davidgillon | Entries tagged with author: norman friedman

A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine

The sequel to A Memory Called Empire. Having achieved her mission of setting the all-engulfing Empire of Teixcalaan at war with the unknown power nibbling on her space station home's borders, Mahit Dzamare has fled home before she's herself engulfed, but finds all of Lsel Station's leadership want to know what's going on inside her head, and if that means brain surgery, then so be it. Meanwhile, back on Teixcalaan's capital planet, Three Seagrass (aka Reed), Mahit's former liaison and now an undersecretary in the Information Ministry (aka a senior spy) takes receipt of a plea for an expert on talking to aliens from the Teixcalaani fleet, and decides she and Mahit are the best candidates for the job. Being Reed with an idea, this means her talking very fast at everyone she encounters, and leaving them steamrollered in her wake.

I didn't like this quite as much as A Memory Called Empire, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it a lot. Not only are Mahit and Reed back, but there are a couple of new and interesting characters with the Tleixcalaani fleet, and we also get a substantial chunk of Teixcalaani politics via Eight Antidote, the 11yo clone of the former Emperor and likely future Emperor. The problem for me was structural, in that the resolution bypasses Reed and Mahit.

OTOH we're pretty much promised a third book from something Mahit says to Reed, and I'll be queuing up for that.

To End in Fire - David Weber and Eric Flint

I thought Weber was done with Honor Harrington, but I'd forgotten the spin-off series with Eric Flint. The Grand Alliance may have hammered the Solarian League in record time, but the Mesan Alignment, the slave-trading eugenicist bad-guys responsible for the last 20 (30?) years of war are still out there, and all the intelligence types are still looking for them, And their hidden base. Utterly bizzarely the story has a single major new character, the Solarian Leaugue's new spy-chief, who is basically a Marty Stu (he's repeatedly called a genius) of Flint's frequent collaborator Charles E Gannon. He's even called Charles E Gannon?!?

The plot is completely predictable, the spies and analysts narrow down the physical patch of space where the bad guys can be and then hand the problem over to Honor to blow up their not so little evil base, But there's something off for me, the whole thing feels rushed, even to the point of having Honor go into premature labour to get her back in the saddle a couple of months earlier, which pretty much times the whole plot to that point at under seven months, even though it can take months to get from place to place. One character even completely regrows a leg they lose in the course of the plot within those seven months, including post-regrowth physio. Yet there's absolutely no reason that I can see for the compressed timetable.

And there's at least one more book to come, because that was only the bad-guy's secret base, the good-guys don't know about the secret secret base yet.

Fighting the Great War At Sea - Norman Friedman

Wow, this one was heavy going, I think it took me a full month to get through, reading most days. The length isn't excessive, either 320 or 416 pages in the print edition depending on whose website you believe (though that's A4 pages), but it's a very dense book. As is normal for Friedman, about a third of the length is footnotes, often just a citation, but just as frequently 3 and occasionally 4 kindle pages of text. But it was heavy going because of its depth and I've come out of it finally understanding what was going on with Fisher's Baltic Project and the truth about Winston's competing desire to invade Gallipoli - yes, Winston was all for the Gallipoli landings, but so was the entire War Cabinet and Winston took the historical fall for all of them as the junior member.

And oh, dear God, Asquith*. I was vaguely aware he was discussing Cabinet affairs with his lover Venetia Stanley, I wasn't aware it went to the level of "We've been seriously discussing the invasion of Borkum, we've agreed always to refer to it as Sylt, but we really mean Borkum"

* aka the Prime Minister,

Definitely only one for the serious naval history fan, and it might more accurately be titled Fighting the Great War in the North Sea as coverage of the other theatres is minimal.

