Monday, December 12, 2016

Book Review: The Annihilation Score, by Charles Stross


The latest book in Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series, The Annihilation Score, takes place in the days and weeks following the events of the preceding novel, The Rhesus Chart, which ended with (here be spoilers!) with the apparent death of Angelton, the Eater of Souls and direct superior to Bob Howard. Bob, is of course, the decidedly put down upon spy in the best Len Deighton tradition and employee of a super-secret British occult agency tasked with defending the realm from against supernatural threats.

At the beginning of The Annihilation Score, the marriage between Bob and his wife, Moe, is coming unglued, while yet another threat emerges.  This time, it isn’t Bob who is answering the call, but Moe, who, in a deft piece of writing, is the main protagonist of this novel. As Agent Candid, she is the wielder of a sentient white-bone violin that deals destruction to demons and other assorted nasties. Always on the sidelines, this relationship is one of the many that Stross examines throughout the novel. She must also deal with two of Bob’s ex-girlfriends as she examines the meaning of her own relationship with her husband.

Stross also maintains his usual light touch as the central plot point unfolds: an upsurge in apparent “superpowers” and superheroes and villains – which are actually sourced in magic and driven by the early stages of the world-ending CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and are therefore The Laundry’s business.  The book is actually a very clever examination – and satire – of the all superhero genre – with subtle dose of bureaucracy insanity thrown in.

The Annihilation Score ends in a hugely satisfying climax but leaves many questions unanswered, as is fitting, as despite the fantastic swirling around, it is still very much rooted in in reality. Both this book and its immediate predecessor, The Rhesus Chart, are not directly related to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN – which is when the Stars Finally Become Right – and the Many Angled Ones begin to seep through the walls of our universe. With the next novel in the series, the main event should finally begin, and for that I am waiting for with great anticipation.

Regular readers of this space will know by now of my high opinion of both Stross and this series. If you haven’t started reading it by now, you most certainly should. You won’t regret it.

Up Next:

I’ll be exploring a trio of Robert Conroy books: 1882: Custer in Chains, Germanica, and Red Inferno: 1945.

Meanwhile, you can  purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Alternate Futures 4: Come Fly With Me!

It has been a very busy – yes even stressful – time here at the blog. First, I’ve got a new job – for which I am very grateful.  There is a steep a steep learning curve attached, but I am confident I will gradually overcome this.  I’m getting ready to move to a new apartment closer to where I work, thus cutting down a killer commute, which is its own source of stress…

…and there’s this Donald Trump thing. Over a week on, I, like much of the rest of the world, am still how trying to get my head around how possibly Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it. Although I predicted it in this space back in April, I still can’t believe it. Anyhow, the less said about that, perhaps the better.  

On to the main topic of today’s post, a more gentile form of air travel, a passenger flying wing airliner, based on John K. Northrop's XB-35 and YB-49 flying wing bombers of the late '40s and early '50s.  According to its backers, the flying wing jet transport represented the "fulfillment of scientific vision and symbolized the dreams of science for our world of tomorrow." If it were only so. Ultimately, the bomber projects came to naught, stifled by a conservative military, and the the dreams for the big wing airliner faded away.  I like to think that flying wings like these could be flying the friendly skies of some alternate world and may yet somehow fly over our own world in the not-to-distant future:


Design for passenger version of Northrop's Flying Wing
Cabin mock up from promo film.


















Blow up of image below; from newspaper.







Here's the Northrop promotional film for the passenger wing, which gives a clue of how it all might've unfolded:


Meanwhile, you can  purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.
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Saturday, November 5, 2016

Book Review: Bombs Away, by Harry Turtledove



Harry Turtledove is back with another fresh look at our times through the lens of alternate history.  This time, he asks what if the Cold War – most specifically the Korean War – got hot? In truth, it almost did. In our history, General Douglas MacArthur publically petitioned President Harry Truman to use nuclear weapons in Korea to after Chinese positions just inside China.

Wisely, in our history, Truman turned down MacArthur’s request. The request for nuclear weapons was one of the many clashes between Truman and MacArthur that eventually led to MacArthur being fired as commander of UN forces in Korea.

