Tag: book

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Review

“Oath Keeper,” or, “I was very wrong about where this book was going”

I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t actually intend to finish this book so soon after I read the last one, but it sorta just happened. Whoops.1
So, first things first: this is the second book in an ongoing series, and I kinda doubt I can get through a review of it without at least slightly spoiling the first one, so if you, like me, hate having things spoiled, and you haven’t read the first book, go do that.
Now, on to the second: much like the first, it’s got a lot of different plot lines going on at once. One or two got dropped entirely, which I thought would make things a bit easier to follow, but they got replaced with different new ones. Seriously, the cast of this series is spreading like nobody’s business. Which kinda works, I guess – it makes the whole thing feel bigger, but manageably so, to have so many different angles on the same underlying plot.
And that plot, I must say, got more interesting than I was expecting: most of the way through the first book, and a good bit of the way through this one, I thought I had a good grasp of where the series was going. It felt a bit like a Star Wars arc: you get some success in the first book, everything goes to hell in the second, and in the third you’ll pull it all back together, good guys win, fireworks and a party in a forest with a bunch of weird small creatures.2
And boy, was I wrong about that. I still think it’s possible for the arc of the series to be wrapped up in the third book,3 but what actually needs to be wrapped up is very different from what I was expecting to need to be wrapped up.4
It was a very solid addition to the series, though; the first book took a bit to get going, but this one has done a much better job of capturing that Septimus Heap-style “I have no idea what’s going on, so many questions, I can’t stop reading” feeling.5 I definitely recommend it – though, as I said before, read the first one, and then the second one.

  1. I’ve also realized how well I’m doing for reading Jefferson Smith’s books; with this one done, I think there’s only one non-children’s book he’s got published that I haven’t done a review of, and it’s in my To-Read pile. ↩
  2. There’s definitely a few analogues between the two series, you’ve gotta admit. ↩
  3. Which, I should note, doesn’t actually exist yet. Not that I’m mad about this or anything. ↩
  4. But seriously, I really hope there’s going to be a third one, because the ending of the second is such that I could see that being the end of the series, but the sheer amount of unanswered questions would drive me insane. ↩
  5. I’m referring to it as a ‘Septimus Heap’ thing because that’s the first series I can remember reading that really did that; media-wise, I think it might have been the Atlantis animated film that Disney did as a direct-to-VHS/DVD thing when I was a kid?
    Tangent off this tangent: that was a good movie, and I’m disappointed that the spin-off TV series turned out to be so meh and only got three episodes. What an under-appreciated movie. ↩
Categories
Review

“Strange Places,” or, “I don’t know if it’s the *places* that are the strange part”

In the “books I don’t know how I wound up with” category, we have Strange Places. I actually wound up starting the second book in this series before the first, which was a bit annoying – I’m not a big fan of spoilers, y’know, and accidentally spoiling the ending of the first one wasn’t the best thing that could’ve happened.
Still, I did enjoy the book; the way it begins is definitely interesting, and I think I enjoyed that part the most. About a quarter of the way in1 it jumps off the rails, though, and even a bit of fourth-wall-breaking “this is so weird” from the narrator/protagonist didn’t work to keep me from calling the book out on the suddenness of it all.
Still, the story is interesting, and I’m invested enough that I’m going to go back to the second book and continue reading. From the first book I’ve figured out a bit more about how everything works in the setting, but plot-wise it’s all loose threads still hanging there.2
Which is where I’ll leave this review – fairly short, but I’m supposed to be on vacation right now, and this is ostensibly work,3 so I’m going to cut it off here and go back to getting sunburned on the beaches of southern California. If you’re interested in the book, here’s the link.

  1. Pushing the limit of my ‘no spoilers’ rule here, I know. ↩
  2. I think there’s three books, but I only have two, so… I’m going to be sad when I finish the second one, aren’t I? ↩
  3. At least, according to the organizational systems in my task- and time-tracking software it is. ↩
Categories
Review

“Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis,” or, “seriously just read the series it’s delightful”

First, a disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book (prior to the release) provided I’d write a review of it.1 That said, I was planning to buy the book and write a review of it when it came out, so I’m fairly sure my opinion of it is safe from being affected by the Free Stuff, but still, it’s good to make these things clear.
I’ve reviewed at least one of Roberts’ books before, and a short story or two, but I think my love for this series actually predates my hobby of writing book reviews for everything I read. So, first things first: if you haven’t read any of the other books in the series, go do that. Like, right now. Because, seriously, they’re fun. It’s exactly my aesthetic in what I want from media: young people with superpowers, and some fun exploration of how that world works. This one is one of my favorite: the superhuman community has a self-policing thing going on, with a core rule of “don’t get personal.”2 Which is fascinating, really; I love that sort of stuff, just explorations of how the world would have to be different to not be super different from a bunch of people having superpowers.
This one deals with some leftover plot stuff from earlier in the series, and it was really nice to see those things get wrapped up in a good way.3 And it provides some solid lead-up to the next book in the series, which I’m quite excited for. I think that’s my biggest problem with this one, actually: the rest of the series has had a solid “monster of the week” feel to it – not exactly a ‘monster of the week,’ but that same idea of being a self-contained thing. This one is clearly working to tie together the whole series, instead – the end is really leading into the next book, and the first half is, plot-wise, devoted to wrapping up stuff from earlier in the series.4
Which isn’t precisely a bad thing; the overarching plot has been very slowly working towards something. I guess I’m slightly irritated that the whole “time to tell the parents” plot that the book felt like it was building up to is getting pushed to the next book, at the earliest, but at very least it means I’m guaranteed at least one more book in the series, so I’ll call it a win.
End result: it wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a whole lot of what I love about the series, so I’m quite happy, and I’m quite happy to recommend the book to you, dear reader.