Current Mood: Flump

It's been surprisingly mild up here in the North East, in fact I've traded back down from the duffel coat I've been wearing to the much lighter jacket I travelled up in as the temperatures have peeked/peaked up into double figures. While it's been intermittently damp and drizzly, the only really bad day we've had was when Storm Deidre blew through weekend before last, which had the interesting phenomenon of rain freezing into pebble-like lumps as it hit the ground. Crunch. Fortunately that quickly progressed from ice to snow to rain and was gone by morning.

Not being able to get online after Amazon stuffed up my data SIM order combined unfortunately with Office deciding to throw a wobbly over whether I had a license or not, which meant I couldn't work on any of the projects I might have put time into instead, I thought maybe I'd messed up the license renewal (i.e. forgotten it), but getting online at my sister's confirmed it's on auto-renew. I'd just given up on an hour of trying to sort it out when it decided to spontaneously resolve itself. Grrrr.

Since having got Word back I've reworked one short story, written about 80% of another, which has been a first couple of lines hovering about in the back of my head for months, and an idea for a third has popped up - though that one may come under character background rather than being a viable story idea, we'll see. Plus I've done some work on a hobby Excel project I largely save for when I'm up here.

My sister and I did the local pub quiz on Sunday. We didn't win, but we did respectably. Andrea took great pleasure in pointing out we'd have been much closer to winning but for going with my (wrong) choices rather than hers on four questions. Of course we would have been rather less close if we hadn't gone with my choice on others - one or two of which were surprisingly hard for what's billed as a fun quiz- "Who preceded Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor?" Seriously? That's pre-Thatcher - {smug}and it was Denis Healey {/smug}.

I was back in the pub for a quiet drink on Christmas Eve with Andrea and her husband (after Not-Midnight Mass), which was a pleasant evening, though I was quite surprised to see the extended family (three,maybe even four generations) at the next table over whip out a pack of "Cards Against Humanity" and start having great fun, it was noticeable it was the c70-ish grandparents/pub regulars cackling loudest at the lewdest cards/plays.

Christmas Day was pleasantly quiet,with the added advantage of no one in the family being ill on the day for about the first time in three years. We kept to our now tradition of having Christmas dinner at Dad's care home,which was perfectly presentable - prawn cocktail or tomato soup followed by turkey, pigs in blankets, roasted potatoes, mashed potatoes, baby carrots and brussels - they had slightly drowned mine in gravy, but it was good gravy, and either Christmas pud or Black Forest gateau (yum) to finish. The glass of white wine they served first was a bit ordinary, but the bottle of rose they brought around to follow was incredibly smooth and decidedly drinkable. Our server, Victoria, one of Dad's regular carers, was dressed head to foot as one of Santa's elves - hat with pointy ears, green tunic, multi-coloured tights, and it was just as well she had the pointy shoes with the bell on the end as it meant I missed her toes when I accidentally trod on her foot at the end of the meal! The only downside was Dad was having one of his 'today I shall mostly be sleeping' days, but he surfaced enough to smile at everyone every now and then and he's been sharper on other days.

Amazon have now compounded the SIM package without the SIM by delivering my sister's Christmas present to her husband, which I'd ordered for her as I have Prime, to my house in Kent, rather than to my mother's house here. I rang my sister twice to confirm whether to get it sent to her house or Mam's, chances of me not remembering to set the delivery address after that seem remote. The order states 'Handed to resident', which seems rather dubious given I'm three hundred miles away, so I'm just hoping it's with one of the neighbours. Not impressed (and my sister is even less impressed).

