Indigo Rain

by on January 29, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

While getting started with this novella, something was tickling at the back of my mind. Shortly after the first chapter, I realized that I recognized the names “Raneadhros” and “Ranea”. This is the same world as his early stories “A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood”, and “The Lighthouse”. It’s good to be back. (Watts, get these stories into ebook format; I know the former is available free in HTML, but they both deserve a good portable reading format.)

Like Watts’ other stories, Roulette is a fairly typical person. No amazing abilities or other hooks to make Roulette ‘main character bait’. She grew up in a backwater area of the empire, and wants more than living on the family vineyard will ever get her. She is attractive (if you go for curvy raccoons Procya), and knows how to dance. She’s using this to earn money to travel to the capital and find herself a rich husband.

However, in the human-dominated province of Achoren, she runs into trouble when a need for a bit of extra money turns into a private dance, assault, and death. Roulette has run straight into explosive local politics with stakes higher than she can willingly credit.

The political side is sadly even more familiar today than back in 2013 when this was written. But this is still a character-driven story, and as ever, Watts has given us a good cast of characters to follow. The action (because of course there’s action) is good, Roulette does spend a little too much time trying to duck the story she’s in, but Rissi is a nicely complicated character, who drives much of the middle.

I don’t know that this could hang together as a longer story, but it makes a great novella. Recommended, and I do hope we see some of the characters again someday.

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Alliance Unbound

by on January 21, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is a direct sequel to Alliance Rising; you could read this alone, but reading that first would be highly recommended.

That said, while Rising left off on a cliffhanger, nothing about that gets resolved here. It will take time for Galway to make her trip, and for the fallout from that to happen. Meanwhile, some of the crew is stranded, and Finity’s End, the ship that has spearheaded the Merchanter’s Alliance, has them and loose ends to wrap up.

The book starts with Finity’s End on arrival at Pell station. This introduces a few themes, one of which is a somewhat deeper idea of how Cherryh’s hyperspace drive works than we’ve gotten elsewhere. The plot proper starts once we’re actually on Pell. It is a rich station (at least by the standards of anything outside of Earth), but things quickly go from seeing the sights to finding products that just shouldn’t exist there.

This quickly blows up into the main structure of the book, and then adds a complete new layer to the problem presented in Rising. Considering how all the focus had been on a few things in that novel, and the consequences of the end of that book, seeing an all-new element thrown in was a very good ratcheting up of the stakes.

On the other hand, we are back to lots of detail examination of character thoughts while they work through some complicated things with a lot of possibilities. This has always been Cherryh’s strength, and main point, in writing, but it does mean a lot of repetition, and drags things out longer than they should go. Unlike the last half of Rising, we don’t get any real breaks from this, and while the novel is overall quite strong, it does suffer from being all internal thoughts. So, not quite as refreshing as the first one, but still very good, and continuing to explore a part of her SF universe that has been part of the background from the beginning. And in need of… at least one more book to finish off the story.

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The Hour of Peril

by on January 13, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

If you read up on the start of the Civil War, you will doubtless come across the fact that Lincoln ended up sneaking into Washington DC before his inauguration. This is after he is presented evidence that an attempt will be made on his life as he passes through Baltimore.

This shows up in many books, but always leaves the question of whether there really was such a plot hanging. In the positive column, enough evidence was presented for Lincoln to change his plans, despite great reluctance to do so. On the negative, nothing actually happened, and no one was ever charged with conspiracy to murder the president-elect.

Stashower doesn’t really spend time arguing the case. At the end, he goes into some of the troubles. Instead, he lays out what happens day by day, as Allen Pinkerton’s detective agency gets called in to investigate a “deep-laid conspiracy to capture Washington, destroy all the avenues leading to it from the North, East, and West, and thus prevent the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln in the Capitol of the country.” on behalf of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. With time running short, Pinkerton sends lots of agents to Baltimore, and engages in various short-cuts that are against his general rules, and uncovers a plot against Lincoln instead.

The first part of the book is actually a short biography of Allan Pinkerton himself, and therefore introduces much that the general ACW reader will not be aware of, such as his involvement with the Chartists, which shows him as far more in sympathy with the working class than he’s generally given credit for (the strike breaking that the Pinkertons are known for actually happened a couple years after his death, but the odium attached to him, rather than his sons).

At the end, Stashower has an extended epilogue that goes into what happened to nearly everyone involved afterwards. This uncovers a personal feud that started during the main events, but erupts decades later, and turns into a denunciation of Pinkteron’s claims on the plot, which has muddied things in histories ever after. Stashower shows the chain of events that led to this, and retroactively puts the rest of his book on firmer ground.

