THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE – John Scalzi

Posted by Daniel on June 28, 2017
Posted in: SF/FANTASY. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

We’re many years in the future, but the laws of physics still hold true and it is not possible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light.  Still, mankind has managed to cobble together an empire spread throughout the galaxy.  Some are on planets, some inside planets, some in space stations.  Earth is no longer in the picture.  At the heart of the empire is “Hub” and furthest away from Hub is “End.”  Aside from an Emperox, what keeps the empire together is a natural(?) phenomenon known as “the flow.”  The Flow is a slipstream of sorts, carrying ships from one location to another in faster than normal (though not FTL fast) speeds.  The Flow has natural entry and exit ports and the locations for the empire were based on where these ports were.

But something is happening … the Flow is changing – something that only happens every few thousand years – and the collapse has been predicted by a ‘flow physicist’ on End.  That physicist needs to get the information to the Emperox quickly because the entry to the Flow from End will be one of the next things to change.  Unfortunately, there’s a coup going on at End, with another family looking to replace the Emperox.  What they don’t know on End, because it still takes a long time to travel through the Flow, is that the Emperox has died and because his son, the heir, had died before him, the new Emperox is the daughter, Cardenia Wu-Patrick, who has not been prepared for the role.

Cardenia takes command of the empire just as the Flow is collapsing and a rival family is looking to take over and her best friend and confidante is killed in an attack on her.

Author John Scalzi knows how to tell a tale and this first book in a new series really zips along with lots of action, enough intrigue to tantalize, and characters that are pulled from a catalog of stock characters but made interesting with Scalzi’s style.

Scalzi has a legion of fans and more than a few detractors.  He falls into that category where he is either a writer you really like, or one whose work you won’t touch.  Me…I like his style.  It’s direct and fun.  He offers plenty of humor, more than a little cursing, and characters to love and characters to hate and you never wonder which is which.

Scalzi also does a really tremendous job of bringing something new into the sci-fi world with each of his books and this is no different.  In fact it may be his world-building at which he most excels.

I listened to the Audible version of this book, as read by Wil Wheaton, and enjoyed Wheaton’s narrative.  Wheaton knows how to read the book with some energy and excitement, offering the listener the full thrill of the story.

But there is a down-side…  this first book has no ending.  Just as every other author seems to be doing, Scalzi has written an adventure that leaves the reader with more questions than answers and finishes right at the moment of rising action.  I definitely prefer a book that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Still – it’s a Scalzi adventure, and that’s worth more than the price of admission.

Looking for a good book?  The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi is the first book in a new series by one of the most entertaining of voices in the sci-fi community.  It’s worth reading.

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The Collapsing Empire

author: John Scalzi

narrator: Wil Wheaton

series: The Interdependency #1

publisher: Audible Studios

ASIN: B01L2PERQY

Audible, 9 hours 16 minutes

ONCE BROKEN FAITH – Seanan McGuire

Posted by Daniel on June 27, 2017
Posted in: SF/FANTASY, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I’ve become quite a fan of Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, and while the October Daye series has been on my radar to begin reading, I’ll have to admit that this is my first October Daye book (and it’s the tenth in the series).

While this book is mostly pretty straight-forward and a self-contained story, it was very evident that there is an awful lot of history here and that those of us just jumping in have missed out on a lot.

October Daye has traveled to the Kingdom of Silences to try to keep the peace between them and he home, the Kingdom of Mists. But now she’s back and she has a new cure for “elf-shot” (a sort of magic coma that can put a magical being to sleep for centuries without causing any other harm) and she’s has become the primary figure in a battle of political tug-of-war. October is the heir apparent for the troubled Kingdom, but she wants nothing to do with politics and leadership.

When one of October’s closest associates and friends is in mortal danger, she’ll be forced to make one of the toughest decisions of her life.

Seanan McGuire is quickly rising to become one of my favorite fantasy authors.  Bother as McGuire and as Mira Grant, she publishes a steady stream of fiction that is tremendously readable, highly original, and character-driven but intricate plotted.  This book is no exception to that list, but because it’s a long-running series to which I am a virgin reader, I spent much of the first half of the book simply trying to become familiar with this world and to understand the rules of how magic works here. In this sense I grew a bit bored.

But once I understood the landscape, I began to see the signature writing of a Seanan McGuire novel and became more deeply interested in the story and the characters.  Enough so that I now desire to go back to the beginning of the series and work my way through (local library, here I come!) and with the book ending the way it did, I, like most fans of the book, will be eager to see what Daye makes of herself.