Recent reading: Ben Aaronovitch's The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London/PC Peter Grant book 6), good, and some major series arc developments, though I still hate what he's done with Lesley May's character arc, which compounds 'being facially disfigured turns you evil', with 'disabled people will betray everything they stand for for the chance of a cure'. I'm probably going to reread the entire series, and have already re-read Rivers of London, but I've run into the Kindle DRM bug with the later books and will have to delete and re-download them. In the meantime I've been reading From Russia With Claws, by "Molly Harper writing as Jacey Conrad and Gia Corona" (seriously, and is that one author or two?) which has been sitting unread on my Kindle for several years - Russian mafiya werewolves in Seattle, it's practically required research given the overlap with my Graveyard Shift. It's surprisingly good, though the heroine bonking the Rom werewolf alpha at every opportunity doesn't really do anything for me (not that there's anything actually wrong with the writing of the sex scenes, they're just not my thing). Worth a look if you like Supernatural Romance. And I bought myself a couple of Norman Friedman magnum opuses (opi? opii?) to sustain my naval history habit over the holidays. The one I bought on the Kindle (Naval Weapons of WWI) shows signs of being OCRd - badly - from a printout, which given the first edition, from the same publisher, is only seven years old is pretty unforgivable. The one I bought in hardcopy is one of his early works (US Battleships, 1985) and shows he was actually once capable of writing a book without it being a third footnotes. I'm more and more confirmed in my opinion his research is immaculate, but that he desperately needs a better editor, because his sentence-level micro-writing is sloppy as hell.

Current Mood: Seasonal
Current Location: Snowless in South Durham

Continuing my reading of Friedman's Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery: 'Hmm, I know this is the last chapter, but I'm only 67% of the way through, there must be a big data annex or something'.

Nope, main text ends at 67%, the remaining 33% of the book is the footnotes. I knew there were a lot of them, and with a kindle it's easy-ish to navigate back and forth, but a third of the wordcount, seriously?

His research is immaculate*, but his editors need to stage an intervention. Eight page footnotes (I'm not exaggerating) need to be in the main text.

I'm still happy I bought it, but it's disappointing that he just stops the narrative dead at the end of his time period. There's no attempt to sum up, conclusions or whatever.

*Interpretation maybe not so much, I've seen some comments pointing out he isn't as rigorous with the USN as the RN, accepting uncorrected USN figures, even when the real Japanese loss rates, produced by checking Japanese records, have been available for a couple of decades. And even within the text there are issues: "The USN didn't use RN-style barrage fire" - You just bloody described them doing precisely that!!

Current Mood: Quizzical
Current Location: In the Foothills of Mt Footnote

The wired mouse on my desktop has been intermittently iffy since Friday's Win10 update, and at times unusable. So last night I decided to end-run the problem and switch it out for something using an entirely different driver. So I swapped it out for the wireless mouse from my laptop, which immediately worked perfectly.

Out of curiousity I plugged the non-functioning wired mouse into the laptop, where it also works perfectly. At least until Win10 next updates on the laptop.

{Sigh} Computers!!!

In other news, pouring boiling coffee all over your hand turns out to be a really effective way of waking yourself up, but not really one I can recommend.

Fortunately I got away without serious injury. I was pouring myself a cupful on Saturday morning, tried to lift it with my (weaker) left hand, which instantly started to shake, splashing itself with scalding hot coffee. To compound the issue, rather than drop the cup I tried to put it down on the floor, which just meant splashing more and more coffee onto myself. So I spent the next 20 minutes with my hand under the cold tap, and the rest of the morning with it wrapped in a damp cloth, and six hours later it was still stinging, but it never actually blistered. I had to give up on heading out for lunch, as using my hand for wheelchair propelling seemed like a bad idea, but it was fine by Saturday evening. Really, really lucky there!

One of my relatives asked if I hadn't learnt to avoid doing this kind of thing. I pointed out I do learn, I just keep finding new ways to do them!

Currently Reading

Bingeing in Norman Friedman's naval history stuff with two on the go. Almost finished British Cruisers of the Victorian Era, which I've been picking my way through over the Summer. It's been slow progress as it's a little on the early side for my interests. And about a quarter of the way into his Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery, which I bought myself for my birthday and, like his Naval Firepower on surface gunnery is another of those rare books where you really do want more equations. The descriptions of how they managed to computerise AA gunnery in the period between the wars using purely mechanical means are gorgeously ingenious:

"You need the sine of the angle? Here, run a pointer over a sphere";

"You need to multiply X and Y, and multiplication is difficult? Well let's take Log(X) and Log(Y) and add them instead"

"You need to balance two complex equations? Here, take a total guess at each, put the results up for the operators and have them adjust the inputs until they're the same"

"You need to extract angles from what's essentially a section of a cone? Well approximate it as an ellipse, and approximate the ellipse by rotating a hoop in front of a light source, and have the operator read the tangent off the projection on a screen."

