March Book List

Mar 3rd: David Drake - Hammer's Slammers vol 1: I probably would have enjoyed these stories of future war and the mercenaries who fight them if any of the "heroes" had been remotely likeable...

Mar 4th: Terry Pratchett - Eric: A Discworld version of Faust and the 4th Rincewind book...

Mar 6th: Cordwainer Smith - The Instrumentality of Mankind: The last collection of the late, great, WEIRD but cool Smith's far future scifi. Good stuff if odd...

Mar 8th: Smith - The Planet Buyer: A novel set in Smith's Instrumentality future. With a young man buying the Earth with the help of his computer in order to avoid being executed by a childhood rival...

Mar 10th: Tamora Pierce - Beka Cooper: Terrier: Still my favorite of her YA books. Fantasy version of a rookie cop story. I'm still not sure how the existence of female city guard and knights in this book match with earlier books set further up her timeline...

Mar 13th: Glen Cook - The Dragon Never Sleeps: More far future scifi. Bizarre aliens, crazy AIs, massive ship battles and plotting clones. More good stuff...

Mar 15th: Sherwood Smith - The Fox: Oh the pain of getting to the end of a lengthy book and suddenly realizing, MIDDLE BOOK. Arggh! But on the good point, lots of naval battles and pirate fighting and political fighting. A sequel to sartorias's earlier Inda...

Mar 19th: Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano: A warning against over auto-industrialization. Takes a bit too long to get going and then ends fairly abruptly. Still good, but not one of Vonnegut's best...

Mar 20th: Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan: An odd kind of sort of time travel, sort of love lost story. This one just didn't work for me...

Mar 21st: Christopher Golden - Hellboy & the Lost Army: Hellboy vs. undead in the deserts of Egypt. A good Hellboy and supernatural action story. Though I kept getting drawn out of the story by the fact that the quasi-military attached to the expedition Hellboy joins is referred to as being MI-5 when it probably should have been MI-6...

Mar 24th: Harry Turtledove - How Few Remain: The start of Turtledove's epic alt history of an America where the Confederacy won the Civil War. Set during what would have been the Spanish-American War. My favorite part is probably still that a surviving Abraham Lincoln travels the country giving Socialist speeches...

Mar 28th: Turtledove - The American Front: Starts the WW1 series of books. With a 70+ year old George Custer as one of the U.S. generals. And Teddy Roosevelt as U.S. president to the C.S's Woodrow Wilson. The US/Germany/Austria-Hungary/Ottoman vs. CS/France/England/Russia/Canada...

Mar 30th: Turtledove - Walk in Hell: WW1 continues to slog along, as Turtledove follows his myriad cast on various US/CS fronts, in occupied Canada and at sea...

Mar 31st: Richard Adams - Watership Down: The greatest book about bunny rabbits ever written. I think I need to replace my copy its starting to wear out...

Total books: 14

Tuesday Tangents: Image Founders part 3

So even for a fanfic concept like this I still end up thinking, whats the setting like? We've established its got a post-attempted rebellion thing going on like Bab5 or Firefly. So I decided that 1. No FTL ships. They have SOMETHING that can go FTL but the mass it works on is negligible, allowing it to create a system wide information/communication network. And the tech is advanced enough so that if the gravity doesn't squish everything, humans can colonize any of the planets and moons with varying degrees of difficulty...

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First up is The Wildcat. When you're flying a pirate ship against a military just HOPING for an enemy you'd best be quick, quiet and clever. Captain Jack Spartan certainly thinks he and his people are. And with the Colonial Rebellion long dead, the days of easy pickings are over. But he's got a good crew Grifter Cash can slice any data free to find their targets. Sata "Zealot" Kagi was one of the Rebellion's best pilots and will do anything that lets her hurt the establishment. And ex-military cyborgs Voodoo, Maul and Warblade provide him with all the muscle he should need to intimidate their targets. But every day the shadows get brighter and it gets harder for a crook to make a dishonest buck...

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The SolNet communications network extends instant communication across the system. And within it is the EtherNet, a virtual world where data slicers and wannabes play and work. And out of the super-dense data pit that is Pitt Industries something new has emerged. Spawn is a self-aware construct. The first true A.I. Or at least that what "he" thought. But while exploring the EtherNet as Al, Spawn keeps getting cryptic hints of earlier A.Is. And of stranger things hidden in the depths of the 'Net...