bluegargantua

Well...obviously not true. But I have been making some fairly steady progress getting through some books and while the review backlog is still quite lengthy, I've decided to put out the ones I've finished to at least get them out and to perhaps encourage a bit more dilligence.

Anyway, from way back, here's what I've been reading:

It was on sale and looked interesting so I picked up A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II by Simon Parkin. This book focuses partially on the British Wrens of WWII who helped develop and train naval officers in anti-submarine warfare by gaming out scenarios. A bit of a military-LARP if you will. The officers were seated in a large auditorium that had model ships representing a typical convoy, while the Wrens controlled the submarines and other “NPC”s.

So this book suffers from a number of problems. Like a lot of history books, it throws a lot of names and faces at you and only a few of them are consistent enough that you can easily follow them through time. The book also tends to skip back and forth in time a bit which doesn’t help. The biggest problem is that all this training eventually leads to a huge battle where the German submarine fleet is so thoroughly defeated that they can no longer seriously threaten allied shipping. That entire battle is almost completely skipped. Very few details of what went on just “they sent all the subs at this big convoy and they lost because of all the wargaming scenarios the Brits went through”. It just seems like a ton of groundwork for no payoff at all.

You do get a decent-ish idea of how the gaming went, but again, not as much detail as you might like if that’s why you got into the book.

Let’s get back to fiction: The Last Human: A Novel by Zack Jordan is a pretty solid sci-fi novel. Sara is a young human being raised by a terrifying (if loving) spider alien and Sara, herself, is pretending to be another alien. In this future, almost every alien has joined a vast Federation-like organization called the Network and your status within that brotherhood of sophonts is determined largely by your intelligence (both straight IQ and other measures). Intelligence runs from deific-level intelligences down to the automated drones that clear up garbage. Once your IQ is above this line, you’re a citizen.

Anyway, Sara has to pretend she isn’t human because Humanity is a pariah. They were offered the chance to join and built warships and went on a rampage, until the Network shut them down. Now she’s living quietly on a backwater space station. Then a bounty hunter comes looking for her and we’re off to the races.

I rather enjoyed this book. The spider-momma is delightful and there are a number of other neat characters. The underlying plot works pretty well and even if I have some quibbles, there’s nothing in here that made me want to stop reading. Worth checking out.

For the summer session of Ad Hoc Book Club, we read: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Thirteen edited by Jonathan Strahan. This is a collection of Sci-Fi and Fantasy stories from 2018 that Mr. Strahan curated. The book club thought it was a great collection and I concur. In these times, I was hoping that a bunch of bite-sized reading would be easier for people to get through and I think it was helpful in getting back into a regular reading habit.

Tons of great stories in here, but three standouts were Intervention by Kelly Robson, If You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho, and The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander. Still, there was lots of good stuff in there and I do recommend it if you’re looking for some short, diverse reading.

Speaking of short reads, I picked up The Mongolian Wizard: A Tor.Com Original by Michael Swanwick which is the first in a string of short stories. In a magical Europe we meet Franz-Karl Ritter, a young man with a gift for working with wolves and Sir Toby, an English wizard and a bit of a doof...perhaps. A lot of important people are meeting at the estate of Ritter’s uncle and Ritter’s there to keep an eye on people. It was a short, fun read, although I haven’t gone after others in the series. Still, Swanwick is always a good read.

That's the first batch. Still about half a dozen or so to go. Hopefully soon, there are some fun ones coming up.

later
Tom