A couple of word origins have tickled my fancy as well. I though the "Board Margin" was the amount allowed in RN ship designs for unexpected weight growth during construction because of design changes. It actually turns out to be the amount allowed for weight growth during construction because "we don't actually know how much this bit will weigh until we build it". And then there's "Flyplane", which I just thought was the randomly created name of one of the gunnery systems; nope, the Flyplane is the plane defined by the course of an aircraft, and the position of the observer, which can be used as an alternative coordinate system for measuring this stuff.

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: On the banks of the Meander

I was getting ready to book my ticket home, the stuff regarding my father's care funding having ground to a halt with people on Easter holidays, and just starting to look forward to it, when they got back to us. Ironically at precisely the same time we were ringing their complaints people to say 'how do we move this forward/extend our complaint'. The call was to offer a new assessment with new assessor, exactly what we've wanted from the outset, but not until the 26th. Which means I'm probably here until the start of May - that's assuming my sister can make that date - she can't check her appointments diary until she's back in school on Monday

The weather here continues to take 'April Showers' to heart, so we haven't really been out anywhere apart from Sunday Lunch last weekend, which was a little disappointing vs the restaurant's usual standard (watery turnip and carrot mash), though still pleasantly filling.

After Yoon mentioned meeting S L Huang I've re-read the bits of her Russell's Attic series I have: Zero-Sum Game, Half-Life, and Root of Unity, plus the short stories Ladies Day Out and Rio Adopts a Puppy (which I hadn't previously read - deeply creepy, no actual animal harm. but it is contemplated). I would have liked to move on to Plastic Smile, the fourth book, but the series is apparently in the process of changing from self-published (and an example of how that can be done so well it looks completely professional) to being published by Tor, so not currently available.

Having read the latest three Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson (2)+Alpha and Omega (1) novels it looks like I may reread the parts of the series I have on Kindle next.

WRT non-fiction I read The Battleship Builders, a big history of the firms that built the Royal Navy's dreadnoughts, and I've finally finished Norman Friedman's Naval Firepower, which has taken me almost a year, and is that rare thing, a book that doesn't have nearly enough equations. It's basically a history of a very specific mathematical/engineering problem* - battleship fire control, aka bringing two objects together in time and space when one is manouvering to avoid that, and the other follows a ballistic trajectory over anything up to 15 nautical miles that takes several minutes of flight, while being fired from a platform that is itself manouvering and subject to wave motion causing it to pitch and roll, which affects the alignment of the firing barrel. I'd actually have found it much easier to follow with some of the equations ready to hand. I picked up Command at Sea, a set of notoriously detailed naval wargames rules, to see how it handled abstracting that, and inevitably am thinking "well, I wouldn't have done it that way". I may look for another heavyweight naval title to follow

* probably the most complex successful computational solution prior to Ultra, and all mechanical.

I have managed some writing, line-edited about 110 pages of the first novel, to bring myself back up to where I was(and a bit beyond) when I set the rewrite aside before Christmas. I did consider doing something for Sherwood Smith's ballroom anthology, and came up with a plot for The Elf-Queen's Inaugral Ball, but I think I need to concentrate on the novel, so I'll set that aside as notes. That said I promptly took a couple of days out to experiment with an alternate opening to the second novel which decouples it from being so tight a sequel to the first one. That would let me market it independently if the first goes nowhere, but it's six and two threes, there are plot advantages to both approaches. The first version of the alternate didn't work, the second worked a lot better, but could be tweaked to be better still. Even if I don't want to go with it as an opening, I probably need to work it in somewhere. Meanwhile, back to book one.

