davidgillon | Entries tagged with author: k b spangler

Burn Rate, K B Spangler

K B Spangler's Rachel Peng technothrillers became pretty much my favourite series a few years back, a charismatic lead, likeable secondary characters and plots that actually dug into the ethics of serious issues (including the issues of being a cyborg cop with a gun while hiding the fact that you're technically blind). And then she wrote herself into a corner. The Rachel Peng books tie into her A Girl And Her Fed webcomic, and a throwaway line in that decreed that two of those secondary characters had to die. And apparently she really struggled to write the deaths. But six years and multiple drafts later, Penguin is back.

I'm not entirely convinced by the way Spangler got around the deaths, Rachel is dealing with traumatic amnesia, secondary to a serious concussion and smoke inhalation plus hyperthermia, and the guilt and grief of being rescued from a fire when Jason and Phil, people she was closer to than brothers, weren't. So she has to re-investigate, in the hope that that and her notes (which no one else can read for legitimate reasons - personal braille shorthand) will jog her memory as to what really happened. The forced structure means the first few chapters feel rather clunky, but it settles down fairly quickly.

On top of all that, Rachel's home situation has gotten really complicated. Her girlfriend has moved in, but so has Rachel's partner Santino and his wife (because their house next-door is being remodelled), and they've just had twins, one of whom just won't stop crying. In addition to which Jason and Phil's widow, Bell, was installed in the spare bedroom while Rachel was unconscious, because she's potentially a target, and Bell's being guarded by Rachel's pet psychopath Wyatt, because the last order she gave him was to guard Bell. (Which was three days ago and by now Bell's thoroughly creeped out).

The plot is clever, and sneaky, on the surface they're hunting an arsonist, but there are multiple layers beyond that. And Spangler does eventually write the death scene, and it's heartrending enough I think it would have caused legitimate pacing problems in a conventional narrative. One aspect I particularly liked was Rachel's anger at people forgetting she's blind looping around to confront her with her own forgetting that Bell's grief is greater than her own.

Not the strongest entry in the series, and definitely not the place to start (that's The Digital Divide), but ultimately worth reading, and for a book six years in the stalling, it's surprisingly topical

The Hound And Hob Pub, Seana Kelly

Werewolf/witch*/necromancer Sam and her new husband Clive, the vampire master of San Francisco (just think Clive Owen in a particularly sharp suit) have honeymooned in Paris, but now they're in England, and hunting the vampire who has been targeting Clive since the series started, a rivalry which goes back centuries, to when both were human. And then the elves get involved, and then the dragons.

It's a reasonable entry in the series, but does suffer a little from American Author In England syndrome, though Kelly does make a belated effort to try to write off Sam's belief that there are wolves on the North Yorks Moors as Sam's, not hers - which doesn't entirely ring true given Sam is 1) a booknerd, 2) a bookshop owner, and 3) a werewolf.

All I Want For Christmas is a Dragon, Seana Kelly

While Sam is off doing honeymoon-y things with Clive, someone has to keep her bar/bookshop open, and that someone is barkeep/witch* Owen Wong, who is run off his feet, but mostly he's worried that he wants to move in with his boyfriend, and dragon-shifter, George, but he doesn't know if George wants to move in with him, on top of which it's Christmas and Owen loves Christmas (even if he's technically Buddhist) and George hates it, for unrevealed reasons, plus there's George's scary grandmother to convince his intentions are honourable. It's a novella and close tie-in with the events of the first half of The Hound and Hob Pub, and ultimately fairly slight, but entertaining for an hour or so.

Samples Sampled

Bewicched: The Seawicche Chronicles, Seana Kelly

This is a spin-off from the Sam/Clive series, with new protagonist Arwyn, who got an offstage-intro in The Hound and Hob Pub (she made the Maguffin). She's an artist and a witch with an affinity for the sea, but also a psychic, to the point that just touching someone floods her with insights - so gloves with everything. She just wants to spend her time on converting an old cannery into a gallery, but her mother wants her as part of a witch-y triumvirate with her grandmother and there's a very annoying werewolf measuring up for the new deck.

Seems entertaining enough, so I'll probably follow through and read it at some point - ideally if it's on sale.

The War at Sea 1939--45: Volume 1 The Defensive, Captain S W Roskill, RN

Oh, oh, the Official War History of the Royal Navy, and Volume 1 is 800 pages in its own right. It's probably about time I read it, given my interests, but oof, that's big!

* I absolutely refuse to use the series spelling of wicche if I can avoid it!

Current Mood: Bookish

I've been meaning to recommend NK Jemisin's novella Emergency Skin, which has been sitting on my Kindle for a year or so but which I finally read over the holidays. Subtle it isn't. A soldier from a society founded by all the billionaires abandoning Earth before it's inevitable collapse into an over-populated, mixed-race, climate hellhole full of useless eaters* finds it isn't at all what he was led to expect.

Imagine Elon Musk and Peter Thiel having a baby society together....

This really changed the way I've been looking at Musk's whole Mars thing.

* Perceptions may vary for those among us who aren't white male billionaires.

And just today SL Huang's newsletter pointed me at her new novelette Murder By Pixel in Clarkesworld, which predates the news frenzy about ChatGPT (by a whole day she says!), but reads like it she has spent ages considering its implications. She says she's actually spent ages considering the whole field's implications, coming out at the same time as ChatGPT was just serendipity. It's presented as a journalist investigating a story of social media harassment, but keeps diving deeper.

Other Recent Reading:

Hammered, Lindsay Buroker

Competent urban fantasy. Elves and dwarves etc are sort of known about, but have mostly abandoned Earth (being policed by the military and their hired assassins might have something to do with it). Seattle house-flipper Matti Puletasi is a half-dwarf who tries to stay out of the military's eye, but the military killed her mother and jailed her father when she was a child, so when her latest project turns into a battleground between the local werewolves and an extremely arrogant elven assassin and draws in the military things get complicated.

Rachel Peng series (Digital Divide, Maker Space, State Machine, Brute Force), K B Spangler.

Re-read, technothriller spin-off from Spangler's A Girl and her Fed webcomics. Rachel's an OACET agent, meaning she has a quantum chip in her head that allows her to access any computer system, and the legal right to take over any law-enforcement investigation she wants. Meanwhile her job as liaison to the Washington DC Metro PD is to forge bonds with normal law enforcement. These two things do not sit naturally together. (Neither would the fact she's blind, if anyone realises she's dependent on the chip to see).

Possibly my favourite series, and the re-read isn't changing that. And timely, as Spangler has just announced the three other planned books in the series will be appearing this year.