The book includes a novella that was every bit as interesting as the book – perhaps even more-so for me as I had just become invested in the world.

Looking for a good book? If you read urban fantasy, you will want to have a regular diet of Seanan McGuire, and Once Broken Faith, the tenth book in the October Daye series, is  book (and a series) that you will enjoy.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

* * * * * *

Once Broken Faith

author: Seanan McGuire

series: October Daye #10

publisher: DAW

ISBN: 0756408105

paperback, 420 pages

BREAKTHROUGH!: CANADA’S GREATEST INVENTIONS AND INNOVATORS – John Melady

Posted by Daniel on June 26, 2017
Posted in: NON-FICTION, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

It’s sad how little I know about our neighbors to the north – Canadians and their country.  And I live in a border state.  But this book, Breakthrough!, by John Melady, lets us all in on a little secret … Canadians have done an awful lot to make the world a better place.

In a very readable manner, author John Melady writes a series of brief biographies of a number of Canadians who have contributed in a wide variety of manners, from the progress of technology to the creation of popular recreation activities.  Each one fascinating in its own way.

The book begins with Frederick Banting, the doctor who ‘invented’ insulin in the early 1920’s – still the most common drug for treating diabetes (I believe), and ends (appropriately) with Lester Pearson, Canada’s Prime Minister through much of the 1960’s, who spearheaded the campaign for Canada’s now iconic red maple-leaf flag.

Only two names here were familiar to me before reading this book, and both were surprises as to their connection with Canada: Alexander Graham Bell, and James Naismith.

Some inventions/innovations are small (such as the paint roller), but even those simple tools were ‘game-changers’ and so common-place today that we forget that there was a time when someone first came up with the idea.

Some creations seemed pre-destined to have been invented in Canada or by Canadians, such as the snow-mobile and the hockey goalie’s facemask, while others simply show that we don’t often think about who or where an idea was first nurtured (such as a high performance aircraft pilot’s flight suit).

Given the number of unique innovations first begun in Canada, why haven’t we heard more about this?  I think Melady hits on this a couple of times in his biographies, but most succinctly in his telling about Sanford Fleming (who gave the world the concept of standard time).  Melady writes:

And sadly, this being Canada, we never really granted him the praise he was due. Other countries put their heroes on pedestals; we forget ours.

Clearly Canada has had some great innovators, but what it hasn’t had … before Melady … is a great publicist – a flag bearer, a banner-waver, someone to remind the country (and the world) of what Canada has provided.  Hopefully that changes with this book.

This book contains the following:

Frederick Banting: Lifesaver for Millions
Alexander Graham Bell: Pioneer Communicator
Mike Lazaridis: Genius Ahead of His Time
Henry Wooward and Mathe Evans: Two Friends Lighting the World
James Naismith: A Round Ball and a World Game
Wilfred Bigelow: Heart Surgeon and Lifesaver
Peter Rbertson: Small Hand Tools, Big Impact
Joseph-Armand Bombardier: The Man Who Conquered Winter
Norman Breakey: Wall-Painter’s Dream
Jacques Plante: Facing the World’s Fastest Game
Wilbur Franks: Safe Suiting for Flying
Sanford Fleming: Time for All the World
Spar Aerospace: An Arm from Earth to Space
Arthur Sicard: Making Winter Roads Possible
Harry Stevinson: Finding Plane Crashes and Saving Lives
William Stephenson: Pictures without Distance
Wallace Turnbull: All for the Way of Flight
Tom Patterson: Saving a Town with Culture
Tim Horton and Ron Joyce: Double-Double Empire Men
Lester Pearson: A Flag Unique in the World
Notes
Bibliography

Looking for a good book?  Breakthrough!: Canada’s Greatest Inventions and Innovations by John Melady is a wonderful resource and biography of many great men (sorry…no women) who hailed from Canada and the ideas that helped the world.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Breakthrough!: Canada’s Greatest Inventions and Innovations

author: John Melady

publisher: Dundurn

ISBN: 1459708520

paperback, 224 pages

STEAL THE SKY – Megan E. O’Keefe

Posted by Daniel on June 23, 2017
Posted in: SF/FANTASY, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I was really looking forward to this book – epic fantasy, rogue-ish pirates, a publisher who puts out very good work, and a new author (I enjoy finding new authors to follow). But sadly this book did not hold my interest or attention.

Detan Honding is of royal birth, but he’s a bit of a con-man/pirate who effuses charm and often talks his way out of a jam. Right now he has his sights set on ‘acquiring’ a prized new airship that belongs to a former commodore of Thratia.  It’s no small task, but if anyone could do it, it would be Detan and his crew.