The central figure of the plot seems to be Cypriano Ferrandini, an ex-Corsican barber, who had stated his secessionist views loudly enough to be brought before a Congressional committee shortly before Pinkerton became interested in him. We have descriptions of the charismatic Ferrandini putting together the plan and having volunteers to pull slips out of a box, so no one could know who had been chosen to do the deed.

This sounds incredible, though it wouldn’t sound so incredible at the time. The final problem is that most of Pinkerton’s contemporary records were lost in a fire, so most of what we have are accounts written later. Stashower doesn’t ever explicitly say it, but he definitely believes that the plot was real, and the epilogue does do a good job of showing the likelihood of it.

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Dragon’s Soul

by on December 25, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Okay, from the beginning, I have questions that are never answered. It’s part of a setup that is fine in it’s own right, but you do have to wonder at the biology.

Teku is a fifth child. Which doesn’t seem like it should be odd, but it is here. In this village, every…one is paired. The particular focus family has a mother and father, and two sets of twins. This is normal. And then they also have Teku, who is not.

This is odd enough that I was wondering if the inhabitants were even human, since there’s not a lot of early description, but yes, they are.

Of course, four kids per two parents is a pretty good population growth rate… if child mortality is very low. It sounds like that’s not a major problem, but we don’t see enough to have any idea.

All of this is really just important for the first chapter, as it is part of the initial equilibrium setup. From here we quickly get into (literal) transformative fantasy, which is the backbone of the story.

The second unexplained bit is the character’s sudden transformation from male human to female dragon. There’s at least some hints of unknown forces operating for this part, which at least makes it feel less ignored, and that maybe there’s an answer that the characters (and reader) don’t get to know. This a fairly obvious allusion to wish fulfillment for being transgender, including a renaming of the main character to Blaze. She struggles with the change in status for the rest of the story… but outside of that it generally isn’t a problem. Unique? Yes. But it obviously happened, and therefore there’s no point in tying themselves, or Blaze, up in knots about it.

So, this is man vs self, but instead of struggling with a choice or essential nature, it is a struggle to accept her own self-worth. (It’s kind of in the vein of the classic Andre Norton trope of a misfit finding their place in the world elsewhere, but with less struggle, and more spontaneous transformation.) External plot meanwhile is generated by the fact that dragons are in charge of ensuring magic—which is needed for life—flows through the land properly, and everything remains growing. Blaze’s old village should have been dead, but magic was flowing until just now, causing things to come full circle as the characters go back to investigate for a conclusion that has no plot twists whatsoever. (And it’s said that once an area is dead, you can’t just bring it back by re-establishing the life stream there. So, what took care of the world before the dragons took over?)

The general writing is good, and if you stay concentrated on what’s going on through Ember’s eyes, it’s a decent enough story. It’s not trying to be great, which is good, because the various unanswered questions hold it back already. If the description sounds interesting, go ahead and get it; it is by no means bad, it just has some problems that in the end don’t interfere with the story.

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Rogue Elements

by on December 17, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The third Picard novel finishes up the initial run of prequels of the series (the fifth novel is a fourth prequel…). And it is easily the best of the lot.

Following in the trend of The Last Best Hope, I was expecting this to be full version of the background that eventually spills out during later parts of season one, where Rios was executive officer of the USS Ibn Majid, and has is career wrecked after the ship encounters a pair of androids.

Instead, we get a much looser story centered around how he got the La Sirena. Which is at least as logical a choice, and one we haven’t gotten anything on before.

It works well, and the story turns into a sprawling mess ranging from action, to the good ol’ Traveller campaign premise of making payments every month (only ever alluded to), to caper. It works because there is a bigger story than the La Sirena serving as a backbone for all this.

The main MacGuffin of the novel is the “actuality”, a particularly high-fidelity holographic recording. Particularly, some done by a particular artist that are exceptionally ingenious, and deservedly sought after. That comes a bit later of course, since we start with just getting the ship, and then complications start setting in. Overall, the plot structure is sound, and very well done.

Along the way, we get a lot of call outs to various parts of Trek lore, ranging from TOS to characters reappearing from TNG episodes, and events from The Undiscovered Country. These all naturally flow into the novel better than I would have thought if told beforehand. Miller takes a common premise (tramp freighter captain), adds a few things we know are coming (the emergency holograms), gets Rios going with a bit of action, hands him a problem (a debt that he can’t ignore—no matter how hard he tries), and then starts layering in the plot twists. Rios gets to grow past the immediate trauma of losing his Star Fleet career, and Miller keeps an air of fun the entire way.

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