Greek Key, K B Spangler

Re-read. A spin-off from State Machine, with Spangler's Girl as its protagonist. This is where she partitions the AGAHF weirdness from the Rachel Peng books. Hope Blackwell's rich, brilliant, lethal, and Ben Franklin's her best buddy, because she sees ghosts. She's also married to the head of OACET (aka the Fed, aka Sparky) and Sparky sends her to Greece, where he's legally forbidden from operating, to track down the foreign leads from State Machine. Also featuring Helen of Sparta (yes, that Helen, and no, not Troy), Mike, the world's worst pacifist, and Speedy, the koala.

Sidequested : K B Spangler, Ale Presser

New fantasy web-comic from Spangler and her AGAHF artist Ale Presser (apparently the original concept was Presser's). The main plot direction's not apparent yet, but Robin, daughter of the 'evil witchqueen' has just been 'rescued' from her tower by not the handsome prince, but the handsome prince's (female) cousin Charlie (our protagonist), with running commentary by comedy-vulture Peony. Charlie's engaging but a little bit of a cypher, while Robin is definitely perky-goth - Peach and Charcoal Grey, who knew that would work as a colour combination?!?

(Or is that coral and charcoal grey? I'm hopeless at colour nuances).

Halting State, Rule 34, Charles Stross

Re-read. Linked darkly humourous technothrillers set in a post-Independence Scotland. Halting State has the police and forensic auditors investigating a bank raid in a MMORPG that turns out to have rapidly escalating consequences in the non-virtual world (and that title is brilliantly appropriate). Rule 34 - that if you can think of it, the internet has porn about it, has its protagonists caught up in a rapidly widening set of murders by domestic appliance. (And pairs thematically with SL Huang's Murder by Pixel). I really wish Stross had written the originally planned third book.

Born Magic, the Diary of Scarlett Bernard, Melissa F Olson

This one's a bit weird. Scarlett's a cleaner for the Los Angeles supernatural underworld, meaning she knows not just how to get blood out of the carpet, but what to do with the bodies afterwards, and has played that role through a series of urban fantasies, but in this one she's on maternity leave. And what we get is "Dear protege, I know you're away at college, so I'm writing this diary just in case I die and you have to pick up looking after my baby, the promised one". It's a weird structure, but it sort of works, though with a few too many chapter breaks for "sorry the baby needed changing" and "sorry, the baby scared herself and levelled the house". Ultimately, it's flawed by being 'bringing up the promised one' with a side order of plot, rather than vice-versa.

Fastening the Grave, L A McBride

This is one of those books that you find really annoying, but end-up quite liking in spite of itself. Kali James sees ghosts, who inevitably want something from her, starting with her murdered twin sister who wanted her to find the man who killed her. So she's fled from Chicago and its memories to Kansas City, where to avoid the ghosts she's opened up a costume shop, in an entire suburb given over to haunted house attractions *facepalm*. A girl's night out in one of them climaxes with them walking in on a real dead body, and its ghost.

So that's okay as a setup, the problems for me were that the ghost is a really annoying dick, while Kali is irritatingly oblivious to the wider supernatural world around her and alternates hourly between "Nope, absolutely not doing the ghost thing again" and rapidly escalating law-breaking to dig deeper into the investigation.

Current Mood: Literate
Current Location: ex libris

Definition of a First World problem:
Me: I'd like a mocha, please.
Barista: I'm sorry, we're out of chocolate syrup

Aaiieee!

Worst time to discover you have a cold and get out of breath if you try to do anything faster than a slow waddle:- half a mile from the car, at the bottom of a hill, it's cold and drizzling miserably, and you suspect you may have left the car's lights on.

I don't have the strength to wheel more than half way up the hill at the best of times, and not having done any significant wheeling in a month I wasn't even going to try pushing up, so I got behind the chair and waddled, slowly. Fortunately the lights were off.

I genuinely didn't realise I had a cold until that point. I'd gone into town to post a parcel (my sister's Christmas present to her husband, which I'd ordered for her from Amazon as I have Prime and she'd left it until the last minute - the 23rd, but which I'd managed to get sent to Kent instead of Durham. I wasn't popular) and stopped off to have lunch. 10 minutes after putting in my order, I noticed a car pull up outside and turn its lights off, at which point my brain started panicking as to whether mine were still on. It wasn't the most restful meal I've ever had, though the fish and chips were tasty.

And the worst time for the blocked breathing to turn into sneezing was in the car, half way around a busy corner. I sneezed so hard I almost had my head between my knees and the only thing I could do was brake and hope I could keep it under control when I sneezed again. Fortunately I was one corner from home, but anywhere else I'd have had to pull over. I sneezed so hard turning into my road I swear I got an echo from the other end, and I then had a string of about 20 sneezes that were so hard I couldn't actually get out of the car. I could feel everything between nostrils and eardrums complaining for hours!

So today I'm living on Lemsip Max. If I can work up the energy I may make myself a hot toddy, and there's chicken soup in the fridge. (ETA hot toddy and soup successfully achieved).

Recent Reading:

First Flight, Chris Claremont

Re-read of Claremont's late-80s hard SF novel. 2nd Lt Nichole Shea is taking the final test before officially qualifying as an astronaut, having already qualified as an Air Force test pilot (her rank's a bit junior for her actual experience), when everything goes wrong and she and her co-pilot end up ramming their shuttle into the space station they were supposed to dock with. Fortunately it's a simulation. The deputy head of the astronaut programme wants to kick her out of the programme, but is overruled by NASA's head of manned spaceflight, General Judith Canfield, and throughout the book there are veiled references to Canfield's relationship to Nichole, which no one will ever explain to her.

Now qualified, Nichole, her co-pilot Paulo and newbie mission specialist Hanako 'Hana' Murai are paired with Cat Garcia, an experienced Mission Commander, the deadly US Marshal Ben Ciari, and a couple of experienced engineer/scientists, one Russian, one Israeli, for a year long mission out to Pluto. Mankind has stardrive, and extra-solar colonies, but starships are huge, expensive, and rare, so most spaceflight is pootling about the system on reaction drives.

Things settle into a pattern, with Hana pairing up with Paulo, and Nichole with Ciari, much to the annoyance of Cat Garcia, who perceives it as more favouritism, especially when Ciari starts training Nichole in martial arts, with the explicitly avowed intent of turning her into a killer, because, he says, she has the aptitude for it, and may need it. And then, passing through the Belt, they happen on a wrecked miner ship, with a dead belter aboard, a friend of Cat's. Things don't add up, so they head for his home rock, and walk into an ambush. Half the crew die, and the survivors are left with a wrecked ship, AUs from home, and where a mayday may bring the pirates back down on them. Then Hana spots the alien ship....