Current Mood: Delayed
Current Location: The Northern Wastes

Whoops, two and a half months since the last of these? Well, I suppose I did lose about half of that to wall to wall Olympics, holiday and Paralympics.

I didn't actually carry on with Defying Doomsday, the anthology about disabled people in doomsday scenarios I mentioned I was reading next in the last one of these. That's not a reflection on the book, I read the Amazon kindle sampler, bought it to read while away, but didn't actually restart it - it would be doing it a disservice to say I didn't finish it, it's much more I didn't start it. I do plan to return to it when I'm in the right mood for that kind of fiction.

Anno Dracula, Kim Newman

I've been meaning to read this for years, and it was going cheap in the Amazon autumn sale.

Events did not happen as Bram Stoker imagined, Doctor Van Helsing failed, and his head decorates a pike outside Buckingham Palace, for Count Dracula's ultimate aim was no less than the seduction of Queen Victoria, and the undead now rule Victorian London, with Dracula as Lord Protector and his Carpathian Guard impaling dissidents in the streets. But a killer, Silver-Knife, is roaming the East End, gutting poor new-dead whores on Whitechapel's streets, and the newly vampiric establishment is quite clear that something must be done. That odd pillar of the establishment, the Diogenes Club, is on the case, in the person of Charles Beauregard, a man clearly cut from precisely the same bolt of cloth as Richard Hannay.

As Charles delves into the hunt for Silver-Knife (Sherlock Holmes, like Bram Stoker, being interned in the Devil's Dyke concentration camp and therefore unavailable), he finds aid in the most curious of places, including a meeting with not one, but a whole committee of criminal genii in a Limehouse sewer. Providing him with his entreé into the seamier side of London is Geneviève Sandrine de l'Isle Dieudonné, who was a vampire when Dracula was still a babe in arms (and who Kim Newman assures us is not quite the same Geneviève Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonné as featured in Jack Yeovil's* Warhammer novels). Geneviève has been passing her time helping at the Toynbee Institute, a Victorian social initiative, though one increasingly becoming indistinguishable from a hospital as it tries to care for the newly dead, many of whom do not long survive being of Dracula's flawed bloodline (Geneviève is not, a point she's rather superior about). The Toynbee's plight is not helped by its increasingly distracted director, Jack Seward, who lives in fear of joining Van Helsing outside the Palace, while mourning his lost love, Lucy Westenra.

Meanwhile, another of Van Helsing's coterie, Art Holmwood, has done rather better for himself and as the newly-dead Lord Godalming is now gopher to the very not newly-dead Prime Minister, Lord Ruthven. When he isn't sniffing around Charles' fiancee, the oh-so-prickly Pamela.

And then the Dear Boss letter arrives, and the killer gains a new sobriquet, Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper with vampires, in fact with a walk-on part for just about every literary vampire Kim Newman could think of, and he's an expert on the subject. And with plenty of non-vampires as well, from Mycroft Holmes of the Diogenes Club, to real people such as Florence Stoker and Oscar Wilde (vampirised) and fictional ones ranging from Danny Dravot (The Man Who Would be King) to Soames Forsyte (the Forsyte Saga) and both Doctors Jekyll and Moreau. There's an extensive Afterword and Newman admits even he isn't sure how many real and fictional characters he managed to squeeze in.

It's a self-indulgent romp, but an incredibly readable one, and there's a far deeper game afoot than first appears. And the moment I finished it I downloaded The Bloody Red Baron, which picks up the tale in the Great War (Biggles as a vampire!)

