Reviews

The latest in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, Serpentine continues the series with the planned wedding of “Ted” and Donna. Of course, things never go quite according to plan, and there are the usual supernatural complications that seem to follow Anita whereever she goes. Since we’re talking about book 26 in a series, this is not the place for new readers to start. Further, we’re talking about a series where the closest thing to a Dark Lord threatening the world was killed off something like 10 books ago.

A Wastrel’s Tale is (probably) the first book in a swords and sorcery zombie apocalypse series. The story revolves around a member of an order dedicated to fighting necromancy with the use of arms and specialized magic, yet for decades now there have been but few necromancers. Indeed, only one of any notable talent or skill, and that one in captivity. An ideal condition for a third son who would dearly love to spend his life training, drinking, and wenching, no?

An Airless Storm follows up on the adventures of Andrew Cochrane and his security service of interstellar mercenaries. Following their initial success in funding their operations, the company has ordered more ships and larger ships. But their enemies are doing the same. The book has the same vaguely Heinlein-juvenile feel, and the plot armor is less perfect. Mostly it represents an improvement, but the ratio of people talking about their plans and engaging in covert operation shenanigans versus space battles is still pretty high.

Peter Grant’s new novel, The Stones of Silence, is set in his science-fiction universe, sharing it with his two other series starting with Take the Star Road and War to the knife. It’s unclear to me if the setting is intended to be the same, or just happens to be similar in a generic science fiction way. The setup for his new series is interesting, but shares the flaws of the earlier works.

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher is a collection of short stories in the very popular Dresden Files series, named for the central character Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard – or at least the only one with an ad in the phone book. I don’t normally go in for short story collections, but occasionally with an established universe my completionist instincts will kick in. In this case I had already read Side Jobs, a similar collection by the same author in the same universe.

A sequel to Sufficiently Advanced Magic, On the Shoulders of Titans manages to significantly complicate the plot. The number of characters who may not be trustworthy or whose interests may lie in a direction other than that of their allies grows to very nearly equal the number of characters in the book. Thankfully, the “magic school” elements of the plot are reduced almost to insignificance; the main character barely attends class and spends only a limited amount of time on screen taking tests.

What do you get when you combine an interesting magic system, a lot of influence from video games, a competent but emotionally distant author, a dash of gender ambiguity, a token pinch of political preaching, and yet another book about a child who goes to magic school? Apparently, you get a pretty good stew of a book that’s enjoyable to read, intellectually interesting, and only rarely makes me want to throw it against the wall for brief periods.

Many years ago, when I was a young man, or perhaps a boy in the process of becoming a young man, I walked into a bookstore and bought a book that would change my life. I bought the book on the basis of the cover, because the cover was the coolest thing I had ever seen: a man wearing sunglasses drives a car in a futuristic city. You understand, I say he drives the car because that is what one does with a car.

There’s not much to say about Adapt and Overcome (The Maxwell Saga), the third book in Peter David’s series about a young man who joins the space navy and comes of age amongst a series of increasingly improbable coincidences. It’s fast, reasonably fun, and the infinite improbability drive is set to just a notch below winning the lottery without buying a ticket. The author’s complete failure to grasp his readers’ comments about his main character’s plot invincibility in prior books is a charming mirror of his main character’s casual stroll through explosions, firefights and love affairs that never seem to leave a scratch on him.

The one-line review is that Interstellar is the movie that 2001 should have been. It has a mysterious anomaly orbiting Saturn, a realistic depiction of a space mission to investigate and explore. But it also has so much more: incredible, moving performances from the leading actors and actresses, an emotional investment on both the personal and the species level, strange and wonderful and terrible things to find, and a powerful human drama that plays out across that background.