grabbed the next one in the series.

Review: Midshipman, by Phil Geusz

In this book, David Birkenhead is still technically a rabbit, but he’s now a free rabbit, no longer considered a slave by law. But as he recovers from his injuries and considers his future, it’s clear that most people still consider him to be a slave in all but paper.

As much as the anthropomorphized animal aspects might be weird — my wife, for example, was a little squicked by it — it actually served as an interesting proxy for our own history of racial slavery in the U.S. In many cases I could see people treating the rabbits in much the way old slaveholders of the U.S. south would have treated them, and I also see what that slavery has done to the rabbits psyche, in terms of their expectations, their choices, and their self-image. More than any furry aspect, it was this comfortable view of slavery that got under my skin more than anything else.

So, this book takes David from his injuries through to his official decoration for his heroic actions in the first book, and then onto the navy’s officer academy with the Kings full blessing. Of course, not everyone wants to see David succeed as the first free rabbit to enter the academy, and there’s quite a bit of good struggle over that. Along the way, he befriends a few other students in the academy, and for the climax, they go to an interstellar wargames competition between two opposing academies. He acquits himself fairly well in a move that would have made even Ender Wiggin proud.

So, I’m pretty jazzed about it, even with the bunny ears and slavery, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.