  1. Don’t be too excited for me, this isn’t a ‘you’re a Real Book Reviewer’ moment; I follow the author’s blog, and I’ve read one or two advanced chapters from this book and a couple of the others that get posted there. The publisher wanted a few early reviews, which resulted in a “comment your email address if you’d like an advanced review copy!” post, and I commented my email address. Still, it’s cool! ↩
  2. As a fun bonus, one of the books in the series covers how this system was created, and while it follows a different group of characters than the rest of the series, it’s just as much fun. ↩
  3. It’s difficult to do these reviews without giving away spoilers, sometimes, and a lot of the time I feel like I wind up being too vague, but I have a deep hatred for spoilers so I’m fairly okay with that result. ↩
  4. That said, I specified ‘plot-wise’ because, by volume, most of the first half of the book is devoted to the sort of “this is what superheroes do when they’re not being superheroes” stuff that I love. ↩
Categories
Review

“The House at Baker Street,” or, “the patriarchy is an even more insidious villain than Moriarty”

A couple weeks ago us Austria students spent two days setting up for and helping at a charity bazaar. The entire first day was devoted to setting up the tables – a couple metric tons of books take a while to lay out nicely, you see. This was a dangerous proposition for me, because in the face of that many books I am weak and I wound up buying several. Which I now have to get home somehow. Whoops.
The books I grabbed were “City of Dark Magic”,1 “The Clockwork Scarab”,2 two others that I haven’t yet read, and “The House at Baker Street”, which I finished just last night.3
I’ll admit, finishing the book last night wasn’t the best decision I’ve made recently – I’m fairly tired and irritable now, having stayed up a bit later than was advisable – but I’d gotten to that point in the book where you just can’t put it down.
The book was written as a take on the Sherlock Holmes story that is entirely compatible with the original novels – one or two of the things that the author treated as canonical aren’t precisely confirmed as such, but even those are based in popular interpretations of the canon.4 The core of the idea is “what do Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Watson do all day?”
The answer, as it turns out, was generally ‘putter around doing appropriate things for a woman of the time to do’ … right up until the beginning of the book when Sherlock, rather characteristically, rejects a potential client. Mrs. Hudson offers the young woman tea, and winds up hearing her troubles – someone is blackmailing her, not with anything she did but just with the threat of spreading the sort of nasty rumors that can ruin someone’s life. Mrs. Hudson, and Mrs. Watson, being nicer people than Sherlock, decide to take up the case and help the young lady as best they can.
And then it starts to get fun, because it’s just a delightful romp through the world of the background characters of the Sherlock Holmes books. I really don’t want to say anything more, because it’s still a mystery novel, and it’s quite a good one – I didn’t see the ending coming, and I’m usually fairly good at calling how things are going to go.
In sum: Mrs. Hudson and Mary Watson are awesome, go read this book about them.

  1. Which I didn’t finish, so don’t hold out hope for the review of that one. My silence is my review. ↩
  2. I liked enough to share a link to it, but I was so irritated by the ‘buy the next book!’-ness of the ending that I decided against writing a full review when I finished reading it. ↩
  3. One of, I should add, three Sherlock Holmes themed books – “The Clockwork Scarab” being the second, and the third I can’t recall the title of but appears to be a Russian riff on the Holmes theme. ↩
  4. The one I’m referencing here is the idea that Mrs. Hudson’s first name is Martha – my understanding is that it’s never explicitly stated, but the general consensus is that that’s the case. ↩
Categories
Review

The Long Cosmos

Normally I let the spoiler warnings for these be implicit, but this is the fifth (and final) book in a series, so I’ll go ahead and put it here again, to be clear: spoiler warning.
Good? Good.
So, I was a little bit sad to find that, as I’m writing this, I only have a single post tagged ‘Terry Pratchett’ on here. Which makes sense, I suppose – my love of his writing predates my writing book reviews. A bit of a shame, really, because that would be more than 60 reviews – he was a rather prodigious writer.
Now, I mentioned in my previous Pratchett review that it was his last book. That wasn’t entirely accurate – it was his last Discworld book, but the Long Earth series hadn’t wrapped up yet, either. And for this, he had a coauthor – Stephen Baxter.1 I’m going to drop in a chunk of the foreword, written by Baxter, here:

The books have been published annually, but we worked faster than that; time was not on our side, and Terry had other projects he wanted to pursue. Volumes 1 and 2 of the series were published in 2012 and 2013 respectively. But by August 2013 we had presented our publishers with drafts of the final three volumes of the series, including the present book. We did continue to work on the books subsequently. The last time I saw Terry was in the autumn of 2014, when we worked on, among other things, the ‘big trees’ passages of The Long Cosmos (chapter 39 onwards). It has been my duty to see this book through its editorial and publishing stages.