It's not perfect, it could do with being about 50 pages longer for a start, but I like it a lot, and it has an extraordinary cover, which I think was probably painted over an actual picture of someone in pilot's gear, the three-dimensionality of the equipment is striking, Nichole's face and limbs are okay, but not quite as good (and for someone whose nickname is Red, her hair is awfully black).

Spanish Mission, K B Spangler

The second Hope Blackwell novel. Hope's friend Mary 'Mare' Murphy is having a bit of a crisis, because the ghost of Tom Paine just manifested in her kitchen to check in on his great to the Nth niece, and if you're an organisational genius, and one of OACET's cyborg agents, then the sudden dissonance in your worldview caused by talking ghosts can be jarring. And it doesn't help that Mare has a fairly major anxiety disorder. Hope is mostly pissed because she sat the ghosts of the founding fathers down and got them to swear blind, over good whiskey, that they wouldn't manifest around the OACET agents who don't know about them. But done is done and Hope decides the only thing to do is to pack herself, Mare and Speedy the super-intelligent talking koala off to Las Vegas for a girls' (and koala's) week of fun.
But we start in media res with Hope being chased across the desert by chupacabras. Monsters don't exist, but ghosts can manifest in any form they like, and the undead cryptid brigade, Sonoran Desert division, like chupacabras. Las Vegas didn't last long, Mare and Speedy creamed the tables, then they ran into the crew of a low-rent ghost hunting TV show, whose front man happens to be son of the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and therefore in a position to put an unfortunate crimp in OACET's funding. The ghost hunters are off to the desert to host Spanish treasure galleons and ghostly pirates (which isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds, think Salton Sea, plus once in a century storms).

As an aside, I really liked it that Hope, as a newly qualified doctor, immediately reacts to the description of Hawley, the pirate captain, as tall, elongated, with clawed fingers and toes by saying "Marfan's Syndrome", on the negative side, disabled villain again.

So Mare decides they're going to have to go with the ghost hunters and keep them alive. They're helped in this by front-man's mother having placed a pair of competent bodyguards (female twins) in the crew without his knowledge (and somewhat hindered by a complete dick of a cameraman), and by Mare arranging the loan of a bunch of military off-road vehicles, a pair of drones, and their operator. Unfortunately their operator, 'Fish' Fleishman, immediately pings Hope's radar as another psychic. And then they get into the desert, and meet Maria de Borromeo, who wears Keds and likes watching daytime TV on her cellphone, which wouldn't be remarkable but for being the four centuries dead ghost of a Spanish Jesuit nun, killed binding Hawley's ghost the last time he got loose. And the big problem is ghosts are powered by reputation/attention, and a team of ghost hunters are live-streaming the hunt for Hawley's ghost, with international media magnets Hope and Speedy along for the ride.

Things get complicated.

On the surface it sounds pulpish, but Spangler really knows how to use her characters, she's been writing Hope and Speedy in A Girl and Her Fed for over a decade, and while the Hope novels are written much more for laughs than her Rachel Peng technothrillers, she still has a habit of throwing in lines that stop you dead with how insightful they are. And on top of everything, it's one of the cleverest Coyote tales I've ever read.

The cover is by Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, and features Hope, Mare and Speedy, threatened by Hawley and his crew in a style that seems inspired by AGAHF.

The Mortal Word (Invisible Library Book 5), Genevieve Cogman

Irene Winters, agent of the Invisible Library, is just back from acquiring a book from the library of a witch-hunting German Graf on a world stuck in the 16th Century, and hoping for a quiet evening bonking the brains out of now ex-apprentice Kai, when she receives an urgent summons from the Library. There is a secret peace conference between the forces of the Dragons and the Fae (aka Order and Chaos), being brokered by the Library as the only neutral force that understands how the universe actually works, and someone just killed one of the dragons. The Library needs Irene and her friend Vale, the great investigator of his steampunk world's London, to hurry to the alternate world where the conference is taking place, investigate the crime and bring a suitable suspect to justice (them being the actual perpetrator would be a bonus, but isn't actually required).

So Irene, Vale, and Kai (arriving by total coincidence) find themselves in a 19th Century Paris, locked in the grip of a sudden cold snap - Kai's uncle Ao Ji, King of the Western Ocean, has an affinity with ice, has just lost his trusted spy-master, and is having a temper tantrum. Things rapidly get complicated. Not only is the Library blaming the crime on anarchists to keep the French police out of their hair, but there are actual anarchists at work, and more suspects than you can shake a stick at, including Irene's operational superior, who wants to turn the Library into an organisation that holds power by playing the Dragons and Fae off against each other.

The Fae Powers at the conference are the Cardinal and the Princess (think Richelieu and Snow White), archetypes so powerful that they bend everyone they interact with into their expected roles, while Ao Ji may be dedicated to human welfare in a way the Fae are not, but also in such a way that demonstrates why absolute order is as dangerous as absolute chaos.

Irene's position as the Library's member of the investigatory team is matched by Dragon and Fae representatives, the dragon is Mu Dan, a competent judge-magistrate, but the Fae is Lord Silver, Vale and Irene's regular semi-antagonist, who is slightly perplexed by his new role, though the perfect man for investigating the seamier underside of Parisian Nightlife.

Things escalate when an even scarier Fae archetype, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, appears, but is the legendary Blood Countess the perpetrator, or a convenient scapegoat, pre-empted in her attempt to stop the conference by someone much closer to home?

Recent Gaming:

I was mostly playing XCOM2 over Christmas as I was offline, but I've been playing Ark again since I've been back. I missed their Christmas 'Winter Wonderland' event, where Raptor Claus flies over the map in his sleigh delivering presents, but as I play solo rather than on one of their servers I've simply added it to my start up, Christmas will continue until I'm sick of presents ;) They also have Gacha Claus who'll exchange the mistletoe and coal Raptor Claus delivers for more presents. The mistletoe isn't too bad, but the coal weighs a ton, so it was very convenient that Gacha Claus spawned just outside my base on the Scorched Earth desert map.

One of Raptor Claus's presents was a 500% damage crossbow, which has made taming things with tranq arrows much simpler, except when it does so much damage it kills them outright with a single shot. I managed to tame my first Rex with it, using only three tranqs, though admittedly she was a very low level Rex. Unfortunately I'm not at a high enough level on that map to actually build a saddle for her yet, but Regina is handling internal security for me at my base until that happens.

