Month: June 2019

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Pass of Fire (Destroyermen XIV) – Taylor Anderson

In the fourteenth installment of Destroyermen, the Grand Alliance has finally pushed the Grik up against the wall. The First Allied Expeditionary Force has a firm foothold along the Zambezi downriver from the Grik capital, whilst the army of the Republic of Real People is pushing north to join up. The final assault on Sofesshk is about to begin. Unfortunately, the Grik are well dug in, and rooting them out will take some innovative tactics. Also, just defeating the Grik on the battlefield will not be sufficient. They must be broken politically in order to prevent a retreat and resurgence.

Meanwhile, on the American front, the Second Allied Expeditionary Force is set to assault the Pass of Fire, and will find out the depths to which the Dominion will sink in their exploitation of the populace. League of Tripoli forces loom in the wings, scheming.

There is even more battlefield action than usual in Pass of Fire. And it is the good stuff. Mr. Anderson continues to show a talent for expanding the story, while still moving it forward and closing off plot threads. There is obviously plenty more to come.

The world of Destroyermen is becoming rather complex, with myriad military actions, references to previous events, and many, many ship types. Thankfully, there is a Wiki with maps, ships drawings, characters bios and more.

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Flying Upside Down – Duke Nukem

An extremely irreverent book about flying as a contract pilot in Mainland China. Everything from living conditions, to pay, to punitive schemes for minor infractions, to hair-raising transcripts of conversations with air traffic control, management, and first officers. The structure is loose, mainly made up of anecdotes and redacted emails from company officials.

The book is self-published and free to distribute. It is also full of grammatical and orthographic errors, with a structure that barely deserves the moniker. The tone is joking, sarcastic and exasperated, often to excess. The formatting goes from passable to awful. The content, though, is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. The non-pilot would probably not find it very interesting, as it is full of jargon and addresses the unique aspects challenges of the profession.

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Children of Ruin (Children of Time II) – Adrian Tchaikovsky

A generation after the conclusion of Children of Time, an exploration ship leaves Kern’s World, arriving some time later, by means of sublight travel and crew hibernation, at a star system that appears to harbour life. Unbeknownst to the mixed Portiid and Human crew, millenia previously a terraforming mission arrived from Earth’s fallen Old Empire. Catastrophe befell that mission, leaving behind a spacefaring race of intelligent, uplifted octopi, as well as an ancient alien virus.

The premise involving uplifted octopi is ambitious, even more so than the premise of uplifted spiders in the first novel. The distributed intelligence of an octopus is very alien to the reader, and Mr. Tchaikovsky makes a concerted effort to convey this. Unfortunately for the story, this makes decision making by the characters frequently confusing, contradictory, and transitory, as this is the nature of the sentience of the depicted octopi. While clever, it takes the reader somewhat out of the story. As in Children of Time, the spectre of deep time weighs heavily on the story, bringing themes of legacy, of connection between intelligences, and of the meaning of existence.