Having just finished reading the book, I know now what the ‘big trees’ passages he references are, and it makes me happy in a quiet, sad way to know that Pratchett had his hands on those directly. My first experience with Terry Pratchett was the Nomes trilogy.2 I’ve no idea where I got them – it was long enough ago that that memory is entirely gone – but I know that it captured my imagination in a wonderful way. The books were silly and sweet, and the characters even more so. But they didn’t quite capture my interest the way the Discworld books would later. I do distinctly remember how I found my way into that series – the Kindle had just come out, and I really wanted one. While we were on vacation, a family friend who had one offered to let me play around with it to see what I thought.
I’ll interrupt this story to reference the fact that I tend to be reading a lot of books at once – one or two paperbacks, something on my Kindle, and something else in the Kindle app on my phone.3 On this vacation, I hadn’t brought the paperback I was reading, but I remembered the title – Dark Watch. Except I didn’t quite remember the title, and put in Night Watch instead. I’m sure the Kindle Store tried to show me the cover, but low-resolution grayscale images aren’t super helpful, so I wound up downloading the sample of the wrong book.
But hey, never look a gift horse in the mouth – I figured I’d read the sample, it’d work just as well for figuring out if I liked the Kindle or not.
And I did – I’ve mentioned before that the original Kindle was, in my opinion, the Best Kindle, and the fact that when it (sadly) died, I replaced it immediately. When I got mine, the first book I downloaded4 was Night Watch. I finished reading it, and I’ve loved Terry Pratchett ever since then.5
Finding out that he was working on a science fiction series? I was intrigued. I’ve read The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata6 They were both characteristically hilarious, but more importantly, interesting takes on the genre.
The Long Earth series is quite a bit more serious than those, but it’s nothing the less for it. It’s also lacking in those characteristic footnotes, which makes it feel less like a Pratchett work than any of his other stuff, but it’s still deeply fascinating. The world building throughout is marvelous, and the degree to which they extend it is, I think, my favorite thing about the series.
It basically starts off with a single premise: stepping. A device is invented, the blueprints published online for all to see, that allows the user to step, moving from one Earth to another in an apparently-infinite chain of Earths. Only ours, referred to as the Datum Earth, has a human population: the rest are pristine, untouched natural wilds. From there, it’s extended: each of these Earths is something akin to a quantum probability mesh, and the further out from the Datum you go, the stranger things can get. One step away, the only difference is that there’s no industrialization-aftereffects from humanity. Go ten million steps away, and you hit worlds where life as we know it never evolved, and instead there are slime colonies the size of small buildings wandering around. Ten million steps in the other direction, and you can climb a tree five miles high and fight giant lizards in the forest of its canopy.
Of course, this does Bad Things to the governments of the world – who’s going to stick around and work a 9-to-5 when they can hop over a couple worlds and have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Who’s going to pay taxes if they live on a homestead ten thousand steps West7 that doesn’t see a dime of government services?
And Pratchett and Baxter play with that – as the series goes on, and by the end it’s spanned nearly 400 years of history,8 you can see the way the United States reacts to the paradigm shift that is stepping. It’s fascinating.
And then you get to Book Three, and explore the Long Mars. Because somewhere along the infinite chain of Earths, there’s one where the asteroid impact that formed the moon hit at a different angle and the Earth never formed. Which is a terrifying way to die – you think you’re going to step normally into another world, but instead find yourself suddenly in interplanetary space. But people are creative, and it’s possible to bring materials with you, so the Long Earth’s equivalent to SpaceX forms up on the world just this side of what becomes known as the Gap. Forget about expensive rockets – just hold onto your spacecraft, and then step right out of the gravity well. Once you’re free-floating, step back, and you’re suddenly in orbit, at about a billionth the energy cost. Space exploration is suddenly a lot easier.
And then a bonus twist on the concept: Mars is Long too, but in a different direction. Sure, it’s still stepping East and West, but a step West from Mars gets you to a different reality than a step West from Earth.
Book four is where things get spooky. (Spoiler warning again, because what I’m talking about now is from closer to the end of that book, rather than early-on reveals as above.)
Given a multiply-infinite series of worlds, certain things become inevitable. Von Neumann machines are one of these – somewhere out there along that infinity, there’s going to be a sentient lifeform. Given that it’s truly infinite, there’s probably going to be an infinite number of those. And at least one of them will have been smart enough to come up with the idea of a von Neumann probe, and dumb enough to actually build it. And then the problem with von Neumann probes shows up, one that we here on our Earth have been dealing with for centuries: self-replicating systems will eventually have a problem. For humans, with our self-replicating cells, we call it cancer. A von Neumann probe system will similarly eventually become cancerous, which makes it a massive threat to the entire galaxy.
And that’s all I’m going to say about The Long Utopia. I’m 1,500 words in, I should probably start talking about the book in the title.
The Long Cosmos takes another spin on that “given an infinite universe, there will be sentient life” thing. With the von Neumann probes, we never actually saw their creators, nor even any evidence that they’re still alive. In The Long Cosmos, though, we get proof of life: a signal that blows SETI’s “Wow!” signal out of the water.
“Join us.”
And that’s all I’m going to say about the story, I think. Suffice it to say it’s in the same vein of the rest of the Long Earth books – a delightful look at a truly large-scale world, and the people who inhabit it. It’s those characters who really make the story, and it’s a nice way to check in with all of them again.
Overall, it’s a wonderful book. Each one gets larger in scale than the last, and that’s what I like about them – it’s such a huge world to play around in, and the underlying concept is simple and understandable. It’s a veritable playground for the imagination.
As with every single other Terry Pratchett book out there, I highly recommend it. Start with the first, of course, but when you’ve read the rest of the series, read this one too.

  1. There’s nothing tagged under his name, as of yet, but I figure I’ll link to it anyways. Might read more of his work in the future, you never know! ↩
  2. I’ve actually still not read the first one in the series, but once I’m home and have access to my library I might go back and reread the second and third. ↩
  3. And yes, Amazon’s WhisperSync service does function to keep me in one place in the book if I read it on both devices, but I like this way better. ↩
  4. Aside from a bunch of free stuff from Project Gutenberg ↩
  5. And been heavily influenced in how I write – I like to say my use of footnotes has a lot to do with David Foster Wallace, and there’s some of him in there, but it’s a lot closer in style to Sir Terry Pratchett’s. ↩
  6. And I want to get a copy of Strata for myself, but it’s still hard to get in the United States. Ooh, maybe I’ll find a used book store while I’m abroad… ↩
  7. As opposed to East – knowing which is which is apparently an instinctive sort of thing for people when they step. ↩
  8. From the actual start point to the end point, it’s closer to 80 years, but there’s a good bit of prequel-type action in the earlier books. ↩
Categories
Review

A Short History of Nuclear Folly

So, ever since I heard about this book, I’ve wanted to read it. I’m a sucker for all this Cold War history stuff, okay? This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the books I’ve read on the subject.1
Anyhow, I’ve reached a point where very little of what I read in this book was actually new to me. Which is weird, because I hardly feel like an expert on the subject, but apparently I’m getting close. How strange.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t get anything new – quite the contrary, there were a couple really interesting bits in there that I found fascinating, and some things that I’d either never heard of or never explored in depth.
For example, while I knew about Project Plowshare, I hadn’t looked into some of the frankly ridiculous things they were trying to do.