I took my small raptor pack out for a training run with the new crossbow and came back with not just the pack, but three direwolves, a pair of sabretooths, an australovenator (big raptor type from a mod), an extra raptor, and a terror bird (bad tempered carnivorous ostrich). Unfortunately I promptly lost the sabres and the new raptor when I took the newbies out for a run and ran into a tougher pack. And I finally have a flying mount on that map, which means my rate of exploration has just shot up, and generally makes things far simpler.

The makers of Ark have just launched Atlas, which takes a next generation version of the Ark engine and turns it into a MMO pirate game, with an absolutely ridiculous playing area hundreds of times that of Ark. It's in pre-release, but already looking very accomplished. I'm tempted, but I've got a lot of playing on Ark yet to do.

I'm experimenting with Dreamwidth's image hosting, not sure I quite understand incorporating images into posts yet (this may get edited a few times to try and work it out).

Bringing Regina Home

My Ark character, her raptor pack, and my new T-Rex

Gacha Claus Visits

Current Mood: Sneezy
Current Location: In the land of I need another hot toddy

I've mentioned K B Spangler's self-published Rachel Peng ebooks here before, they're one of my favourite series of recent years and show how self-publishing should be done. To celebrate her signing with an agent, Spangler currently has all six of her novels (four Rachel, one related Hope Blackwell and her far future SF novel Stoneskin) for sale at a dollar each. They're all worth far more than that, so what have you got to lose?

Here's umadoshi 's post with the links and more thoughts on Spangler's universe

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: She did what to Ben Franklin?

K B Spangler has just put up a new AGAHF short story, or rather one whose rights have reverted to her, at http://agirlandherfed.tumblr.com/ Shawn and Jenny talk brains

Mildly spoilery context behind( the cut )

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: In a fake catacomb/wine cellar/ER

A little bit of a catch-up as a couple of these go back almost a month.

Currently Reading

Anno Dracula - Dracula, Cha, Cha, Cha, Kim Newman

It's 1959 and the Italian Dolce Vita is watching eagerly as the guests assemble for the wedding of the year - Dracula's marriage to the vampiric Princess Asa Vajda. Also in Rome, watching Dracula in his Italian exile, is Charles Beauregard, the man who thwarted him in Victorian Britain. But Charles is 106 and waiting to die, and not even Geneviève Dieudonné, the love of his life, can persuade him to let her give him the vampiric kiss and bring him over to be one of the undead. Arriving to help Geneviève with Charles' final days is Kate Reed, the vampire journalist whose credentials stretch back to being a prominent part of the resistance to Dracula. And it soon transpires that also in Rome, in fact working as Dracula's chatelaine, is Penelope Churchward, the third of the vampire women in Charles' life.

Reading Newman's notes after completing this, I realised that I had missed a large element of the story. Newman's work as a film critic means he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of film, and the core motif for Dracula Cha, Cha, Cha is apparently Three Coins in the Fountain, which I'm not certain I've ever seen, with Charles' three women taking the title roles. Of course, that's not the only film motif. The Talented Mr Ripley is contemplating the prospect he may have bitten off a little more than he can chew in trying his games on Dracula's household. Secret agent Hamish Bond is in town, and there are several perfect adaptions of Bond film motifs, though Geneviève finds Bond a pale shadow of her Charles. Drawing on the Italian vampire movie tradition is a major subplot involving Matre Lachrymae, the Mother of Tears, the guardian spirit of Rome, and a series of vampire murders, culminating in one at the wedding itself, and leaving our three protagonists needing to find the real culprit in order to clear Kate, who was caught literally red-handed.

Also included with the package is the novella Aquarius, which is a solo effort for Kate Reed as she is asked by the Diogenes Club to investigate a rare vampiric murder as a favour to Scotland Yard's vampiric B Division. It's easy enough to imagine Jack Regan of the Sweeney as a vampiric cop, but George Dixon of Dock Green?!? Lying close to the root of things is one of the creepiest images of the whole series, amoral secret policeman Caleb Croft turned into an academic of the beat generation, with his own little cult of followers.

Anno Dracula - Johnny Alucard, Kim Newman

It's 1976 and Francis Ford Coppola is in Romania to film his Dracula, with Kate Reed as his technical advisor. Vampires are persecuted in Romania as the Transylvania movement is agitating for the creation of a separate Transylvanian state, to be ruled by vampires, of course. When Kate finds a half-starved Romanian Vampire, Ion Popescu, she helps him get a job on the production as a fixer. He thanks her by setting her up for the murder of their Securitate watcher. What Kate didn't realise was that Ion is Dracula's last child.

Having achieved his aim of slipping into the States, Ion Popescu becomes Johnny Pop, master of the disco dance floor, drawing the attention of New York's most famous vampire, Andy Warhol, just as another familiar face, Penelope Churchward decides to move on. Behind the scenes he starts to build his empire, by creating the drug Drac, which gives mortals an all-too-brief experience of vampirism. His New York career is cut short, courtesy of an intersection of the plot of Saturday Night Fever with Taxi Driver, The French Connection, (probably) Shaft, and Scooby Doo.

Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, Geneviève Dieudonné has run into an old PI, taking on one last case. Her help prompts him to suggest she has an eye for it, and she reinvents herself yet again. Things turn ugly when her friends start dying, and she finds herself faced with a tiny blonde cheerleader, convinced that Genè is the fount of all evil. Yes, it's Genèvieve versus Barbie the Vampire Slayer, but there's more to it than just those darn annoying kids, and she quickly finds herself afoul of the new power in the movie business, Johnny Alucard, a man newly arrived from the East Coast and who seems to be financing a surprising number of Dracula films across all sorts of formats.

Having moved on from Andy Warhol, Penelope Churchward has gotten herself a job as an instructor on one of America's most secret projects, teaching America's best to be the best that they can be. Newman claims it's the film he hates above all others, but it's a gesture-perfect evocation of Top Gun, with Penny in the Charley role. Penny's success there prompts Alucard to bring her onboard to coach a protégé of his own.

As the Eighties pass Alucard entrenches himself in Hollywood, the Transylvanian Movement grows stronger. Geneviève reinvents herself as a forensic specialist - Bones, with blood. But in the UK Caleb Croft is back in the secret policeman role he fits best, and Kate is not his favourite person.

The endgame comes with the fall of the Wall. Alucard proposes that he should stage the Anno Dracula version of Liveaid, but this time the beneficiary is Transylvania, and the concert is the cover for a coup. The Transylvanian Movement just don't realise whose coup it actually is.

Structurally this is very difficult to review, it covers fifteen years in the character's lives, and it does it via a series of self-contained novellas. Geneviève the PI and Geneviève as Doctor Dee, the forensics specialist, I'd happily read far more of, or watch the TV series, but Kate's story is harsher, and the reality is that both our running protagonists spend the entire book being persecuted for their earlier interactions with Dracula, while all the while Alucard grows in power.

