Europa Journal by Jack Castle is a science fantasy adventure story set in our future. The story centers around “Mac” O’Bryant and her crew as they struggle to survive on an alien world after crashing their intrastellar spacecraft. The first chapter is excellent and did well at hooking me into the story to find out more. How the characters got into this mess. How they’re going to get out of it. The first chapter makes a big promise of an action packed science fiction adventure. However that promise sets the reader up for a feeling of disappointment when the story goes outside their expectations. Continue reading
I only occasionally read historical fiction1. However, a new friend spoke well of Ken Follet so I grabbed a sampling of his books from our public library to try. I started with Jackdaws which is set in 1944, primarily in Nazi-occupied France. It turned out to be an excellent read, and the only thing preventing me from reading it in one sitting yesterday was that I had other things I had to get done2.
Tritcheon Hash isn’t actually my kind of book. I’m certain this is a case where what I think is cool and what the author, Sue Lange, thinks is cool, doesn’t match up. We have different tastes in humor or I don’t actually know the right cultural references to get some of the humor. There is a well-executed and subtle pun I particularly enjoyed. Be careful–it is liable to sneak past you!
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There are many webcomics available on the web and while I’ve tried many of them, there are only four that I’ve liked, and only two of those that I read regularly. Questionable Content (QC) is one of those two. I love reading this comic. I love enough that I was eager to purchase both of the printed collections. Continue reading
Many teenagers’ worries involve grades, sweethearts, and their successes or failures in extra-curricular activities. Not so for Chance Fortunato, unless peddling under-the-table black magick counts as an extra-curricular activity. “Apprenticed” (sold to) to a demon at a young age, he’s more worried about incurring his master’s wrath and the state of his soul than whether he’ll “make the team”. Continue reading
Playing “what if” with the fate of the “dinosaurs” is certainly not new, Harry Harrison is in good company with the likes of Verne, Burroughs, Doyle, and many others. Each have done their own spin on “What if the fate of the dinosaurs was different?” Harry Harrison’s answer to the question, West of Eden, is excellent. Continue reading
I recently received a review copy of the Kindle edition of Vera Nazarian’s The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass. I’m cross-posting this review here, on Library Thing, and Amazon. Continue reading
Native Tongue is a fascinating treatment of what role linguistics might play in alien contact. Language issues are oft-neglected (not always, just often) in science fiction with good reason: the reader would get impatient with the delays in the “main story”. But in this novel, the linguists play a central role, and the issues and impacts of coping with the task of communicating with aliens are addressed.
Another significantly interesting aspect of this story is the setting itself. In this setting, laws were passed which set the civil rights of women back hundreds of years. The book examines aspects of the society that comes out of those laws about a hundred years later. It does so without being aggressively feminist and still keeps the concerns of the characters immediate rather than dramatic.
The characters, while interesting, do not feel fully developed to me…I like to have fairly extensive depth to characters, and these don’t meet that standard. Otherwise, the book is an excellent science fiction read.
