Reviews

A Cassandra Kresnov novel, 23 Years On Fire advances the clock a bit and brings some intriguing new ideas into the series. Although they are coming a little bit out of left field and strain plausibility somewhat, such small sins are easily forgiven in support of a good story and the philosophical questions that comes along with it. The novel opens with Sandy leading a military raid on a Federation planet suspected of using mind-control implant technology on the population of an entire planet – accidentally.

Have you ever wanted to strap yourself into a starship and light off the thrusters just to see where you would end up? Fight space pirates with your black belt in Karate while climbing the ranks aboard a merchant starship? How about just being an improbably nice fellow with the plot thoroughly on your side? Then this book will satisfy you. Just keep your suspension of disbelief handy, because you’ll need it.

Astra takes the lead of a new super-group, squaring off against the Green Man – an environmental super-terrorist who causes super-accelerated plant growth. Nothing exceptional in this straightforward superhero novel, though readers might find the page count and the price tag somewhat at odds with each other. This is the third novel in the Wearing the Cape series.

I’ve been a mild fan of Jack McDevitt’s books for a while. He does soft science fiction with a decent sense of wonder pretty well, though there’s usually a mild sour note here and there that keeps his books from being an entirely positive experience. The Cassandra Project fit that description for most of the book, which is essentially a “What if” take on the fake moon landings theory. But when I read the epilogue, I wanted to throw the book across the room.

Destroyer is the latest in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, the tale of Bren ameron’s tempestuous relationship with the alien atevi. As the paidhi, Bren is the sole human permitted to enter atevi society, and on his head rests the task of translating not only language and culture, but also the instinctual behaviors that can seem deceptively similar … with sometimes deadly results. As Destroyer opens, Bren returns to his adopted planet following the 2-year space mission to retrieve human colonists from a remote space station.

I ended up reading Orson Scott Card’s First Formic War series because of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about the central moral question of Ender’s Game: was Ender’s action to end his war moral or not? It would be a spoiler to describe exactly what he did; suffice it to say that it’s a close call based on the available information, and our opinions differed based primarily on whether the books in this series were considered canon or not.

Ethan Kaille is a thieftaker, someone who is hired to find thieves and recover stolen property, in Boston during the time right before the Revolutionary War. His life is complicated by a rival thieftaker, Sephira Pryce, who is more like a female caricature of a mob boss than someone on the side of justice, and her ire at his being hired by a coveted rich client to investigate the murder of the client’s daughter.

When the best think you can say about a book is that you don’t remember reading it a year later, it’s not very flattering. That’s the only way I can describe Kiss the Dead, another Anita Blake novel from Laurel K Hamilton. Even reading the plot summary on Amazon just now failed to bring back any signifiant elements of the story. So why am I writing this review, you ask? Even the fact that a book is that forgettable is useful information.

The latest book in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Dive series, Skirmishes interweaves three plots together: a past encounter at the Room of the Lost Souls, the beginning of Boss’ attempt to dive the Boneyard and recover more working dignity vessels, and a confrontation between Cooper’s two working dignity vessels and a larger force of ships from the Empire. Readers will want to be caught up with the earlier works in this series, because it will make absolutely no sense standing alone.

An interesting independently published ebook, The Stars Came Back is a tale of space adventure with distinct military, political and moral themes. Stylistically, it occupies an unusual dialogue-heavy space somewhere between a novel and a screenplay; the author has mentioned that he originally wrote it as a screenplay and as it grew in length the style adjusted somewhat. Though written in a manner reminiscent of a Heinlein juvenile, it is not a coming-of-age tale; almost all of the characters are adults, though they still have room to grow and change.