However, in Bombs Away, the first of his three-part Hot War trilogy, Turtledove posits that MacArthur’s request made against a Korean situation that was more desperate.  With no way out, Truman accedes to the general’s wishes.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union began trading cities in a drawn-out nuclear exchange, much as described by cold war theorist Herman Khan (one of the real-life models for the character of Dr. Strangelove) suggested might happen.  Meanwhile, conventional fighting breaks out in Europe as the Red Army begins its drive across Germany and to the Rhine.  The action unfolds in a frighteningly plausible fashion.

Indeed, Turtledove has picked possibly the last moment that mankind might’ve been able to survive an atomic war with comparatively low-yield nuclear weapons only in the hands of the two superpowers, and the only delivery method being, for the most part, slow propeller-driven bombers.  Work on both ICBMs and far more powerful thermonuclear weapons was under way but had not yet produced anything far from useful.

As befitting any of his multivolume works, Turtledove presents us a wide and diverse cast of characters, ranging from the high and mighty to the soldiers on the front line and civilians caught in the crossfire. It’s to his continual credit that he does not lose track of any of his characters. In a very real way, Bombs Away is a counterpart to the author’s other examination of the same time period, Joe Steel (reviewed earlier in this blog).

Upshot: highly recommended. I will be looking forward to reading the next volume in the series, Fall Out, once it’s out in paperback (remember, I pay for my books).

What’s next?
Next month, I will be reviewing the most recent book in Charles Stross’ the Laundry Files series, The Annihilation Score. Following that, I’ll be exploring a trio of Robert Conroy books: 1882: Custer in Chains, Germanica, and Red Inferno: 1945.

Meanwhile, you can  purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Alternate Futures 3: Worlds That Weren’t

We all knew how we were supposed to live in the World of Tomorrow.  Higher, Faster, Better. Everything pointed onwards and upwards.

Except it didn’t.  We probably should’ve known better that the streamlined jet and rocket-like Space Age images that were products the imaginations of countless artists, were exactly that: imagination, and nothing else.  But somehow, it all seemed so tantalizingly close. Dream on:





Following Up:

If you’ll recall earlier in this blog how I reported that how billionaire Elon Musk and other prominent individuals had become convinced that there was a good chance that we were living in someone else’s simulation, à la The Matrix.  Even the Bank of America has jumped on board, recently stating there’s up to a 50% chance that we were living inside a simulated reality.

But now, according to The Independent, two unnamed Silicon Valley billionaires who believe in the simulation hypothesis, are putting their money where their mouths are and have secretly hired scientists “to break us out of the simulation.”

Now, according to Musk - and it is unknown if he is one the funders of this project — if we were living in a simulation, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. On the contrary, if we weren’t living in a simulation, Musk says, then all human life is in danger of ending, so we should hope that we are living in one.

Stay tuned...

Meanwhile, you can  purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Book Review: United States of Japan, by Peter Tieryas

The concept of a world where the Axis won the Second World War has been an evergreen topic among writers in the alternate history genre.  With the popularity and critical acclaim of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, the adaption of the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, this has become an even more popular area for writers to explore.

It’s not just because of High Castle, of course: The Second World War remains a defining event of the last century and is cast as the Good War, the ultimate battle between Good and Evil.  So it’s no wonder that writers continually return to this subject to find new areas to explore.

Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan is one such new and welcome entry.  A multilayered novel that weaves back and forth between the years since the United States’ capitulation to the Axis in 1948, the action takes place in the titular area that Imperial Japan has carved out as a puppet state for itself on the west coast of North America. The United States of Japan is a country both militarily and culturally under the thumb of Imperial Japan. The primary antagonist is Captain Benjamin Ishimura, who is a video game censor for the Imperial Army. He is called in to help investigate USA, a subversive video game illegally distributed by the George Washingtons, a fanatical guerilla group that depicts among other things, an American victory during the Second World War and the wartime conduct of Imperial Japanese forces that many would just as soon have forgotten.

We follow Ishimura – who is a well-drawn character not without his own faults and a past – through a richly detailed universe that pays homage in its own way to such works by Philip K. Dick as The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Indeed, the video game that Ishimura spends the much of the novel hunting is much like The Grasshopper Lies Heavy from High Castle as it depicts another reality where the Axis lost the war and shows how fluid our reality can be. Comparisons between High Castle and the United States of Japan seem almost inevitable.  I don’t find this troublesome as these are deftly handled and are mixed in with other references such as the giant mecha who regularly stomp through anime.

