Moe Lane

I picked John Ringo’s and Mike Massa’s The Valley of Shadows (set in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising zombie apocalypse series) not because it’s out.  It’s not out. It won’t be out until November.  But it is being published by Baen, which means that they will release the E-ARC sometime… soon? Maybe?  Maybe putting it out there now will remind somebody else to pull the trigger on the E-ARC, and then I can get it, and then maybe this twitch in my eye will go away.

Come on, Baen.  It’s been a while since the last Black Tide Rising book. Have a heart.  Release the E-ARC. Let me give you my money.

SM Stirling’s The Black Chamber is coming out in a couple of weeks: it’s an alternate history where President Taft suffered a fatal heart attack at just the right moment in 1912 to ensure that Woodrow Wilson would lose ignominiously to Teddy Roosevelt in the Presidential election.  From what I’ve read so far on Stirling’s site, the results from that are going to make a lot of people’s teeth grind. But there are fights on zeppelins and spying against perfidious Imperial Germans and high tech (by 1916 AD standards) and whatnot, so it’s all going to be good, hopefully. I’m looking forward to reading it.

It’s weird: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican vampire novel Certain Dark Things has been on my Kindle for over a year, only I never got into it.  Which is weird because: Mexican vampires.  This is the sort of thing that I would read.  And now I have gotten into it, and it’s all about Mexico City and different kinds of vampires and the drug trade and yeah, this is pretty good stuff. It could be ported into a Night’s Black Agents campaign, which is why I got reminded of the book in the first place.

Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away is an extended metaphor for resource depletion, seen through the lens of 1970s-1980s environmental pessimism, of course.  This much is known. But it will still be taught in literature classes a hundred years from now, while other suchlike metaphors have been justly exiled to the dusty hells of graduate thesis footnotes, because Larry Niven can in fact write.  Not to be impolite, but there are authors out there who seem to favor other qualities above the ability to write well.  Not as many as I might like*, but they’re out there. (more…)

Hey did you know that Lois McMaster Bujold had written this novella called The Flowers of Vashnoi: Vorkosigan Saga yeah no neither did I there’s the link it’s downloading now it’s all about Ekaterina Vorkosigan and oh hey the download’s done see you later.

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I SAID, new Vorkosigan saga novella! It’s OK! Go!

Borrowed Time?  …Oh, hell.  Jack Campbell wrote a bunch of time travel stories. :sigh: Let me get out my credit card…

A Just Determination is the first in Jack Campbell’s ‘JAG in Space’ series, and I held out for as long as I could. I really and truly did.  But eventually I was going to succumb.

I’ll update the sidebar tomorrow.  Bad Internet connection here.  Like, really bad. This post has had it blow up three times already.

Uncharted is the first in the new Arcane America series by Kevin J Anderson and Sarah Hoyt, and it has proven to be most diverting.  As you might have guessed, it’s alternate history fantasy (magic returns in 1759 and promptly cuts off America from Europe), set in the early 1800s and telling of a somewhat different Lewis and Clark Expedition. I look forward to the upcoming books in the series, although I suspect that they’re going to be somewhat more violent than the inhabitants might suspect. Can’t say why without spoilers.

And so, adieu to Stark’s War.

Stark’s War is not John Hemry’s/Jack Campbell’s best military science fiction series. Which is to say, it’s A+, instead of A++ and a silent Q.  I still chewed through it in about a day and a half.

Like one does. (more…)

Just finished the Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints E-ARC, and I read Grunge and Sinners a while back.  They’re interesting books: Larry Correia and John Ringo managed to create a hero who I like and want to succeed, while at the same time seeing him as an utter a*shole.  That’s harder than it looks!  But, well, Correia and Ringo. They give good pulp action.

And so, adieu to Theodore Rex.
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