Mindtouch

by on September 5, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I can remember reading a fair number of books dealing psychic powers, adventure, and relationships in the ’80s. This is kind of a return to those, but much improved.

Psionics is never a favored subject of mine, though it’s not exactly a turn-off either. Here, we get some interesting exploration of the problems faced by a couple of contact-empaths (one in particular, really), though even with that focus, the entire subject is a bit… fuzzy. (Though the perception of emotions gets an interesting bit in the second half.)

However, the real driving force of the book is the blossoming friendship between the main two. There’s a decent supporting cast, but the novel maintains its focus so well, that many of them just serve to color their lives around the main events. Concurrent with that is the partial exploration of xenopsychiatric therapy that they are uniquely suited for. (It took me three chapters longer than it should have to realize just where the series name ‘Dreamhealers’ was headed.)

It’s not a heavy book, and it is very definitely part one of two; I’ve dived right into the second book as the first ends an appropriate break, but isn’t really the full story. It does a great job of presenting a pair of people who are not outgoing in nature, and perfect for each other. Recommended as a very good coming-of-age, alien/college environment, and lifelong-friendship story.

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For Honor We Stand

by on August 28, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The second book of Honsinger’s military-SF series delivers pretty much everything you’d expect after the first book. Unfortunately, the beginning parts of the novel have some problems. I think he felt too much of a need to re-introduce things with an in media res opening designed to show off Robicheaux’s tactical cunning and generating suspense through use of off-screen actions.

That wouldn’t be too bad as a first-chapter prologue (though I still think there’s better ways to do it), but we’re treated to exactly the same kind of spectacle right afterwards, just a bit more elaborate this time. However, after that the central plot of the story starts taking over and the remaining 70%+ of the book goes a lot smoother.

There’s a good number of familiar tropes again, but as usual they’re well-handled, and they’re not allowed to sidetrack the book. (For instance, we get the ‘snubs from an incompetent superior officer’ this time, but it doesn’t occupy half the book the way it has in some cases.) There’s also a brief lampshade of this series’ relationship to the Aubrey-Maturin series at one point. We also get to see Admiral Hornmeyer a couple times again, and I have to admit the writing for him always makes me laugh.

Overall, its pretty much exactly what you’d expect after the first book: straightforward military SF. It shouldn’t be essential to read the first book before this, but I would highly recommend it.

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Dragon’s Egg

by on August 20, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Dragon’s Egg is a story assembled out of a few disparate parts. There’s the formation of a neutron star from a supernova, the discovery of said star by astronomers in 2020, an expedition to said star… and then there’s what’s happening on the surface of the neutron star, which proceeds through several different arcs.

That last, of course, is where the main imaginative elements of the novel come from. Incredibly, this is an exercise in hard SF, with the main speculative part dealing with the idea of the surface of the star hasn’t quite collapsed all the way to neutronium, allowing for complex interactions (and the evolution of life) utilizing the strong nuclear force. The resulting (very) alien ecology is never explored in any detail, but there’s plenty of details given in the chula’s (the intelligent life that evolves) biology(?) to drive home just how different everything is.

Since strong nuclear reactions are much faster than familiar chemical ones, it is posited that everything happens on the Egg at an accelerated pace, and this is continually driven home by each section being given a timestamp down to the second, with not a lot of time passing for entire generations of chula. The rise of an advanced civilization takes a few hours. This leads to a cast of characters that, in one part, is constantly shifting (“These fifteen-minute lifetime relationships are hard on the emotions.”), but are generally well-drawn.

This is ‘idea’ SF at it’s best. A suitably strange-seeming idea is proposed (what would life on a neutron star look like?), and then a story explores the ramifications of the idea. In this case, both the science and the plot are very good, and the novel is an overall fascinating read.

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Medieval Siege Weapons: Byzantium to India

by on August 12, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The second volume of Osprey’s New Vanguard books on medieval siege weapons is pretty much just like the first: Thompson’s gouache illustrations do a good job of showing some specific examples, while the text goes through variations on terminology and tries to make sense of them.

India probably should have just been left out of the book, as most references are ‘there’s no evidence’. The Byzantines talked about siege machinery often enough, and Islamic writers somewhat less so, but there’s very few known references to siege machines in India. In fact, all but one of the illustrated machines are from Byzantium or the Islamic world, and the one exception is surprisingly enough from Russia. That one is a little unsatisfying, as there doesn’t seem to be any indication that an idea of the size or form of the ‘fire wheel’ (other than the name) is given in the source; that said, the reconstruction given is more logical than anything I’d come up with.

India isn’t entirely absent, and there’s even a mention or two of siege machines in SE Asia, so the effort is there. In combination with the volumes on China, and Greece and Rome, Osprey has probably covered all the pre-gunpowder siege engines of the world. At least as far as scholarship has uncovered mentions of them.

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The War of the Austrian Succession

by on August 6, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

My biggest regret about Reed Browning’s book on the War of the Austrian Succession is that he never wrote any other military history. His normal subject seems to be the British government of the early 18th Century, which is probably a bit too detailed for my general tastes (and also, somewhat surprisingly, ’20s baseball).

But this volume is an excellent one-volume history of the war as a whole, concentrating on the military and diplomatic activities of the principle actors in Europe. The New World and India do get coverage, but it is at least as peripheral as the events would have seemed in Europe. For an overview that is more than fair, but the narrative for both theaters felt not fully formed. (Similarly, the ’45 Jacobite rebellion gets about a page, which is fair.)

The main event is more than complicated enough to need all the attention and focus that can be brought to bear. He starts with a good overview of the political conflicts that led to the outbreak of war, and presents the main theaters of the war. However, while the maps follow this outline well, they’re very primitive, and do not have any of the details needed for later in the book.

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