*aka Kim Newman

The Peshawar Lancers, S M Stirling

This literally fell off the bookshelf into my hand (I'd bumped it) and I ended up thoroughly enjoying re-reading it. It's another one of Stirling's alternate histories where the world gets devastated, but in this case it's a fairly conventional comet strike rather than a change in the laws of physics and odd goings-on at Rhode Island. The comet strikes in the mid-1880s, triggering a nuclear winter across the Northern Hemisphere, followed by famine across the bits of it not already devastated by tsunamis. St Disraeli, warned of the reality he's facing as British PM by a coterie of scientists, oversees the evacuation of as much of British civilization to India as he can before Eurasia inevitably succumbs to cannibal hordes (Stirling does like his post-apocalyptic cannibal hordes).

Roll on a hundred and forty years or so and the Angrezi (English) Raj is the world superpower, with its airships and railways and even a few motorcars driven by Stirling-cycle engines. The British have assimilated into India as another martial caste, and high society is an odd mix of Victorian militant Christianity and high-caste Hinduism. On the borders of the Raj are it's rivals, the Caliphate, the Empire of Nippon (now including China) and the hellhole that is Russia, where the state religion is cannibalism and worship of Tchernebog, the Peacock Angel, destroyer of all - quite literally a death cult. The only other world power is French North Africa, loosely allied with the Raj by way of common enmity with the Caliphate and common European heritage.

Captain Athelstane King of the Peshawar Lancers, just back to the Punjab from a campaign in Afghanistan, is an officer in the pure Kipling mode, literally born to serve and incapable of being anything other than ruggedly heroic. Then someone tries to kill him, while at the same time another group tries to kill his physicist twin sister Cassandra serveral hundred miles away, and King finds himself, and his family, caught up in the Great Game. King is quickly brought up to speed by Warburton, a Political Officer (i.e. spy) and friend of his deceased father. It turns out the Russians have been trying to kill off Athelstane's family for several generations. Warburton doesn't have a clue why, but he does have a suspicion how they keep getting close, and he'll be branded doolally* if he tries to tell anyone. The nightmare that was survival in Russia post-holocaust produced a small bloodline of women, the True Dreamers, able to sense multiple parallel worlds, and to use that to select the actions that will lead to success. And now the Okhrana, the Russian intelligence service, who the True Dreamers serve, want to kill Athelstane, and Cassandra, and maybe they won't stop there.

So, like any manly-thewed Kiplingesque officer, Athelstane and his Havildar (sergeant) Narayan Singh, together with Ibrahim Khan, an Afghan bandit they pick up along the way, head off undercover to try and figure things out, while their mother finagles Cassandra the safest nest she can find her -- at the heart of the Imperial Court, as tutor to the tempestuously teenaged Princess Sita, currently being courted by Vicomte Henri de Vascogne on behalf of the French Dauphin, and which brings her into the orbit of the dynamically noble Crown Prince Charles. Meanwhile the dastardly Count Ignatieff, agent of the Okhrana, aided by his True Dreamer, Yasmini, is still out to kill the Kings, just like he did their father, and his ultimate aim goes much, much further, being nothing less than the extinction of the human race (like I said, death cult).

It's a great, rip-roaring, swashbuckling adventure in the Kiplingesque Kim/Gunga Din/North West Frontier sense, with desperate fights with Thugs and with Ninja, fist fights on trains and sword-fights on top of airships, and the cavalry riding to the rescue, What impresses me most is the way Stirling has caught that upper-class Anglo-Indian sense of noblesse oblige and duty to the Raj. You could drop Athelstane King into North West Frontier (Cinemascope, 1959) in place of Kenneth More's Captain Scott and he'd be utterly at home. Of course that means it's also caught that sense of Imperial manifest destiny, and an upper class that has slotted quite comfortably into the Indian caste system, but it does do a relatively decent job of making Narayan Singh and Ibrahim Khan just as much heroes as is Athelstane King.

*from Deolali, the asylum for people of quality in the original Raj

Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik

I initially read this when it was released, but idly picked it up off the shelf recently and ended up reading it from start to finish in a single sitting.

