Battletech: Decision at Thunder Rift
by William Keith Jr.




I had a friend that was expirimenting with the new Battletech game engine, and that reminded me that these books exist... I see them know and then at book stores, but have never read any. It was always on of those things where they were an overwhelming amount of material and not clear starting point.

So now that it's easy to do so, I found what the first one was and happened to have some kindle credits and voila. The setting is definitely pretty interesting.. I think if I hadn't read about it online before hand I might have been confused though. The book does have a brief history of the timeline in the back (which I didn't see until later, but I had already read the info online anyway), but still was a bit of a learning curve to sort out.

Once you get into to, it's a fun world with lots of possiblities. This particular book has a very Dune-like general plot. The main character is pretty interesting, he's the hero, but not perfect by a long shot, which is good.

The main down side was the writing. The author spend alot of time playing up the capabilities of the mechs, then tore them down rather easily when it came to the actual battle scenes. He also got a bit too into the weeds with technical details for mundane things like communications which hurt the pacing a bit.

Overall though, a nice world to visit.. I think I'll at least read the other two Grayson Carlyle books at some point soon.

So Bright the Vision
Clifford Simak





Clifford Simak is the master at adding science fiction elements into a normal story and making it seem like it fits right and and isn't really fiction at all. He doesn't get nearly enough credit for being one of the greatest of the genre. This 4 short stories (some might call the first 3 Novellas at about 50 pages each) all do just that. The first one (Golden Bugs) is a very unique first contact that has some great insights on any potential meeting with an alien intelligence... so often we are shown as on a somewhat equal footing.. but this is a story about what happens if we're not.. and what could happen. It's a cautionary tale, but in a very sneaky way.

The 2nd two stories both take the premise that humans are unique in their ability to lie in the universe.. one is a rather eccentric story about a inter-galactic stamp collector. The other is amazingly contemporaries for a 60+ year old story, and discussed what happens if fiction writers get replaced with machines. Simak pictures mechanical devices that take story elements and mix them up rather than the AI we have now, but the concept is the same and has some excellent insights.

The final story 'Galactic Chest' is a bit odd.. definitely the my least favorite, but by no means bad. It's a take on the story of the brownies and the tailor.

So my wife did a thing...

This is from her Book Party this weekend reading chapter 1 of her memoir.

fb.watch/mQTOiaADk9/?mibextid=NnVzG8

I really should get City... I don't have that one. 

 I was able to pick up one of the black bordered Tarzan books (Jungle Tales) at cafe that had a few books for a buck each today.. that was exciting.   Not sure if it's still Neal Adams, but it's a good cover



Dance with Death
by Will Thomas



It seems we've explored all the different neighborhoods of long and we're officially going abroad for stories now. I really like the use of an actual historical event as the basis for the story (more or less)... it definitely added to things. I always enjoy looking things up later to see what the author took as fact, and what they may have fudged a bit for the story.

I've in previous reviews of the series noted that this is not really a Holmes analogue, but rather a Victorian version of Batman and Robin. It seems Mr. Thomas is struggling with the same thing Batman writers have for the last 50 years or so.. .what happens when Robin grows up? The comics have handled it by a using a veritable parade of people, but even so, whenever one of the previous fellows come back, they seem to either fall back in to the same pattern of Master/Sidekick, or tell the same coming of age story over and over and over again.

This later version is what is going on here. Thomas is still very clearly the side kick.. he's still living in Barker's house (despite being married for some time) and still things happen where Barker remarks that he's developing, even though that's already happened (I know for sure this is the 2nd time they've talked about Thomas having his own contacts, for instance).

I get it.. you write a bunch of good stories with a certain dynamic, and its hard to change it. When you don't though, you quickly run out of stories to tell. Hopefully this trap can be escaped from in the next book.

Even with the criticism, this was still a great book, but it definitely loses alot of points for the implications of the ending... poor guy just doesn't need that. Perhaps it'll end up being good in the end, but right now it seems like a case of the author just being too mean to his character.

Laura by Vera Caspary 

Another read of a book that I know from a classic film noir.  Caspary's novel was serialized in Colliers two years before the seminal film noir.  The broad strokes of the two are largely the same, but there are significant differences that make it well worth pursuing both the book and the film.  The book isn't a true literary noir.  Laura is not a femme fatale of the type that will become codified in later years.  She's a very competent and driven young lady, but it's not her scheming that causes any man's downfall.  And Macpherson isn't the type of hard-boiled detective that came out of Hammett and Chandler.  It's been long enough since I saw the film that I couldn't quite pinpoint all the differences, but they're fairly substantial, particularly in the ending.  Caspary uses an interesting technique of shifting narrators, which can be a bit jarring but is generally effective.  It does tend to make you wonder at the end which of the narrators was reliable...which is frankly to the good. 

If you've seen the film it's well worth your effort to read the novel.  If you haven't...well why haven't you?  It's a classic.  And the source material...well it's darn good.  

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard

I'd read and enjoyed Millard's previous popular history titles about the assassination of James Garfield and about Theodore Roosevelt's Amazon adventure so when I saw this one for cheap I picked it up.  Millard takes a discreet time period in the life of a larger than life figure, Winston Churchill, his time during the Boer War, and in particular his capture by the Boer army, his imprisonment and subsequent escape from a POW camp and this journey to the Portuguese East African coast.  Millard gives us enough background to get a sense of Churchill at age 25, his overweening ego and ambition, and his willingness to do almost anything to gain public recognition and acclaim.  

Most Americans, I think, only know World War II and, maybe, thanks to The Crown, post-war Churchill.  Millard gives us a short look at his background, his birth into aristocracy, his father's rise and fall, his socialite mother and, briefly, his military service in the Indian north-west frontier and the Mahdist War.  Following his narrow loss in the 1899 Oldham by-election, Churchill finagled, partly through his social connections, a position as a journalist for the Morning Post at the beginning of the Second Boer War.  The meat of the book is his time in South Africa and his capture by the Boers, his imprisonment and his escape.  The escape, coming at a time when the British army was meeting defeat after defeat at the hands of the Boer forces caused a sensation in the U.K. and Churchill credited it with his narrow victory in Oldham in the 1900 general election giving him his first seat in parliament. 

The book is interesting and well written as I'd expect given what I've read before from Millard.  There's enough background on Churchill, the war and the Boer's to allow even someone with little knowledge of the subjects to read comfortably.  For all that, the book feels a little slight.  I recognize that this really was a defining moment in a very important life, but it still seems like there just isn't quite enough meat on the bone.  

It probably doesn't help that in a fight between the Boer states and the waning British Empire, reasonable people probably need to root for a scoreless tie.  Because, really, both sides were terrible.  Don't get me wrong, this is still a solid read and it's a fairly quick read because it's well written.  It just isn't nearly as interesting a subject as Millard's previous two tomes.