I enjoyed reading United States of Japan. It is a particularly well-written and rewarding exploration of an aspect of history, which like the best of this particular genre, uses fiction to reveal fact, which as mentioned earlier, some would prefer to ignore and where the shoe is definitely put on the other foot.  Heartily recommended.

What’s Next?

Next month, I’ll have my review of the first book in paperback of Harry Turtledove’s Hot War Series, Bombs Away. After that, I will be reviewing the latest instalment in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series, The Annihilation Score.  Next, I have my review of a trifecta of Robert Conroy books: 1882: Custer in Chains, Germanica, and Red Inferno: 1945.  Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, you can  purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Alternate Futures 2: Cars of a Different Tomorrow

If you’re of a certain age like me, you’ll remember the concept cars that Detroit regularly rolled out during the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s.  Needle sharp with fins, swept-back lines, and bubble canopies that wouldn’t be out of line on a launch pad, these dream machines were definitely of their time.They exuded optimism about the future.  Sometimes they hinted at what Detroit had in mind for the next generation of a production model; other times they were sheer flights of space age fantasy.

Sometimes, I feel misty-eyed and yes, a little deprived that some of these concepts never saw the light of day. But just maybe somewhere, they’re cruising down the highway of some alternate world. You never now.
1955 Lincoln Futura - later reborn as the Batmobile









1959 Cadillac Cyclone: the black cones on the
front of the car were designed to cover radar dishes















My favourite: The 1961 Ford Gyron

















1969 Buick Century Cruiser
Meanwhile, you can always purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Book Review: The Long Utopia, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Is utopia possible? And if so, at what price? These are some of the questions posed by the penultimate book in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Earth series, The Long Utopia.

As The Long Utopia opens, some years have passed since the last novel in the series, The Long Mars. Our main protagonist, Joshua Valiente, is well into his middle age, and is wondering is that all there is. Never mind that he is one of the pioneers of the Long Earth – the interconnected series of parallel worlds that humanity has dispersed through and can travel through by “stepping.” Joshua’s mid-life crisis takes him back to the old Datum Earth – the “original” Earth, now plunged into an ice age thanks to the eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, where he learns more than he bargained for about his family tree.

Meanwhile, other characters, including Lobsang, the delightful android Tibetan monk/motorcycle mechanic, and his equally delightful android wife Agnes have settled into retirement on an idyllic stepwise world of New Springfield with their adopted child. It’s into the midst of this utopia, that in the words of the late Ray Bradbury, something wicked this way comes. It’s this thing that the humans and the post-human Next, must come together to confront if they’re to save the one thing they hold in common, the Long Earth.

No more from me here, except I highly recommend this book. It is a finely crafted mixture of hard scientific speculation and pure whimsy. If you’re not reading the series, dive in; it’s not too late. Both Pratchett, whom we lost recently and Baxter, have exceeded themselves in that most difficult of a writer’s tasks, believable world-building. The series has been a complete joy to read; I look forward to the last book in the series, The Long Cosmos.

What’s Next?

Next month, I’ll have a review of Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan. Expect also in the following months, a review of the first book in paperback of Harry Turtledove’s The Hot War series, Bombs Away. I am currently reading it and am quite enjoying it. Also on the horizon are two novels by Robert Conroy: 1882 Custer in Chains and Germanica.

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Alternate Futures 1: The World of Tomorrow That Wasn’t

When I was in Grade 7, I found this curious book in my school library: The World of Tomorrow, by Kenneth K. Goldstein, published in 1969, the same year as the first moon landings.  It was full of beautiful four colour illustrations that assured me of all wonderful things that were just around the corner: giant space stations, cities on the moon and under the sea, weather control, manned missions to Mars and the other planets, computers in the home, and sleek jet-like cars zooming down automated roadways between gleaming new cities. A few years later, I found a copy of the book in a second-hand store, so I snapped it up, so serious an impression it had made on me.