Think of Patrick O Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series, but with Stephen Maturin a dragon instead of a doctor. In the first book, Captain ~~Jack Aubrey~~ Will Laurence of the Reliant seized a French frigate carrying the egg of a Chinese Celestial Dragon, impressed (in the McCaffrey sense) the dragonling when it hatched, named it Temeraire and was subsequently transferred much against his will to the Aerial Corps, whence Temeraire proved decisive in defeating Napoleon's aerial invasion.

Only now the Chinese want their dragon back. And as the British don't dare push them further into the French camp, Laurence is under intense pressure to give up Temeraire, whatever he, or Temeraire, think of the matter. Ordered to China, they set sail on a massive dragon transport, effectively a sail-powered aircraft carrier for dragons. From the UK to China is a long voyage under sail and there are ongoing tensions between Temeraire's crew and the Navy (particularly as certain aspects of the Corps are a closely held secret) and between the British and the Chinese delegation, which includes a Chinese prince much inclined to stand on his precedence.

Aubrey and Maturin seems very much a concious model as the transport plods its slow way around the African coast - there are encounters with the French, encounters with sea monsters, encounters with storms, encounters with Chinese cuisine, and superstition among the crew obscuring a real conspiracy. Novik does a good job of illustrating the slow speed of nautical travel in the age of sail, and her exploration of how dragons would affect war at sea is really rather good.

And then they finally arrive in China and the politicking kicks into high gear, but that almost fades into insignificance, because the Chinese have a completely different system for managing their dragons than the Europeans, one in which the dragons are much more equal partners. And if it is surprising for Laurence, it is a stunning revelation for Temeraire.

On re-reading you can see that this was the book where Novik really started to shape Temeraire as an agent of change, after a fairly conventionally plotted first book, but it went so far off our timeline in the next volume that I never did finish the series - which is probably more a matter of my tastes than the quality of the writing.

The Moscow Option, David Downing

I know I wrote a review of this somewhere recently, but I'm damned if I can find it! As I don't think it was here....

Early winter 1941, and as the German front nears Moscow, Hitler flies out to assess the situation, But before he can issue revised orders, which in our time line will turn the thrust north towards Leningrad, his aircraft crashes and Der Fuhrer is left in a coma, leaving the German High Command free to prosecute the war as they see fit. Papilio Acta Est

They do rather well, but are still subject to that old military saw that only an idiot invades Russia, especially in Winter. Also covered are the campaign in North Africa, and the war in the Pacific. The coverage of the Russian campaign is solid, I didn't see any obvious weaknesses, but it's not one of the areas of military history I've a deep knowledge of. The Desert Campaign - actually a dual thrust with a northern arm coming down through the Caucuses towards Persia - I wasn't quite so convinced by. The book does a really good job of showing how knife-edge balanced the entire campaign was, with victory dependent on supply, but Rommel's initial triumph seems a little too easy. The campaign in the Pacific I have real problems with, the reasoning that sees the Japanese realise their codes have been broken and avoid the Battle of Midway is sound, but the option they come up with to replace it is, well, absurd. The Imperial Japanese Navy under Admiral Yamamoto was bold, but it was not so ludicruously self confident as to commit both the battle AND carrier fleets to a battle off Panama. There's either a deliberate ignoring of Japanese doctrine here, or a failure to understand it.

Despite the criticism it's a good read, but an annoying one. This actually first appeared in the 1990s when the military alternate history genre had its peak, with The Hitler Options, Disaster at D-Day and so on. I didn't notice it back then, but this is a recent reprint in e-book form, and it's patently obvious it was produced from an OCR scan of the original edition. I can understand why that might be done, but if you do it that way it's pretty important you have someone who knows the subject, or at least has a copy of the original, doing a line-editing pass to correct the OCR. I'm fairly confident Hitler did not have a general called Jodi (Jodl), nor did the Luftwaffe have an aircraft called the Mel-10 (Me 110, and should actually be Bf 110). There are OCR errors on almost literally every page, which made for a teeth-grinding read. At least I got it cheap.