Apparently a fifth book is contracted, which is just as well, because this one ends with evil triumphant.

The Course of Empire, Eric Flint and K D Wentworth

The 'course of empire' here seems to be a descendant of the old Roman 'Cursus Honorum', the path of offices that would take a young Roman from his first position to dictator. Junior Jao leader Aille arrives on Earth for his first posting. He is literally marked for great things, the once in a generation hope of one of the leading clans of the Jao. But the occupation of Earth isn't going well, 20 years after the conquest there is still resistance, and Governor Oppuk, once the great hope of his own clan, the traditional mailed fist antithesis of Aille's clan of elegant plotters, is regularly driven to furious retribution by Humanity's refusal to accept that the Jao way is better.

Aille steps into his waiting slot as second in command of the human Jinau troops, which is roughly equivalent to sending someone fresh out of Sandhurst/West Point to command all forces in Afghanistant. But Aille has been sent to learn, and as he doesn't have any staff beyond his personal tutor in the art of command, he sets about creating one from people who have things to teach him, picking up a technocrat here, a potential bodyguard there. And scandalously he doesn't restrict himself to only Jao, drafting the hyper-competent Jinao general Ed Kransky, Caitlin Stockwell, hostage daughter of the puppet president of the US, (also the one human who truly understands the Jinau's postural sub-language, though she lacks the ears to be truly fluent) and Pfc Gabe Tully, a resistance plant in the Jinau, who can't decide whether to kill himself now before the interrogation starts, or if he's fallen into an incredible intelligence gathering opportunity.

Initially the game plays out as a dance between Aille and Governor Oppuk, each trying to lure the other into a mis-step, but Aille keeps raising the stakes, and then the stakes are taken out of their hands entirely as the Ekhat, the legendary world-scouring xenophobes for whom the Jao themselves were once Jinau, announce their arrival in the solar system. Humanity thought they were just a Jao bogeyman, meant to scare them and justify the occupation, but now they're here, and Oppuk's response is to abandon the humans in favour of a last stand in space. Aille has different ideas.

I started reading snippets of the later books in the series online, and went looking for the earlier ones, and it turns out the first one is actually free at Amazon, so if military SF is your thing, or for that matter alien societies with some nicely observed non-human edges, then this may be worth a look.

Blunt Force, K B Spangler

The fourth Rachel Peng technothriller, the novel series spun off from Spangler's 'A Girl and Her Fed' webcomic. Two years ago, in the first of the series, Digital Divide, OACET Special Agent Rachel Peng, the cyborg liaison to the DC MPD, allowed psychopathic murderer Jonathan Glazer to escape from custody. She had a good reason, he was going to escape whatever she did, he really was that competent, and her way meant he did it without killing anyone, and paid his debt with enough information to prevent OACET being wound up by Congress and the cyborgs drafted into the military. Now Glazer is standing at her front fence, wearing a dead friend's face, and telling her he has been sent to help her, because another move against OACET has been set in motion.

What that move is soon becomes clear as Rachel finds out Hope Blackwell and Avery Hill have been kidnapped. Whoever kidnapped Hope (aka 'the Girl') is riding the tiger, because she's one of the top ten judoka on the planet, and has anger management issues (plus her husband is Pat Mulcahy, aka 'the Fed', director of OACET, who was lethally dangerous even before he was a cyborg). But Avery is Hope and Rachel's honorary niece, and she's two. The game becomes a little clearer, and a lot murkier, when the kidnappers make themselves known. They're a militia, one focussed on the bizarre political world of the US sovereign citizen movement, and their leader has a little problem he'd like Mulcahy's help with. So it's a standoff, and if some of the militia were hoping for something a little Ruby Ridge or Waco, what they actually get is Josh Glassman, Mulcahy's deputy, a man who can turn anything into a party, even a siege.

Thanks to Glazer's reappearance as Marshall Wyatt, the cyborgs know there's a deeper game, but they don't know who the enemy is, or what their end game is, and explaining just why Glazer/Wyatt is helping means Rachel needs to 'fess up to the whole letting-him-escape thing, which causes some major soul-searching among her bosses and the rest of the cyborg collective. But they need Rachel, she's their best investigator, particularly when backed by her MPD team, their best bet of figuring out what the endgame is before the endgame happens to them. And all the while the clock is ticking, because Hope is off her meds, and eventually her judgement will go and she'll push the militia further than they can tolerate*.

Beneath all the technothriller edges, there's a solid political thriller here, one rooted in the story of OACET and its creation and continued existence, and a disturbing dive into the worldview of the militias. While lurking in the background, 'helping' is Glazer/Wyatt, whose 'help' is likely part of an even deeper game.

I thought this had one or two slightly rough edges, I'd personally have done without chapter one, which is in a different viewpoint, but I still consumed it in a single sitting and Rachel remains one of my favourite characters in contemporary fiction.

* Even with her judgement intact Hope is still regularly beating up her guards, even while duct-taped to a chair. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was going on. Her explanation is "Martial artist tricks", but there's a side of the Girl and Her Fed universe, Hope's side, that the technothrillers don't address.

Up Next

I've got some beta reading to do, not sure what comes after that.

Current Mood: Literate
Current Location: Belatedly ex libris
Crossposts: http://dwgism.livejournal.com/23420.html

Hmm, the last of these was back at the end of January, and was supposed to be part one of two. Whoops!

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

The Hexarchate is an interstellar empire, in a universe where physics bends to the will of the state’s calendar. Celebrate a historic massacre on the right day and you reinforce the physical rules that let your weapons and spaceships work. Don’t celebrate it, or let some heretic celebrate a different feast, and the physical rules may shift to allow your enemy’s calendrical technologies to work instead.

Kel Cheris is a lowly infantry captain in the forces of the Kel, the Hexarchate’s military faction, but Cheris is also a mathematician, and talented enough no one quite understands why she turned down suggestions she join the Nirai, the science faction, instead. Caught in an impossible fight against heretics, she uses her mathematical insight to organise her troops into formations that verge on heretical, and emerges triumphant. But in a brutal example of the reward for competence being a greater challenge, she immediately finds herself drafted to deal with a threat that could destroy the Hexarchate.