Well, the future didn’t happen exactly like we thought it would, did it?  Oh, we have our space station – with a crew of six – and we do have computers in the home, which would seem to be the only prediction they got right. Sure we have other things like cell phones and the web, now it seems, driverless cars, but…

You see my point.  Still, we do have snatches of that more optimistic, brighter – and probably, to be honest, a little unrealistic – alternate tomorrow, which I still like to think, may have happened in some other reality.  In this post, we’ll be starting off with a few images from the General Motors Futurama II exhibit from the 1964 New York World’s Fair that featured so prominently in The World of Tomorrow.

Enjoy.


Undersea habitat








Space station





 







The City of Tomorrow (and Highway of Tomorrow)
House

Automated highway and farm blooming in the south west.


























Weather Control Central

















Who knows? Maybe these things will still come to pass.

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  Thanks.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Reviewing the First Season of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle


I’ll open this review by saying that I liked Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. While not a one-to-one retelling of the landmark 1963 Philip K. Dick novel it’s based on, it’s a very faithful but loose adaption. I’ll explain this in a minute. The show’s producers, Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz have succeeded in painstakingly creating a realistic and by turns, terrifying world where the Axis won the Second World War. It’s a monumental work.

As I said, while the series is faithful to the spirit of Dick’s novel, it a well-done but, again, loose adaption. The novel and the series both take place in 1962 in an alternate America that some 15 years previously had surrendered to Germany and Japan. The Axis powers divided the country into three parts: The Japanese – dominated Pacific States of America on the west coast, the Nazi- ruled rump of the United States on the east coast, leaving the Rocky Mountain States, which serve as a neutral buffer between them. As in the novel, in the series, a cold war exists between the two former Axis partners (Italy doesn’t seem to rate a mention). Most of the novel takes place in the Pacific States of America and in the Rocky Mountain States. In the series, the action is spread across equally America, giving us an interesting chance to see life in America under Nazi control. In the series there is mounting concern over what might happen once Hitler who were are told has Parkinson’s disease, finally dies, which mirrors a similar plot element in the novel. 

Characters from the novel, such as Robert Childran and Nobusuke Tagomi are present. Some, such as Julina Frink, have had their roles revised extensively. A whole slate of new characters has also been added, including SS Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith, who is in charge of fighting the Resistance in the east, and The Marshal, a bounty hunter who stalks the neutral zone. I can’t decide whether the latter character comes out of a Stephen King novel or a Sergio Leone western. I enjoyed the fact that the characters are not black-and-white stick figures, but are, by and large, well-fleshed out individuals who struggle to get by just like the rest of us. I even found myself feeling for Obergruppenfurher Smith at one point, which says a lot.   


While the original novel was more of a meditative piece, television demands some kind of conflict, and so, the Resistance – never mentioned in the book – is given prominence in the series.  Another point of difference between the novel and the series – I’m not knocking the series mind you – is that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book within Dick’s book, which showed that the Axis had really lost the war, has become a series of newsreels that, in the spirit of Dick’s book –  still show a world, but not necessarily ours – where the Allies won the war.  Perhaps because television is a visual medium, this can be both again expected and forgiven.  But interestingly, as of the end of the first season, we have not met the titular man in the high castle and the author of Grasshopper, Hawthorne Abendsen. Or have we? 

I can assure you that even if you had never read the original book, you would still enjoy the television series. If you’ve read the novel, you'll find this, as I said, a faithful adaption of a masterwork of the genre.  In doing this, the producers have created a masterwork of their own. 

Like the best of the alt-hist genre, The Man in the High Castle holds a fun-house mirror up to our own imperfect world. After finishing my binge watching of the series, I found myself wondering if indeed we did live in that best of all possible worlds. Maybe we do. We should count ourselves lucky.

As of this writing, a second season of ten episodes of The Man in the High Castle is in production, and is due to premiere on Amazon Prime December 16th, 2016. If anything, we can expect the second season to cast a wider net in exploring its alternate universe and introduce some new characters.  Hopefully, sometime during the next few months, I’ll be able to review it for you.

What’s Next?

I’m halfway through reading Harry Turtledove’s first book in paperback of his The Hot War series, Bombs Away – I hope to have a review for you soon. I can report, that so far, I’m enjoying it. I’ll also have forthcoming reviews on Peter Tieryas’s United States of Japan and Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Utopia.

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  Thanks.