The Queen’s Secret

by on October 17, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

So, book 2 of a YA fantasy horse series.

Warning: there is a cliffhanger ahead.

The fact that this leads directly into book 3 explains a few things, because on its own the plot is a mess. Even as the middle of a story there are problems here.

Ironically, this was published in 2019 and deals with a deadly plague. In general, the situation is well handled, especially at a YA level. Since this world is somewhere around late 19th to early 20th century in general technology, the general sense of what is going on is known, and it’s down to trying to find a cure, or, as it turns out, a good inoculation.

Of course, this isn’t something the main characters are directly involved in, though they get the chance to be involved in finding a crucial bit of knowledge. That’s dropped a bit suddenly, and comes in from outside the active plot. But, the answer is suggestive of what deeper things are going on, because there is a deeper plot going on underneath all the happenings of the book.

…And that’s really the source of the trouble. Things start unraveling near the end, and while there’s a lot of questions left, the end is also where we start getting the questions in the first place. There were dropped threads near the beginning, and then there’s a lot of motion that goes nowhere until we head into the end. Put together directly with the next book, this may work out well, but inside of this book, the pacing is too uneven, and important things are set aside too long. That said, the writing and characters are enjoyable, and everything is set up well for what should be a very good concluding book.

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Imperial Twilight

by on October 5, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Platt’s book is really about the relationship between Britain and China before the Opium War, and shows why a conflict was unexpected, almost right up to when it did happen.

The two had a stable trading relationship for about two centuries. While the very limited contact (all through Canton) seems repressive, in practice it did mean that everyone involved knew what to expect from each other, and how to keep the goods, and cash, flowing.

Instability arrived on the British side in the guise of opium. Notably, while official British trade stayed away from the substance, the East India Company was doing its best to control the sale of opium in India, and make a big profit from it. However, there was competition from areas not yet under control of the EIC, which led to them competing on price, driving the cost of opium in China down so that it was no longer just available to the rich.

On the Chinese side,  there were serious rebellions that sapped much of the available political will, as insane numbers of men and money were spent to put down the White Lotus rebellion, and right after dealing with the ever-growing problem of piracy. The ultimate cause of both is really that the population of China had doubled during the 1700s, while the tax structure meant no more money came in to oversee the greater needs of the greater population; this left the import tariffs claiming a more and more prominent place in the budget.

These combine to create ever-growing corruption in the Chinese government just as they have to deal with a new popular problem: An ever-growing number of people hooked on opium. (This also starts draining silver coinage out of China—historically extremely rare.) The Chinese go through a number of ideas on their war on drugs, including contemplating legalizing opium, before taking a very hard-line stance with a new administrator, who actually starts getting things done. Whether he was really doing enough to start stemming the tide, or just breaking up a couple waves is taken for granted here, but I have my doubts.

Either way, Lin Zexu ended up on a collision course with the latest British superintendent, Charles Elliot, as the EIC monopoly had just been ended (to the immediate benefit of opium smugglers). Elliot was months away from further instructions, did not have as much authority as he generally needed, and increasingly erratic under the strain. Collision was inevitable, and when it happened war followed.

Though the war itself was still not inevitable. Britain fought, on the surface at least, the abstract notions of honor and respect. That other motives lurked under the surface were obvious, and the effort to push the war through nearly caused top members of the government to be censured by Parliament, and may have led to a collapse of the Melborne government.

Overall, the book mostly sticks with the British side of things, partially, I believe, because the two British efforts to send embassies to China that form the beginning parts of the book are much better documented from that side (and still nearly gets stuck in the weeds of conflicting and incomplete accounts). Much of the middle is better on showing the internal challenges of China, but the figures involved never really come to life. The war itself is merely summarized, though Plat points out that the Chinese, operating with a much weaker miliary, didn’t play to its strengths either.

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Thousand Shrine Warrior

by on September 27, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The final Tomoe Gozen novel is much more cohesive as a novel than the first two. But it is broken into three parts, and they are somewhat independent.

