Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerEffectively, the full title of this is “Against Stupidity, the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain”, a quote that is spread out across the three sections of the novel. I was a bit worried at first, as the book starts with[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve been meaning to read Dune for decades now, but the thick paperback on my dad’s shelf always intimidated me a little. I’ve had some knowledge of the book, being aware of the Avalon Hill game and having started Westwood’s[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The final volume of the Man of War series starts, as usual, in medias res with the USS Cumberland stuck in an impossible situation. Unlike the previous volume, this one flows naturally from the situation at the end, but there’s[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I can remember coming across this anthology in the library when it first came out. I had completely forgotten that I had actually checked it out and read it until a few scenes in the stories started resonating with me,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice was something of a slow burn for me. It was obviously solidly written from the start, but the plot is slow-moving, and unfocused. Early chapters alternate between two very different stories (with—more-or-less—the same viewpoint character) fifteen[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Part two of the Dreamhealer’s duology naturally picks up right where Mindtouch left off. Jahir starts his residency on Selnor, and finds that it has even higher gravity than the (for him) heavy gravity that he’d had to get adjusted[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Enchantress From the Stars has a bit of an ambitious high concept, and pulls it off very well. The main ‘problem’ with the book is a galaxy full of inhabited planets where all the naturally-occurring intelligent life is human, or[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…