Month: August 2025

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Livesuit (Captive’s War I½)

Humanity is engaged in a war with a savage and relentless enemy over vast tracts of space and time. Kirin is a paramedic on a human settled planet. Together with his colleague and friend Piotr he enlists in the Livesuit Infantry, composed of elite troops who spend their entire tour of duty encapsulated in suits made of living tissue. The suit is responsible for feeding, waste elimination, and medical care. Kirin soon begins to suspect that the livesuits have much more sinister aspects.

This excellent novella is very much in the vein of The Forever War. Humanity is lost in a war which, due to the distances involved in both space and time, is well beyond the comprehension of the troops. Friends and lovers will never be seen again once separated, and the end goals are remote and difficult to fathom. Kirin’s slow loss of humanity, both mental and physical, is the perfect metaphor for pointless war.

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Behind the Veil (Transdimensional Hunter III) – John Ringo & Lydia Sherrer

As Lynn Raven and her friends are about to graduate from high school, the Transdimensional Hunter national championships loom. Lynn’s suspicious mind starts to see glimpses of the sinister truth behind the transdimensional monsters, while she also has to deal with bullies, hormones, and keeping the team focused.

The battle scenes and banter are solid as in the previous two books, making this an easy page turner. This installment also develops Lynn’s character, and the storyline in general, moving things forward nicely.

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Ice Trials (Time Trials II) – M.A. Rothman & D.J. Butler

After the events in Time Trials, the team is transported to a new mysterious location in the deep past. Surjan unintentionally shakes things in the civilization they find there.

Unfortunately the first part of this book left me decidedly lukewarm and disinterested, so I have up after about a quarter of the book. The characters don’t engage me as a reader, and unfortunately this particular LitRPG title falls flat.

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Spin (Spin I) – Robert Charles Wilson

One night, when best friends Tyler, Jason, and Diane are children, they escape outside from an adult party. As they watch, the stars disappear from the night sky. Earth has been enveloped in a membrane which will come to be known as The Spin. Who created it, or why, is a complete unknown. As it turns out, time outside the membrane passes thousands of times faster than inside. Within a few decades of time on Earth, the sun will have aged to the point of enveloping the Earth, dooming everyone inside. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up and lead their lives, a culture of fatalism takes root, but Jason, a genius scientist with drive and ambition in spades, has other plans for humanity.

The premise is very clever, and the scope is ambitious. Mr. Wilson takes the reader on a decades-long journey, both in the wider story of Earth and humanity itself, and the much more intimate narrative of Tyler, Jason, and Diane, that veers off in many unexpected directions. The trap of a Big Dumb Object scifi premise is not developing it beyond the obvious, but in this case the author certainly does. Where the novel falters a bit is focusing too strongly on the story of Diane’s descent into religious cults based on The Spin, and Tyler’s actions in response. While certainly the eschatological element of the physical effects is worth exploring, it becomes too long winded, and the somewhat tacked-on side story doesn’t do very much to set up Diane and Tyler’s future anyway. The story goes very dark in places, but that, in essence, is what Mr. Wilson is exploring. How would humanity react when the clock is ticking?

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The Winds of Fate (Make the Darkness Light II) – S.M. Stirling

A few years after their arrival in the Roman Imperial Era, Arthur, now Artorius, and his former students have set the Roman Empire well on the path to rapid economic and military expansion. But just as things seem to going well, they learn than in ancient China, another time traveling team arrived on the same day that they did. These were sent not to prevent future apocalyptic nuclear conflict, but to ensure China ruthlessly dominates the world.

This is a pager turner just like the first installments, especially for a history enthusiast. The subtle and not so subtle changes, engendered by the protagonists are explored in detail, with extensive discussions on the consequences. There are a number of long tangential infodumps, but these are so interesting that they don’t detract from the pacing. The internal struggles of the five “moderns” as they have to grapple with the fact that they will not have lasting peace in their lives are well explored. The battle scenes are excellent, despite being in a way extensive essays on military technology development. One critique is that Mr. Stirling oft repeats the same background facts about various characters, indicating that perhaps one more editing pass would have been in order.