The airship floats by means of an element called selenium and some people are ‘sel-sensitive’ and able to manipulate the selenium.  Of course the mining of selenium is a top priority here.

But Thratia is suddenly facing a new threat.  A ‘doppel’ – someone who can change his appearance as a result of a sel-deviation. With security now high and on alert because of the doppel, perhaps this isn’t the best time for Detan to be stealing an airship from a ruthless commodore. But… what’s the use of having rogue-ish charm if you aren’t going to use it?

Author Megan E. O’Keefe does some really tremendous world-building here and for her main character she draws on some classic, love-able rogues, like Han Solo or Captain Mal.  How can you go wrong?

But the plot meanders lazily and we spend too much time in learning about the world that we don’t really do anything other than get background after background after background.  Detan may be modeled after some classic sci-fi love-able characters, but he’s paper-thin and dull to boot.

There was a lot here that seemed like it should be a break-out hit, but perhaps there was too much?  I just never got brought in to the story nor fell in love with any of the characters and I was mostly just mightily bored, looking forward to the end.

I’d requested the second book before reading this and am about to start in on it.  I hope that, knowing the background now, I might be able to get more into the characters and story.  Here’s fingers crossed….

Looking for a good book?  Steal the Sky by Megan E. O’Keefe feels like it has everything it needs to be powerful sci-fi/fantasy, but perhaps less is more in this case – we lose interest early as we spend much of the book learning about world instead of going on an adventure.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

* * * * * *

Steal the Sky

author: Megan E. O’Keefe

series: The Scorched Continent #1

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 0857664905

paperback, 448 pages

BIRD MIGRATION AND GLOBAL CHANGE – George W. Cox

Posted by Daniel on June 22, 2017
Posted in: NON-FICTION, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Climate change and the destruction of natural habitat is affecting bird migration and breeding patterns.

Well … that’s about it.

Seriously though, this book provides a great deal of research to back up what most of the intelligent population already believes.  There isn’t anything too surprising here.  If you are already a bird watcher or take an interest in environmental concerns, you probably already have a pretty solid idea of what is happening on our world.  Author George W. Cox puts some numbers to the data and offers up some possible explanations for the changes he describes, as well as a few (though not too many) conclusions.

Cox is thorough and I greatly appreciated that he looked at this globally (as the title suggests) rather than just for a single country or even continent.

But Cox is not particularly engaging. The book reads like a dry doctoral dissertation.  Even a high school text-book has more charisma.

Climatic change, due to greenhouse warming and human modification of tropical forests and other natural communities, also poses a serious threat to other altitudinal migrants. Warming of tropical lowlands, together with forest clearing, may alter physical and biotic conditions of low elevation areas used by altitudinal migrants in the non-breeding season.

And he so carefully explains things sometimes that you might wonder why he even brought it up.

In North America, the ranges of some species have shifted, the population of some species have increased and others decreased, and migration schedules and breeding seasons of a few species have changed.

…

Another quite different morphological feature, egg size, may also be related to climate change. The size of eggs of the European Pied Flycatchers nesting in northern Finland increased over the period from 1975 to 1993. This increase was positively correlated with increasing temperatures during the egg-laying period and also with increasing hatching success. Whether this represents a genetic change or a phenotypic response somehow related to warmer weather is uncertain.

There is a lot of good, interesting, and solid information here.  Cox provides a summary of each chapter along with a listing of key references which shows just how detailed the research was.  The summaries are probably sufficient for most readers unless you like getting in to the detail.

I am not an avid birder … a passive birder might be a more apt way to describe my interest … and as such I don’t read all the birding magazines though I do skim a few as well as a few environmental magazines, so some information is new to me, which I appreciated. (“Shorebirds are sensitive indicators of global climate change, and the populations of many short-distance and long-distance migratory species are in decline.”)

It’s certainly not a secret that we are facing some serious environmental concerns on our planet and changes in bird population and behavior might just be the first serious indication of the problems to come and Cox wraps up this concern in what, in the course of this book, is a pretty strong show of emotion:

 

Protecting migratory birds in an era of changing global climate will require greater understanding of the changes that are likely to occur in breeding and wintering areas, as well as in the networks of stopover areas used in migration.

I like the information offered here, but I don’t think this book will appeal to many other than the most avid birders or educational environmentalists.

Looking for a good book? Bird Migration and Global Change by George W. Cox has some solid research but only the most avid environmentalists and birders will be willing to slog through the work to prove their concerns correct.