Plowshare kicked off with the relatively small “Gnome” test near Carlsbad, New Mexico, on December 10, 1961. It was aimed, among other things, at investigating whether a nuclear explosion could be harnessed to produce energy. But the detonation destroyed the machinery that was supposed to convert the blast into power.

Hold up. They were trying to use a nuclear bomb as a generator? Had… had nobody told them about nuclear reactors? We already had those, folks.
But no, it’s more ridiculous than that, because if you dig into the full reports from the Gnome and Sedan tests, you find this:

GNOME was developed with the idea that a nuclear detonation in a salt deposit would create a large volume of hot melted salt from which heat might be extracted. The possibilities to be investigated for the production of power were the tapping of the steam created by the detonation itself and the generation of high-density, high-pressure steam by the circulation of some heat-absorbing fluid, like water, over the heated salt.
Defense Nuclear Agency, Projects Gnome and Sedan: The Plowshare Program, (Washington D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1983): 38.

tl;dr: they were going to build a geothermal power plant somewhere with no geothermal activity, and then set off a nuke to create the underground heat.
Gotta love the cold war. Other idiotic things that Plowshare wanted to try, but fortunately, was stopped from doing:

using nuclear bombs to melt the ice from polar ports, to re-channel rivers or to desalinate salt water from the ocean.

That said, the Soviets did even dumber stuff, including my single favorite sentence from the whole book:

Between 1965 and 1989, [the Soviets] carried out 116 civilian explosions . . . five were used to combat fires at oil fields.

“Hey boss, we’ve got a bit of a fire going over here.”
“Alright, we’re just gonna nuke it.”
“Seems reasonable.”

I’m going to stop here, because I can’t give away all of the fun parts of the book.2 I quite enjoyed it, so I’m quite happy to recommend it. Have a read.

  1. Fun story: Chase is trying to convince me to write a book about this stuff, because he’s a history nerd and thinks other people should be too. ↩
  2. And the long-winded blog post on the subject that I might wind up writing in the future, if Chase gets his way. ↩
Categories
Review

Colt Coltrane and the Lotus Killer

I’d forgotten how much fun detective novels can be. Who doesn’t like trying to figure out a mystery? It’s a good bit of intellectual fun. And there’s something unique about being the reader – not only do you know what the detective knows, you also know what scenes are important and which ones weren’t. You know the difference between Checkov’s gun and… a regular gun.
Colt Coltrane takes place in an alternate-history setting, with the divergence having taken place sometime during WWII. There’s a brief mention of the fact that the U.S. never actually dropped an atom bomb, despite having the capability, and the Takahashi corporation, formed by someone who managed to escape from Japan to get back to the States, manufactures semi-sentient robots for police and military use. The aesthetic of the book falls somewhere between film noir and Lost in Space. It’s very interesting.
I’m definitely interested in the sequel that apparently exists, because I want to know what’s going on with Petey, and I think there’s plenty of room for expansion on some of the different things that appeared in this. Plus, with some of the stuff that happened with the background characters, it feels almost like the pilot to a TV show – kinda like Odd Thomas, actually.1
So yeah, that’s about all I’ve got to say. A gorgeous alternate-history setting, some fun robotics, and an interesting mystery at the heart of it. I recommend it. Go have a read.

  1. That’s not the best comparison, as Odd Thomas was a solo movie, but it was based on the first book in a series and it really felt like it could’ve made a nice spin-off TV show. ↩
Categories
Review

The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids

I don’t think this one falls under the purview of ‘dark fantasy,’ because it doesn’t end with “and then everything was awful forever, the end,” but it’s… close. Adjacent to that subgenre, I suppose.
Amra Thetys is a thief, and a pretty good one, at that – she lives in a variety of homes around the crime-ridden city of Lucernis, all of them paid for. Her friends, of course, are also thieves. So there’s nothing much out of the ordinary when one of them shows up at her door, asking her to help him hide something while he goes to sort out the payment for his services.
Unfortunately, he never comes back for it. Instead, he’s murdered pretty brutally, and Amra gets sucked up into the mess because whoever did it is after the strange golden statue she was given to hold on to. And, of course, several other people are also interested in it, because something worth killing for is something worth stealing.
Where it gets interesting, to me at least, is in the magic. Because as Amra goes on in her accidental quest to find out who killed her friend, she starts to get more and more involved in the weirdness going on – a monster with an overwhelming aura of hatred, a mage who’s far too good to be a thief but is nonetheless, a downtrodden inspector who turns out himself to be a mage.
Throw in some ancient gods, a hint of undead, a Protector-spirit that has to be locked in for fear of what it’ll do if it gets out, and a hell mouth, and you’ve got an interesting story to be told. The necromancy was a nice touch.
So, the story itself was really interesting – a sort of magical murder mystery, with an adventure mixed in by the way. No problems with that.
Where I get slightly iffy is the setting. I mentioned above that it seems a bit like a ‘dark fantasy’ kind of thing, and all of that is in the setting. The world was, insofar as I can tell from the various hints that were dropped, of the “formerly occupied by the gods” sort. There was a massive war of the gods, though, something like two thousand years ago, and it cracked open a continent or two, creating a sort of diaspora for the humans that occupied the world. And the various other races that got brief mention – there’s some kind of orc-thing wandering around that makes a hobby of murdering every human they come into contact with, I think? Not very charitable of them.1
That said, it wasn’t depressingly so – the end has some hints that, yes, the leftovers of that Age of the Gods or whatever are coming to an end, and the magic is going to go with them2 – but while it hints at that ending, it points towards the Age of Man. There’s some early precursors of the industrial era showing up – arquebusses being the main one, although the invention of mass transportation is another – so I think it’s more saying “the age of myth and legend is ending, it’s time for the age of man.”
Which is cool, I suppose. I liked it, I’ll keep an eye out for the hinted-at sequels, I suppose. Go have a read.3