The British Battleship, Norman Friedman

Technically I haven't finished this yet, I'm about 75% of the way through. It's a design history of the British battleship since the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, it's 400+ pages of A4 small print and I've been reading it since early September. It is incredibly information dense and I keep having to put it aside when my head starts swimming. But if the Royal Navy is your thing then this is essential reading, Friedman having dug deep into the archives to write this. I already have his volume on Cruisers and the second one on Destroyers, and annoyingly his footnote habit has gotten out of control again. I thought he'd tamed it, but we're back to up to 8 pages of footnotes on a chapter, at the back of the book, and they're even more information dense than the main body of text. 120 footnotes in a chapter? Seriously? It makes the book physically a pain to read.

But for all the complaints, it's invaluable, I've found myself reforming my opinions of much accepted wisdom. It points out Dreadnought was even more revolutionary for her engines than her guns, puts the final nail in Beatty's "there's something wrong with our bloody ships today" line at Jutland (more like "there's something wrong with my fleet orders that have made my captains discard every safety precaution built into their magazines, and after the war I'm going to use my position as First Sea Lord to make sure that stays buried"), and the famed loss of HMS Hood to 'weak' battecruiser armour at the Battle of the Denmark Strait turns out to be the loss of the best, indeed most revolutionary, armoured ship in the world in 1920, and still better armoured than most of our battleships in 1940).

Rebuilding the Royal Navy: Warship Design Since 1945, David K Brown and George Moore

Fascinating, and arguably essential reading if the post-WWII Royal Navy is one of your interests. Full of the background detail that allows you to understand why the ships of the RN were designed and built the way they were. And this is the period where DKB was one of our senior Naval Architects, so we are in many cases privileged to hear the view of the man on the inside, who was actually there when the decisions were taken, or making them himself. It was amusing to read about his two decade fight to get even an experimental installation of a transom flap on a frigate (basically a hydrodynamic trick to make ships go faster - though no one understands how it works), simultaneously with finding out from other sources that a transom-flap is now going to be part of the mid-life update on the Type 23 frigates. The inexorable progression of technological development, and the need to keep pace, or fight to keep pace, is rather a theme here.

The authors divided the chapters between themselves, and for some reason I preferred the chapters where DKB was the primary author, rather than those were George Moore was, never mind that Moore gets to cover the immediate post-war period I'm most interested in. I can't actually pin down why that is, and they note that they each reworked the other's chapters, but I definitely found that I didn't feel George Moore's chapters quite matched what I expected from reading DKB's 'Warrior to Dreadnought', 'Grand Fleet' and 'Nelson to Vanguard', while DKB's did. It may be simply a matter of style, and the bulk of the book is DKB's work, but there was just that little niggle.

Up Next

The Bloody Red Baron, Kim Newman

Web Comics

A couple I've picked up recently: Storm and Desire, which is roughly a first contact situation involving some interesting characters in a far future setting - I've not quite worked out where this is going yet, but it's interesting enough to stick with, and White Noise, which is a post-apocaplyptic tale with a teenaged experimental subject (with large, white, fluffy tail) fleeing from the secret wilderness experimental site where he grew up/woke up moments ahead of the terrorists who killed everyone he'd ever known and forced to seek shelter in the big city, where mutants like him are shot on sight (definite manga influence here, one of the characters wears a top saying "I Glomp Bishonen" - and does). Meanwhile Strong Female Protagonist has been quite stunning in recent months, and Wilde Life has been almost equally good - incidentally both have strong fandoms on their respective fora. In other comics I follow, Footloose has put itself on hiatus, but the authors have picked straight up with the related Black Market Magic, and Spinnerette is doing the same, picking up with White Heron, possibly the first ever South Korean set superhero web comic (spun out of the origin story of Spinnerette's Mecha Maid).

Current Mood: Literate
Current Location: ex Libris
Crossposts: http://dwgism.livejournal.com/18331.html

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