The Fortress of Scattered Needles, the Hexarchate’s greatest stellar fortress, has risen in revolt and raised the standard of heresy. The Hexarchate needs it taken down, fast, before its enemies can take advantage, but the fortresses’ shields may be unbreachable. With precisely zero experience of space combat Cheris is handed the job and breveted all the way up to general. For reasons she doesn’t understand she has become the chosen pawn of the Shuos faction, the hexarchate’s spymasters, assassins and gameplayers, but she is certain that to win the siege she needs the Hexarchate’s greatest general, the unbeaten Shuos Jedao. Just one problem, Jedao has been dead for several hundred years, since winning his last battle by destroying, to the last man, both the enemy’s army and his own, including personally hunting down and executing his own command staff with his pistol. Nowadays Jedao is kept on cybernetic ice, the ultimate weapon, to be wheeled out in time of need.

Allowed to requisition Jedao, Cheris finds out rather too late that the gothic technology that sustains him can only manifest him as her shadow, with a voice only she can hear. Which leaves her unproven and jumped far beyond her rank and competencies, on the command deck of one of the Hexarchate’s greatest battleships, a fleet clustered around it, and having conversations with a voice that no one else can hear. And Shuos Jedao is not a voice she can ignore. The Kel are nicknamed the Suicide Hawks, because their loyalty can extend to tactical formations that manifest calendrical weapons, while simultaneously wiping out the entire formation, but the Shuos are the Ninefoxes, gameplayers and tricksters, and Jedao was the Immolation Fox, the perfect Shuos, bringer of the ultimate in Pyrrhic victories, playing a game no one has yet understood.

Cheris finds herself fighting on two fronts: on the outer, to take the fortress, a war that requires both her mathematics and Jedao’s wiles; but on the inside she is alone in her mind with Jedao, the arch-manipulator, the gameplayer, the Immolation Fox. And as they progress on the outer front, so Cheris progresses on the inner, gaining a fraction of insight into Jedao’s game, and into why the Hexarchate considers him both their most dangerous weapon, and their most terrifying potential foe.

What a review like this can’t show is how gorgeous Yoon’s prose is:

It was not the formal roll call. They had no drum, no fire, no flute. She would have included those things if she could. But even the servitors had heard her. They stopped what they were doing and arranged themselves in a listening posture. She nodded at them.

They started with the most junior soldier – Kel Nirio, now that Derken was dead – and ascended the ladder of rank. Nobody ate during the recital. Cheris was hungry, but hunger could wait. She didn’t need to commit the names to memory, as she had done that long ago, but she wanted to remember what every intent face looked like, what every rough voice sounded like, so she could warm herself by them in the days to come.

(Full disclosure, Yoon’s in my DW circle)

An Ancient Peace, Tanya Huff

This is the latest in Huff’s Valor series, which has apparently switched the series title to Peacekeepers given series protagonist Torin Kerr is now out of the Marines and running a contracted special operations team for the Wardens, the Confederation’s interstellar police force. Of course a minor thing like being out of the Marines doesn’t stop Torin’s people from calling her Gunny, or acting like they’re all still marines, which Is somewhat irritating for Craig, Torin’s very unmilitary lover, and confusing for Alamber, the semi-abused and criminally inclined di’Taykan they picked up in the previous story.

But it isn’t the Wardens who turn up with a mission, it’s Military Intelligence. Artefacts, grave goods, are turning up from the H’san, the Confederation’s founders, and though the Elder races are all now avowedly pacifistic (but not so pacifistic as to not bring in the Younger Races, the Humans, Krai and di’Taykan, to fight for them during the War with the Others, before Torin stopped it), the H’san have a brutal past that involved wiping their own colony world clear of life, a colony world they eventually used to bury both the victims of their war, and their weapons, before erasing it from the star charts. If someone is circulating grave goods from that world, then someone else is there and digging, and the consequences of someone actually getting hold of H’san weapons and using them could be the Elder Races deciding the Younger Races aren’t safe to let out on their own. So MI’s instructions are find the world, find the diggers, no survivors.

Of course if you’re going to seal up a planet’s worth of weapons of mass destruction as grave goods, then you probably aren’t going to leave them unguarded, so the story plays out as Torin does Tomb Raider, and those no survivors orders inevitably become a problem for Torin’s no man left behind ethos.

I find the series a little formulaic, but it’s a very competent formulaic that makes for an enjoyable, if unchallenging, read.

Digital Divide, Maker Space, State Machine, The Russians Came Knocking, KB Spangler

Re-reads of Spangler’s Rachel Peng technothrillers, and the one Josh Glassman novella, which is technically a technothriller, but played for laughs, with added squirrels.

Bone and Jewel Creatures, Elizabeth Bear

In Messaline, the city of Jackals, Brazen the Enchanter brings Bijou the Wizard an injured feral child, and as Bijou and the constructs she builds of bone and jewel examine the child, she realises it is the first move in a war against her and Brazen by Kaulas the Necromancer, the three of them bound by old ties of family.

As Kaulas’ plan plays out and death walks Messaline, Bijou fights corruption with artifice, replacing diseased flesh with bone and jewel, and Brazen joins her, adding his skill with pistons and levers. And all the while the child, the Cub as it thinks of itself, watches and tries to understand.

I love Bear’s writing, and this is a novella to read for the prose as much as the plot. Point of view wanders between the aging Bijou – how many stories feature a 96yo heroine? – and the Cub, showing us two sides of the story, one full of wisdom, the other struggling to understand the war into which it has been drafted, but able to see opportunity and hope for the pack it left behind.

It’s a very unusual story, a very unusual setting, but a marvellous one.

Current Mood: Literate
Current Location: Calendrically defined

It's been a while since the last of these, Pitchhwars left me with very little time for reading when it kicked off in September, and I haven't really gotten fully back into the fiction mode since. On the other hands there's still three months worth of books to cover, so this may take a while - in fact it's taking me so long to get through them all I've decided to split the post in two, look for the rest of it later this weekend.

SF/F

I seem to have given up the re-read of Pratchett's Watch books. I'd like to restart, but realistically have no idea when that will be.

Accessing The Future, ed Kathryn Allan

I think I finished this, it was on the go when Pitchwars started, but I really want to go through it again and review each story as I read them, and figure out what it is I would have done differently, because I was left more unsatisfied than I expected. I suspect it's that I'm more overtly political a crip than the writers who did get through the submission process, certainly my submitted story was much more about using SF as a mirror for contemporary attitudes towards disability than most of those that did make it through.