  1. This footnote doesn’t have anything to do with anything, it’s just that I realized I’d gone this entire review without using one and that’s not like me. ↩
  2. Which I am quite sad about, to be fair, magic is a lot of fun. ↩
  3. And read through the little post-script bit that’s an in-character explanation of the world, because it’s hilarious. ↩
Categories
Review

The Ables

It’s a running joke, at this point, that I’m a sucker for anything with superheroes in it. It’s, like, my schtick or something.
This was an interesting one. The Ables is set in a world where superhumans exist, people with a variety of superpowers. The main character is telekinetic, a skill he inherited from his father.1 Unlike most of what I read, though, in this one the superhumans keep themselves out of the public eye. Here, they have the advantage of someone named Weatherby, a massively powerful superhuman whose ability is making people forget. All around the world, the actions of the superheroes are forgotten by the normal folk almost instantly. Which is… a really scary amount of power for any one person to have, to be honest.
Fortunately, that’s not going to be a problem for a whole lot longer – Weatherby is apparently the last in a long line of Weatherbys, all of whom have had the same power and have used it towards the same end. It’s implied that he’s rather old and has no plans to have children, so the governing body of this secretive superhero society2 are, it’s mentioned a few times, in negotiations with the governments of the world to help prepare people for the revelation that, surprise, superheroes are real.
Where it gets more off-norm for my reading is in who the main characters are. First off, they’re middle schoolers. Which… is the main reason that I almost did finish this book. The opening bits, where it’s all about being in middle school, with the tiny tweaks necessary for it to be a middle school in what is very nearly a superhero-only city? They’re a pretty good representation of what it’s like to be in middle school. Which is to say… cringe-inducing in every way. It does eventually get away from that, which is, I think, the first time I’ve been happy that a superhero book has gone away from showing how superheroes can be integrated with a modern society.3
That’s not the only bit that’s focused on in the book, though, because the other thing about the main character and his friends is how they all met: in the Special Education class. Which strikes me as a bit of a misnomer in some cases – Henry, for example, doesn’t really have any special educational needs, he’s just in a wheelchair. That said, it’s a key plot point later on that this town doesn’t consider themselves ruled by US law, and so the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t apply. Rather infuriating, that.
All told, it’s an interesting book, once you get into it. I don’t know if I entirely like the context it’s set in, and there’s a few things that happened that made me really mad, but I deeply enjoyed the way the plot actually went. Sure, some of the stuff that was supposed to be a big twist was astonishingly predictable, but I’m a bit more lenient about that sort of thing than I used to be.4
So, I think I’ll give this one a thumbs up. Not my favorite ‘superheroes in middle school’ novel, but then, the first place for that one is a well-developed series that’s rather hard to beat.5 Without further ado, the link.

  1. His mother is a teleporter, and his little brother is apparently going to wind up as a speedster when his powers kick in. ↩
  2. Points for alliteration ↩
  3. The “Please Don’t Tell My Parents” which I’ve reviewed… less of than I thought, actually, is a counterpoint to this. The protagonist there is also in middle school, but manages to dodge most of the cringe worthiness of middle school as a whole. As I’ve said before and will most likely be saying again, that series is a delight to read. ↩
  4. My stance on the matter is roughly “I’ve spent enough time reading that I’ve probably hit that ’10,000 hours to be an expert’ line, so a lot of stuff seems predictable to me.” ↩
  5. The fact that I can narrow my categories down this much and still have multiple contenders for first place is one of the reasons I’m comfortable assuming I’ve spent 10,000 hours reading by now. ↩
Categories
Review