A sad repeat from the second book is that there’s an ad from the publisher of the Kindle version of the book right at the end of part three. And right before a final short story epilogue. This is a really bad habit by Open Road, and needs to stop. If it was before a preview of another book, that’d be one thing, but but this is splitting apart something that’s supposed to be a cohesive whole.

At least they’re not advertising soup.

At any rate, we have more grand adventure in a world of Japanese myth. Tomoe is now a mendicant monk, making her way while trying to atone for actions she now regrets. She is older, and sadder, and no less deadly, even as arthritis starts afflicting her joints.

Of course, this she stumbles into a small province where an ex-samurai will find plenty of things to regret. Much Japanese storytelling is somber, and this book has the tone down perfect, just like the entire series has gotten so much right.

Overall, the pace is often slow, but the fact that this is much more one cohesive whole helps a lot, and I think this is the best part of the series. Overall, it’s well worth a read, and needs to be better known than it is.

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Powersat

by on September 15, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is the first book in Ben Bova’s “Grand Tour” series—chronologically at least. I get the idea it was one of the later ones written, but I haven’t looked deeply into that. Each one was written about a particular location in the solar system, and this one is… “orbit”.

Technothrillers generally have at least a whiff of science-fiction to them, since they often deal with the intersection of modern military and new technology, so every once in a while SF authors will come at it from the other direction. This is the second such I’ve read, and by far the more successful.

Bova avoids any mention of what year it’s supposed to be, but there’s some interesting hints of background as he writes from a 2005 perspective. There was a second 9/11 style event (three major bridges being blown up near-simultaneously), and the US occupied a decent amount of the Middle East, and is still there as a result. There’s no overall look at the privatization of space flight that was starting at the time, but there is certainly one company making a real go at it, and it is the center of the novel.

Thankfully, Dan Randolph has none of the authoritarian foot-in-mouth baggage that the real world has to deal with. But he is obsessive, and obsessive enough to have two separate obsessions, one of which powers the central plot, the other of which helps tie together pieces of the secondary plot (or maybe tertiary, the side stuff tends to be a bit fragmented to easily sort out).

The primary obsession is to deliver cheap power by setting up a large geosynchronous satellite that will gather solar power and beam it down to Earth. Whatever year this is, the various technical hurdles of this plan have been dealt with, and there’s even been a Japanese demonstration model already (which Randolph helped with).

Of course, this would completely upend current power structures (pun not quite intended). And that’s where the book goes from hard SF to technothriller as various groups try to stop or control this about-to-be new source of comparatively cheap power. It’s odd that all of this comes up as the project is nearing completion, instead of a decade or two of political fighting, but that would make for an extremely dull novel.

The novel starts with the crash in a test flight of the last piece of Randolph’s plan. A true reusable space plane that can get maintenance people up to geosynchronous orbit to perform any needed maintenance. Late in the novel you finally find out that there’s already an equivalent to the ’80s “space tug” proposal up there that is what is transferring everything from low orbit to geo. But there’s no discussion of when/how that was put there, what keeps it fueled, or any other infrastructure. Not even evidence of current space stations in orbit. The novel has a lot to talk about on the ground anyway, but it does make it feel like Astro Corporation is operating in a vacuum (har har).

Pacing is overall a bit slow, a little uneven, and ramps up to a technothriller action climax. Overall, it’s a good book, but a lot of the secondary parts feel underbaked. It’s a strong enough book for me to be continuing on to the asteroids.

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North-West Frontier 1837-1947

by on September 7, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Osprey’s book on the northwest of British India covers from the appointment of Lord Auckland as Governor-General of India, and goes to the end of British India.

In general, this is your usual good Osprey treatment of the subject, with photographs of men in the equipment of various troop types.

However, it is an early book from them, and has some deficiencies. Angus McBride’s artwork for the color plates is good, but still largely in the ‘traditional’ mode. There’s no more than vague hints at backgrounds, and mostly static figures, though the last plate shows three tribesmen charging down a slope. Outside of that, there’s also no map of the region under discussion.

It is a good informative basic history, and as ever with Osprey, provides good visual reference, but it falls short in other areas.

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