Cold Magic, Spirit Walker Book 1, Kate Elliott

See the link above for my review of the first half of the book. The second half kicks off with the Cold Mages realising they've kidnapped and married off the wrong one of the Hassi-Barahal sisters, they should have been going for Bee, not Kat. Unfortunately a quickie divorce is out and Kat finds her new and very unwanted husband ordered to kill her. Some unexpected aid allows her to escape, but that leaves her somewhere near the French coast and needing to walk back to quasi-Portsmouth in time to warn Bee (though fortunately the ice age scenario means she doesn't need to swim the Channel). And all while being hunted by the mages, her not-so-ex and their troops. There's unexpected friends, unexpected allies, unexpected betrayals, and a completely unexpected half-brother, whose existence leads Kat to realise she's never known the truth of her own heritage. The alarums and excursions continue all the way home, and don't stop then, but now it's Kat and Bee on the run together, the Cold Mages hot on their tale, until things take another twist and a new faction emerges. The writing continues as good as I thought it was in the first half and I'll definitely be seeking out the rest of the trilogy.

Skinwalker: Jane Yellowrock Book 1: Faith Hunter
This was a recommendation from my Pitchwars mentor (i.e. homework), the why of which rapidly became obvious. Jane is a vampire hunter for hire in a world where a limited number of paranaturals are known to society, vampires being the obvious one. Jane, however, is one of the unknown species, she's a shapeshifter, and she has a secondary personality resident in her head, a big cat. This makes her a direct parallel to my werewolf cop Aleks, whose wolf also takes the form of a secondary personality (though Suka is non-verbal, where Jane's Beast isn't). The plot in this first novel in the series has Jane hired by, of all people, the Vampire Council of New Orleans. A rogue is killing tourists, cops and vampires, and the leaders of the vampire clans want them stopped (dead tourists are bad for business when you run the New Orleans whorehouses).

I wasn't an immediate fan, Jane quickly runs into a classic bad-boy on a motorcycle (she rides a chopped Harley herself) and insists on referring to him as 'The Joe', which I found plain irritating, but she slowly grew on me. I did like the attention to detail, Jane isn't restricted to one shape, though her big cat is easiest, and she doesn't always manifest at the same size, but there's a mechanism to handle that built into the worldbuilding (I just had Aleks and Suka manifest as a very big wolf). Jane's the classic tough loner, though being an ex-feral child, and probably a Cherokee skinwalker, are interesting variations on the norm. It quickly becomes obvious Jane is in for a tough fight, the rogue has abilities other vampires don't, abilities more akin to Jane's, but she isn't exactly short on weapons herself. One aspect I found interesting was the sheer number of people she befriends, ranging from the girls at 'Katie's Ladies', to Katie herself (never mind that Katie is a vampire clan leader), Katie's security/factotum Tom and his counterparts with just about every clan across the city, and a local Cherokee shaman. There are a lot of action sequences, but along the way Jane makes some unexpected discoveries about her origins and there is a completely unexpected bit of sub-plot involving a vampire priestess that links the origin of the vampires with, in some as yet unexplained fashion, the Christ story.

It's serial urban fantasy, but a pretty good example of the breed.

Greek Key: K B Spangler

I love Spangler's A Girl and Her Fed web-comic, and absolutely adore the spin-off Rachel Peng technothrillers. Her new novel takes Hope Blackwell, protagonist of AGAHF, and gives her a novel in which to shine. It starts with the maguffin from the latest Rachel Peng novel, a previously unknown fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism, which Rachel retrieves and Hope gets to see because her husband (the Fed) is Rachel's boss. Despite that the novel actually starts with Hope face down in her living room with a policeman's boot pressing her into the carpet. This isn't because she's being arrested, it's to protect the four thugs who made the mistake of breaking into her house to assault her. Hope's a flutter-brain at times, and physically tiny, but she's also a world-class martial artist with a violent streak (and they brought a crowbar).

Hope's also a medium, with Ben Franklin as mentor/spirit guide (all long since explained in AGAHF - Franklin picked her as his physical proxy to keep an eye on the continued development of the US) , and when Rachel turns up with the artefact the alarms go off, because there's suddenly a possibility the Antikythera Mechanism is an artefact adrift out of time, something produced by a powerful ghost who continued working after their death - which is a problem as causality tends to shut down timeloops where that happens and stomp them into dust. There's a pretty obvious candidate, Archimedes, but ghosts can't really travel outside their home country, so Hope finds herself despatched to Greece to track down where the artefact came from.

Hope takes her two usual sidekicks with her. Mike Reilly is another medium, though in his case from a long line of mediums - who hate him for being gay (but not as much as they hate Hope for not belonging to one of the old medium families). Unlike Hope he espouses a policy of non-violence, which doesn't stop him being an even better martial artist than she is, it just means he practises Aikodo rather than Judo. And then there's Speedy. Someone decided to see how far he could get with selective breeding/genetic engineering for intelligence (similar to the Russian experiments with foxes), and koalas have a lot of room for improvement. At generation 26 he got Speedy, and who euthanized who got reversed... Speedy is 3 feet of hyperintelligent, pissed-off, sex-obsessed koala, with a talent for languages, code and patterns, so he's along to translate.

Once our heroes are in Greece, they quickly pick up a pair of guides, warring cousins who are both on the shady side of legit, if not outright tomb raiders. They also pick up Hope's usual entourage of tails and potential kidnappers - her husband's agency is really not popular. Both sets of add-ons serve mostly to provide light entertainment; threatening two top martial artists is a sure step towards getting your nose eaten by an angry koala. And then Hope acquires another artefact, a pair of beads, and the story takes an unexpected step.

The beads once belonged to Helen of Troy, but the stories have forgotten who she was first, Helen of Sparta, and a Spartan princess was no simpering beauty. Helen's tale isn't quite done, and she needs Hope to finish it.

The dual narrative is unexpected, Hope tracing clues in the present. while reliving parts of Helen's story each time she sleeps, and much as I love Hope, I think it is Helen's story which is the more compelling one.

The conclusion takes an unexpectedly dark turn, and once you've seen the cover you'll know where it ends, but it does it in a way that's true to both of the stories leading up to it. One slightly odd aspect stylistically is that the story is presented as Hope narrating it in the first person, and she isn't averse to breaking the third wall. However that's entirely in accord with her character. It's a very different story to the Rachel Peng novels, because Hope is privy to a side of the AGAHF universe that Rachel isn't, but still one I very much enjoyed and I hope there'll be more to come.

Indexing: Reflections, Seanan McGuire

Reflections picks up where the original Indexing left off, and Reflections is very much the theme of the work. Not only is glass a recurring issue, not only is this very much a reflection of what happened in the previous book, but we need to look in the mirror at various characters, and off course mirrors aren't exactly an unknown motif in faiy tales,

If you haven't read the first book, the series conceit is that fairy tales are real and are conrtinually trying to manifest themselves. Charged with stopping the mass deaths that usually entails are the agents of the ATI Management Bureau, where ATI is the the Aarne-Thompson Index of catalogued fairy tales. Henry (Henrietta) Marchen and her team of agents work for the Bureau in an unnamed East Coast city, and the best agent to stop a fairytaile is one who has already escaped one (for now). Henry is a Snow White, forever marked by her complexion, and waking each morning to the sound of bluebirds beating themselves to death against her bedroom windows in frantic attempts to reach her and love her. Her team also features a Cobbler's Elf (Jeff, her lover), a Pied Piper (the very young, but very powerful flautist Demi), and Andy, solid, reliable, just your baseline human. It's completed by Sloane, the only Evil Stepsister in the ATI, who treats incoming fairy tales as an opportunity to work out her fury with her fists and her boots.