City of Burning Shadows

Okay, this book was gorgeous. Like, seriously, one of my favorite settings for a fantasy/science-fiction book I’ve read.
The basic gist of it is that this is a world where the gods are real and happily intervened in the world – the best example I can think of is that the whole thing takes place in a mega-city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert, made possible by the occasional rainstorm that just appeared over the city in response to prayers from the priests of the air goddess. And it was a pretty good world, where their Favored Children, something like high priests and priestesses of each of the god’s religions, were celebrities. Right up until, with no warning, the gods vanished. Without them, the world began to fall apart. One of the most immediate problems was that, in response to the fall of the world’s capitol city,1 the various megacities severed ties with one another. And not in the political sense – they destroyed the mass-transit ‘tubes’ that linked them for freight and personnel traffic, and with the tubes went the communications lines. They cut themselves off from each other.
That was years ago, now. The main character, Ash, was once a priest of the Zeus of the world, a trickster spirit who apparently ushered humanity along their evolutionary path out of something like boredom. The other species of the world were created, to varying degrees, in the image of humanity, though each with the unique flavor of their own parent-god. So there’s the shapeshifters, children of the shapeless god of magic, and then there’s the vaguely-elvin Jansynians, the corporate powerhouses of the world. Following the Abandonment,2 priests became rather unpopular, and the majority of his friends were killed. Ash himself was hospitalized for six months, and woke up in the drought-stricken, cut-off city.
He landed on his feet, though, becoming a glorified filling clerk for a private investigator’s firm. It’s there that the plot picks us up – an old friend, one he’d thought dead, came to ask for help.
Of course, it’s never something simple, and suddenly he’s embroiled in all sorts of fun politics. Turns out that someone wasn’t going to take the Abandonment lying down, and had put together plans for a satellite that could do the sort of thing only the gods had done before – it could make it rain in the middle of the desert. It could save the city. They’d handed off the designs to the Jansynians, hoping their resources3 could push the project through before the already-strained water reserves could be depleted. And then, for no apparent reason, progress halted on what should’ve been a simple “launch and press activate” type of process.
Then the assassins came for the inventor, and her sister stepped in to protect her, sending for the slightly-more-than-investigative PI firm.
That’s about enough of the plot, I think – it gets really interesting, there’s a couple of fun twists4 that I’m going to tell you absolutely nothing about.
But I will touch on something else – the setting is, like I said, a gorgeous world. Aside from the magic, it’s also science fiction – the Jansynians, taking advantage of their global business acumen, have built themselves the Crescent, a massive enclave from which all of their companies operate. They’re the ones everyone is jealous of, in the increasingly-parched desert – the Crescent, built 100 stories above the ground, is domed-in and has its own facilities to provide power, water, and food to the inhabitants. Basically, in their gleaming dome above the rest of the populace, they can ride out the apocalypse in comfort. When they deign to visit the city below, they do it in hovercars that they don’t even bother to lock, because nobody is stupid enough to steal from them.
Basically, it’s a delightful blend of fantasy and science fiction, and I loved reading it. Go get it.5

  1. Named something imaginative like “City of the Gods” ↩
  2. Which, I’ve gotta say, is probably the best-case scenario for naming something like the events this world had to go through. ↩
  3. And talent for management, something the inventor wanted nothing to do with. ↩
  4. And a couple of heartbreaking ones, because why wouldn’t there be? ↩
  5. And in looking up the link to put here I’ve found out there’s a sequel which I now desperately want to read. ↩
Categories
Review

A Beginner’s Guide to Invading the Earth

I had fun with this book, y’all. The first few chapters are just seriously silly, there’s a bit of a lull in how interesting it is, but then it picks back up, and I finished the entire second half of the book in one sitting, unable to put it down.
So, the context: you’ve got the Commons, which is something vaguely akin to the United Nations, but at the galactic scale. A rather common trope in science fiction of this specific dint. The “Happy Alien Welcome Committee”1 are preparing to induct humanity into the Commons as the latest member species – a somewhat run-of-the-mill operation, considering that there’s thousands of different species in the Commons by now, and rejection has happened precisely once before.2 Except, us being humanity, we manage to mess it up pretty spectacularly – the first envoy gets hit by a truck. Second one tries to help a crashing Cessna and instead the drunk cowboy flying the thing makes a surprisingly accurate potshot. It goes on from there.3 Ten attempts later, the Committee gives up, having never made contact with their selected Human Ambassador. Instead, the various member species who lost people start planning their various revenges.
So the cast of characters is already a wide-spread group of aliens and one very antisocial human. The chapters alternate back and forth, for the most part, with the first being the Committee planning their first meeting, the second being Jeff, their selected Ambassador, going about his normal life, and then back. It makes for a fun mechanic – there’s one or two chapters where you can see Jeff being his nomadic self, leaving town right after the latest media frenzy in response to another dead alien being found.
And then things start to get weird. The ‘alien’ plot ditches the Committee and starts following Oliop, the Committee’s tech support guy. He’s largely invisible,4 but decides to go take a look at this troublesome human for himself. And makes contact without any trouble.
But then the Plot kicks in, and you realize that, from all the silliness at the start, we wound up with something like ten different groups all trying to achieve different things. And that’s without introducing one of my favorite characters,5 who doesn’t show up until quite a ways into the book. It’s a delight.6
I’m going to stop myself now, though, because there’s just too much fun going on with the plot for me to spoil any of it. I enjoyed the heck out of it, so here’s the link. (It’s a remarkably cheap book, as well, considering how good it was. Seriously, go read it.)

  1. Or some similarly ridiculous name – a couple of the characters poke fun at it in the book once or twice. ↩
  2. The Bunnie, described as “as if someone had taken two giant spiders and then glued them back-to-back.” ↩
  3. The high point, in my opinion, being the trio of flying-squirrel-like aliens who managed to get impaled by a kite. ↩
  4. Not in an “alien superpower” way, in a “nobody pays attention to the IT guy” way. ↩
  5. Think “Sam Vimes from the Discworld series” but as a mold colony growing around a robotic endoskeleton. So cool. ↩
  6. To the degree that I’ve already bookmarked the other book this author has written, for when I’ve worked my way a good bit further through the long list of ‘books to read’ I’ve got going. ↩
Categories
Review