*All quotes are from an Advanced Readers Copy and may not reflect the published book.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Bird Migration and Global Change

author: George W. Cox

publisher: Island Press

ISBN: 1597266884

paperback, 304 pages

5-MINUTE PLAYS FOR TEENS – Lawrence Harbison, editor

Posted by Daniel on June 21, 2017
Posted in: ENTERTAINMENT, YA. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

There is a special knack to reading plays and unless you are used to it, it can be frustrating.  But for those of us who enjoy reading plays, it can be difficult to find reading material that isn’t one of the classics that we’ve all already read a dozen times, or not the latest Pulitzer Prize winner. And if you are a student or a younger reader, finding plays that are targeted to you is next to impossible without buying individual scripts directly from play publishers.

5-Minute Plays for Teens is just the ticket!

The plays in this anthology have a wide range of topics and all of them relate-able to the teen reading audience.  Most are two or three person plays so it would be easy to even sit and read these out loud with a friend or two.

As is typical with almost any anthology, not every script appealed to me, but there were plenty of them that did. One of my favorites was “Over the Moon” by Lavinia Roberts in which a perfectionist male teen is trying to tutor an artsy female student who is planning to turn in her science paper as an interpretive dance.  The short play pushes stereotypes to the edge, adds plenty of humor and a resolve of understanding that is often missing in a short play like this.  I would love to see this done or direct it myself sometime.

“Rainbow Bunnies in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Bennet Preuss was strangely stupid but fun.  This is precisely the sort of short play that could easily get students who might normally enjoy theatre into reading, watching, or even being in a play.

Plays such as “The Sibling” by Jeanmarie Collins are nice, even important for letting young readers know that others might have similar issues, and Collins writes a tight, poignant script.  It’s not something I would consider producing nor have interest in seeing performed, but there is a lot of value in having a script like this in such a collection.

Finally, I really enjoyed “We. Are. Un. Cool.” by Nicole Pandolfo in which, unless you attend an arts school, probably really defines many of us who would be reading a collection of five-minute plays.  Although the characters are teen females, I could still identify with students hiding out during a physical education class and complaining about peers.  This should be a hit with most readers.

A book like this can easily be enjoyed by theatre students, but it would also make a great book to have in English and theatre classrooms.  The plays are short enough to read in a matter of minutes, easy enough to perform in a classroom, and topical and appealing to the target audience. This is highly recommended.

Looking for a good book? 5-Minute Plays for Teens, edited by Lawrence Harbison, is a great collection of very short plays that could easily get more students interested in theatre.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

* * * * * *

5-Minute Plays for Teens

editor: Lawrence Harbison

publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Book Publishers

ISBN: 1495069257

paperback, 256 pages

EAT THE NIGHT – Tim Waggoner

Posted by Daniel on June 20, 2017
Posted in: Dark Fantasy/Horror, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I really enjoyed Tim Waggoner’s two books in his “Shadow Watch” series and so was eager to catch this dark fantasy/horror novel, Eat the Night, published by Darkfuse – one of the leading publishers of dark tales.

Joan Lantz has been having troubling dreams of a mass suicide in the jungles of Suriname – led by a rocker named Mark Maegarr –  which occurred years before.  Then she discovers a previously-unknown room in her basement.  Are the two connected?  Joan gets help from The Agency – an under-funded, short-on-man-power organization that might just be the only thing between humanity and the end of everything we know.

Throughout it all, the death-metal lyrics of Maegarr permeate the novella as a sort of creepy, haunting score to Joan’s life and entropy facing the world at large.

Entropy.

That’s a concept that on the surface seems like such a great one for a dark fantasy novel, but once you start to talk about it takes you out of the mood and that’s what happened here for me. Despite such a short book and the inclusion of music/lyrics – something that I typically relish in my literature – I was drawn in to the story very early on, but quickly stopped caring as The Agency got involved.

I’m only familiar with Waggoner’s two Shadow Watch books which were paced well, highly original in concept, and while not as dark as Eat the Night, still wonderfully creepy, and so I had high hopes for this work as well.  Unfortunately I just never really got into this.

For me, I’ve discovered, I like character-driven stories.  This book is concept-driven and the characters, Lantz, Maegarr, and the Agency are there to move the idea of entropy and the Agency’s battle forward.  It’s a small difference, but just enough to keep from fully enjoying this book.

Looking for a good book? Tim Waggoner’s Eat the Night is a short, quick, dark fantasy read that just barely satisfies.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Eat the Night

author: Tim Waggoner

publisher: Darkfuse

ISBN: 1940544971

paperback, 194 pages