Like the original Indexing, Reflections started as Amazon Singles, being released a chapter at a time. Each chapter is therefore structured much like a short story, with a definite beginning middle and end as yet another fairy tale manifests, but this time it's clear much earlier that there is an overall arc, and that the whole arc has been very solidly planned.

It starts with the team under investigation, as Henry's new active status (she bit an apple in Indexing) possibly leaves her too vulnerable to lead. That brings in HR's Ciara Bloomfield, a Bluebeard's Wife, who may just be roguish enough to be Henry's match. No sooner is that out of the way than the team is faced with a breakout from Childe, ATI's enchanted prison, a breakout that ultimately proves to be centred on Birdie, the ATI archivist gone bad who was their opponent in the first book, and she's taken the opportunity to build herself a little team.

Birdie's first move shows up when Henry's brother Gerry calls for help, with word of a Gingerbread House manifesting outside the school where he teaches (Gerry would have been Rose Red to his twin's Snow White, but for the minor fact of being born male in a female body - the result is someone stories keep trying to latch onto).

Benched as too vulnerable to Birdie's wiles, the team try a Hail Mary play that leaves Henry fighting a lone battle, and Ciara in charge. And all the time Birdie is moving her plan closer and closer to its ultimate target.

If anything Reflections is even better than Indexing, and I really want to reread the two of them together. Reflections is one of those rare first person stories where you can't be certain the narrator, Henry, will make it out alive, particularly as the narrative does occasionally switch POV. One definite piece of fan-service is Sloane's origin story, but it's fan-service that's absolutely essential to the plot. We knew Sloane was a hero, I'm not sure we realised how much of one. There are hints that a third volume is possible, there's a quiet tragedy working it's way out in the ATI office beneath the noses of the team, and there's one line very late in the narrative that has two possible readings - maybe I'm just being a little paranoid, maybe I just misread it, but Seanan McGuire is getting to be very good at what she does, and I don't put deliberate ambiguity beyond her.

Non-Fiction

I've actually read a few hefty non-fictional books in the last couple of month, concentrated on my interest in the engineering side of military history. I also worked my way through about 20 Kindle samples in the days before Christmas looking at naval history/naval architecture books I might want to buy in future, and in some of these books that's 50 or more pages worth - but no reviews until I read the full things!

US Secret Projects 1: Fighters and Bombers of World War 2, Tony Buttler and Alan Griffith

280 pages, A4. The Secret Projects series has been running for a good few years now, covering aircraft projects that never saw service and putting development programmes in perspective, taking advantage of the documentation now released into national archives. We're certainly into the teens in terms of volumes, but the series recently switched publisher from Ian Allan to Crecy. The '1' for this volume is a little bit of a misnomer, there have already been two previous US volumes covering post war aircraft, but it may mean a second WWII volume is projected. This is quite spectacularly good. I rate books of this type by how many aircraft they cover that I've never heard of, with anything in double figures being a good result. This has a project that's new to me on almost every page, many with either period or redrawn three-view art. There are a few minor howlers, the sketching of the overall US development and procurement plan is weak - but that's because no one can find the relevant documents in the archives, and I think they need a better line editor (me!) but definitely a good buy.

Japanese Secret Projects 2: Experimental Aircraft of the IJA and IJN 1922 - 1945 Edwin M Dyer

160 pages, A4. Oh dear. What a contrast. Where US Secret Projects is utterly good, this is utterly a mess. Volume 1, with the same author, was pretty good, so I think the basic problem is they've stretched the fragmentary Japanese archives to their limits, and then gone on to try and get another volume out of it. There are a handful of aircraft new to me, but the structure is dire. It's supposedly one chapter per aircraft project, but we find ourselves bouncing back and forth between Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Projects, suddenly switching from late war to 20s projects, and throwing into the middle of it a chapter on the Japanese nuclear programmes (rather good, expands on stuff I've seen elsewhere, but not an aircraft) and another on a Japanese directed energy weapon project that is a) even more out of place, and b) far too credulous. And within the chapter you often find that 75% of the prose deals with another aircraft entirely, often a well known one that the supposed subject relates to, but on a couple of occasions just an aircraft with a similar role. Clearly there just wasn't enough data to fill the book with actual secret project stuff and they've resorted to padding it. For one aircraft it actually admits there is no direct documentation whatsoever, just a couple of indirect references to say it was built, so we get a chapter talking about the German aircraft that inspired it. Again needs a better editor, but this time to the point I think the manuscript should have been sent back for another draft, with instructions to completely restructure it.

British Destroyers and Frigates, the Second World War and After, Norman Friedman

350 pages, A4. Coverage starts with the Tribal class on 1934 and runs all the way up to the current Type 45s. I've just finished this and I've been reading since Christmas Day, it being my present to myself. This is pretty dense and really one for the serious student of naval history/naval architecture. Friedman is American, a former naval analyst, with a score of serious books behind him, including equivalent volumes on US ship classes, and he knows all the right people and archives (I love that one of these is called 'The Brass Foundry' - it's an outstation of the National Maritime Museum) to research his subject properly. He's written these books by going back to the origina requirements, the original design and history documents (the 'ships covers') and the original workbooks of the actual designers. He very occasionally misses a minor nuance of British politics, but far more often the story he's teling adds nuance, such as British post-war strategy being built on a belief we were definitely going to go to war with Russia, with 1957 as the 'year of maximum danger'. I was half-way through a re-read of his British Cruisers volume before Christmas, so I'll be picking that up again, and I'll probably follow it with the volume on WWI and interwar destroyers, which I'll likely get on Kindle to judge whether it's worthwhile given the heavy use of large and detailed drawings of the ships and the extensive use of footnotes. Destroyers was more readable than Cruisers as they've switched to inline footnotes, whereas all the footnotes in Cruisers were at the back of the book and often half a page or a page in length. OTOH Friedman's prose isn't always the clearest. I'm sure he knew what he meant, but sometimes there are multiple interpretations possible of the words that made it to the page. Again, needs a better editor.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Just crossing the finish line for the book marathon