Calamity

I may or may not have stayed up a bit late so I could finish this book in one day. It’s the wrap-up to a series I’ve really enjoyed, and it was a good wrap-up, at that.
So, the Reckoners series is set in a world that has superhumans – they call them Epics. There’s a subgroup of those, High Epics, who’re the real superpowers – some people have, like, “can speak any made-up language” as their superpower. High Epics have things like “can turn anything he touches to steel, can fly, and is borderline immortal.”1
Of course, this is a world where the phrase “power corrupts” is just about a law of physics. The more of their power an Epic uses, the more they lose touch with humanity, becoming arrogant and cruel. There are no superheroes here – it’s just a new age of feudalism, where the lords are not just politically but physically orders of magnitude more powerful than the normal people.
It’s the sort of setting that I wish I could’ve thought of – it captures my interest in a way that very few other books (or media in general) can.2 I love this idea of superpowered beings having their weaknesses drive them to evil, and of the regular people trying to fight back against it. I dunno, I’ve just got weird interests.
Like I said, I really enjoy these books – I’ve got all of them.
Now, in this one, things aren’t going so well for the Reckoners – in the first one, they managed to take down Steelheart, the despotic ruler of Newcago. In the second, they went to Babilar3 to fight the ruler of that down. In the process, they lost their leader – a High Epic himself, he’d managed to stay on the side of the angels by not using his powers. Regalia, the ruler of Babilar, forced his hand, though, and in using his powers to save the city he rather doomed himself.
In the third book, the Reckoners are up against their former leader – with all his knowledge of them and their tactics, and a suite of powers that makes him one of the most powerful High Epics out there.
Oh, and that’s without mentioning that David, the protagonist, has his sights set on killing Calamity, the Epic in low Earth orbit that burns like a misplaced star and is the source of the powers and evil that shattered the world.
No pressure.

That’s about all I’m going to say for now – I enjoy the series a lot, and I think everyone should read it. If you haven’t read any of them, obviously start with the first. If you’ve read the others, I’d say go pick up the third now.4

  1. Technically speaking, I think the actual distinction of ‘High Epic’ means ‘borderline immortal’ for whatever reason – super-fast healing, indestructibility, able to dodge any attack, whatever. ↩
  2. The only other contenders I can think of are Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Animated Universes, and Scott Meyer’s Magic 2.0 series. ↩
  3. The sunken remains of what used to be New York City – an Epic held up the towers with magical trees, basically, and it turned into one of the best places on the planet to live, actually. ↩
  4. And this is where I have to quietly admit that I just bought this book the day that I read through it – I know, I know, I’m supposed to not be buying more books while I work through the ones I’ve got, but I just got my payout from the Apple antitrust case and how was I supposed to resist, I got a Kindle gift card? C’mon. ↩
Categories
Review

Under a Colder Sun

I’m normally a huge fan of fantasy novels set in the far future, the whole “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” thing, but this one was so depressing. It’s a corrupt world, a dark one – like the Fallout series, but worse, because in those at least there’s some people trying to make it better.
Here, there’s just petty little kingdoms fighting one another, and the creeping darkness outside the world trying to get in and ruin things.
I had such high hopes for this one, as well – the main characters are a grumpy immortal and a lesbian cop.1 And instead it’s just a stupid “save the princess” plot where everything goes wrong.
But then, once you’ve gotten to the point this world has, I think that was about all that could happen – the ball is rolling down the hill so fast it’d take something rather drastic to change that. And while there’s some ‘deus ex machina’ type intervention from the gods, the gods of this world are also awful – rather than offerings of food or whatever, they want “a fresh kill” or “your blood, drawn by another.” Seriously, at a certain point you should probably recognize that your deity sucks.
I dunno, man, this was just a bummer of a book. If you want to read it, though, feel free.2

  1. Which makes me want to write the weirdest buddy-cop movie ever, now that I’ve typed it. ↩
  2. Okay the fact that on Amazon this is subtitled “A Grim Dark Fantasy Adventure” is a pretty good sign that it’s gonna be depressing as hell. ↩
Categories
Review

The Alchemist

A quick read, but one that I enjoyed.1 And found oddly familiar, to the point that, in spite of my Kindle’s insistence that I’ve never read it, I think I must have, at some point. Quite a while ago, though, because it was at the very end of the list, sorted by ‘recently read/added,’ and it feels less like deja vu than it does just a hint of familiarity.
That said, it’s a lovely little story. It’s a world of magic, but magic with a price:2 every casting of a spell feeds the bramble, a poisonous plant that grows at an unnatural rate. Things haven’t gone well for the world: the ancient kingdoms cast magic without thinking of the fallout3 and fell to the bramble. The protagonist is a man already broken: his wife died, his wealth faded, and his daughter is sick with an unsurvivable illness. Largely because of his choice to fight the bramble rather than continue making expensive trinkets for the rich.
But then, at the very lowest point, as his daughter is about to die, he discovers something: a way to kill the bramble.
And for that moment, you think things are going to go well for him, but he’s not a rich man, and he can’t afford to mass-produce his invention. So he goes to the Mayor. And politics happen.
I won’t say much more than that – a short story gets a short review. But I’ll say that I liked it a lot more than the last book I reviewed. So, without further ado, go give it a read, it’s pretty cheap on Amazon.

  1. I’m going to put in a note here to say that this isn’t the first result that comes up when you search for “The Alchemist,” it’s the one by Paolo Bacigalupi. Entertainingly, the first result is by a different Paolo. ↩
  2. Which actually might be why this seems familiar – Anatopsis is another great book about the price of magic. I read that book in middle school, forgot the title, and then spent years trawling through the local library trying to find it again. I knew exactly where it should’ve been – in the old building. But in the time between my first reading of it and when I wanted to read it again, the library moved into the nice new building.
    I think I eventually managed to find it with a very strange google search – something like “book talking dog red cover female main character’s name starts with a.” One of those “how in god’s name did Google figure out what I meant?” sort of searches. ↩
  3. cough-global-warming-cough ↩
Categories
Review

The Secret Garden

“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it’s like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen.”

I’ve had this book on my Kindle for a long time. I think it was one of the first ones on there, to be honest – I grabbed it off of Project Gutenberg, I believe, back when I first got my Kindle.1 I’ve just never gotten around to reading it.
This past Sunday, I’d just finished reading through the Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed Magazine.2 Now, if you don’t know, Lightspeed is a periodical collection of science fiction stories, usually fairly short. The review, when it goes up, is pretty substantial – I wrote a short review of each of those short stories. Which meant that, every few minutes or so, I was putting down my Kindle and doing a bit of typing on my laptop.
It was during one of those times that I got a Breaking News email from Time. “50 people killed in Orlando nightclub shooting,” read the subject line. I opened the email, and it felt like a punch to the stomach. In the middle of Pride Month, while I was halfway through a collection of queer-focused science fiction in the larger process of reading through everything I’d picked up in the Pride Month Humble Bundle, I read this:

At least 50 people were killed and another 53 wounded after a gunman opened fire in an Orlando gay nightclub early Sunday morning, officials said. The death count makes the attack the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

The rest of the day, I kept reading. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.3 Lightspeed was a mix of sad and happy stories; the happy ones felt like throwing teacups of water on a blazing inferno, the sad like being pulled further underwater. My “writing” breaks got longer and longer as I took time to check on the news, Twitter, Facebook – anywhere that I could find out more about what had happened. I kept hoping something would change for the better, but it wouldn’t.4 The tragedy had already happened; all that was left was cleaning up afterwards.
It was heartbreaking. It still is – I’m being thankful I took the time to learn to touch-type, because if I had to do the whole ‘hunt-and-peck’ thing, writing this would take me ages. It’s hard to hunt for a specific key when your eyes are full of tears.
At the end of the day, I started flipping through my Kindle, trying to find something new to read. The last couple of books from the Humble Bundle had lost their allure, as had the stack of science fiction. I wanted something different than what I’d spent the day doing. Clearly, the queer-focused science fiction hadn’t worked to take my mind off the tragedy.
Sitting at the very end of the list, just above the dictionary folder5 was The Secret Garden. It’s certainly different, I thought. And it is: a book written more than 100 years ago probably couldn’t be more diametrically opposite a bunch of queer science fiction if it tried.
And while I’m not normally one for believing in fate or god or any such higher power, this is the kind of thing that if someone had conspired to write it into the way things should be, that would be some beautiful predestination. This book was exactly what I needed right now.
Because, sure, the dated phrasing is a bit strange at times,6 and the painstakingly-written-out accents are rather hard to read at first. But beyond that, the story is something pure and innocent.
The first almost-half of the book isn’t that way; it’s the story of a terrible little girl, the result of the sort of horrible parenting where you can call it “terrible parenting” even after the tragic death of her parents.7 She’s always gotten what she wanted, and she’s used to getting it from servants who wouldn’t dare talk back to her. She is, basically, the worst-case scenario for a ten-year-old. After the death of her parents – something that barely affects her, as she rarely if ever saw them – she’s sent from India8 to Yorkshire, in the ‘care’ of her uncle.9
Once there, though, she begins to explore. She’s told of a ‘forbidden garden,’ hidden away from the world after her uncle’s beloved wife was injured there, eventually leading to her death. Being the little brat that she is, she goes to find it.
And there, the Magic starts to happen.
Throughout the book, you see her become a better person – so slowly that she’s not aware of it, and the reader only notices because the narrator makes the occasional effort to point it out.
And it’s not just her – a few other characters are introduced, and her growth as a person helps to kick-start the same process for several others.
Now, I’ll insert a warning here: spoilers ahead. Normally I refuse to write about anything past, oh, the halfway point of the book or so. If you want to go read this from a fresh standpoint, you can pick it up for free on Amazon or free at Project Gutenberg.
Again: spoilers ahead. If you don’t want to know how it ends, stop reading.
All clear?
Alright, I’ll go on.
As I got to the end of the book, I was starting to get suspicious – nothing can be this happy, this perfect and pure, can it? Everything is going too well. Good things just don’t happen.
But sometimes they do.
Sometimes you get the perfect happy ending, where everything goes just right. Nobody has to die, and everyone can be happy and healthy and alive.
And I think that’s the sort of thing we need to remember, in the wake of a tragedy like Orlando. Even if it sometimes seems like nothing good ever happens, that nothing gold can stay, that’s just not true. There are so many good people in the world. So many good things.
It’s important to keep that in mind. So if you, like me, need something good and pure and happy to remind you of that, then I absolutely recommend this book. Like I said above, you can pick it up for free on Amazon or Project Gutenberg.
Go do something joyful. Remember that there’s good in the world.

  1. When I got my first Kindle, in fact. It’s been sitting in my “list of things to read” for a long time. ↩
  2. The review of that one will be posted in a couple weeks; I’m bumping this one ahead of schedule for reasons I’ll get into in a bit. ↩
  3. It’s the first time this summer that I’ve felt truly homesick – I’m 2,000 miles from home, and while most of the time I’ve been fine, this is the sort of situation where you want to be surrounded by loved ones. ↩
  4. The worst of it, which I feel a morbid need to share, is a Facebook post that made the rounds (in screenshot form), originally posted by someone named Andy Carvin:
    > RE: the Orlando shooting, CNN just described something I’ve never thought of – as investigators are inside the nightclub, where many of the bodies are still where they fell, they have to tune out the nightmarish sound of all of the deceased phones’ ringing constantly as loved ones try to reach them. #shudder ↩
  5. It lives at the end of the list; hard-coded. ↩
  6. My original ‘social media post’ title for this was “The Secret Garden,” or, “you know there are objectives other than ‘queer,’ right?”, but once I’d gotten into the swing of writing it didn’t seem quite right. ↩
  7. Normally dying in a sad way can erase some of that blame, but “you, servant-woman, make sure I never see this child” is a whole new level of awful parenting. ↩
  8. As John Oliver called it, ‘the country formerly known as “Great Britain’s spice rack.”’ ↩
  9. He makes two appearances throughout the book; I’m forced to assume that part of being wealthy in Britain is having the portion of your brain that knows how to deal with children be forcibly removed. ↩