Category: Books

In the Mail: Agent Garbo.

This is, of course, Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day — and it’s making a credible case for the latter part of it. I ordered the book when I first heard the tale of Juan Pujol Garcia, and it came today; I started reading it while my kids were playing in the pool. It is, so far, compelling reading; apparently Juan Garcia was placed on this earth solely to lie to Nazi spies in ways that almost defy human understanding. It was a gift, and thank God that the man used his powers for good.

Moe Lane

PS: Apparently he was getting paid so well by the Abwehr that the British Double Cross operating budget ended up being significantly subsidized by their greatest enemy.  …That’s art, man. They should put that up on the wall in a museum, somewhere.

Tweet of the Day, Scenes From the Clusterf*ck That Is @United’s PR Department edition.

You know you’re having a bad day when the TSA is going all Don’t even TRY to drag us down with you, Sparky on you.  Believe it or not: the TSA is actually not the one at fault here. I know, I know: it confuses me a bit, too.

Via Instapundit.
Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Scenes From the Clusterf*ck That Is @United’s PR Department edition.

OK, your character is cool. But is your character JUAN PUJOL GARCIA cool?

As near as I can tell, every word of this story about Juan Pujol Garcia is true.  At least, MI5 is corroborating it. This guy messed up the Nazi response to D-Day in ways that is almost inconceivable to modern science, and he made it look easy.

Continue reading OK, your character is cool. But is your character JUAN PUJOL GARCIA cool?

Book of the Week: The Delirium Brief.

The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross is the latest in his Lovecraft-meets-espionage Laundry series, and it’s… well.  How do I put this nicely?  Charlie Stross — who is from Great Britain — has clearly been scared spitless by three specific current events since 2014 (two domestic and one foreign from his point of view, and you can almost certainly guess what those events were), and his horrified reaction to at least two of them clearly comes across in the book.  The effect is much like reading “The Horror At Red Hook” when you’re not a racist; you don’t get the same effect as you would from reading about stuff that actually scares you, but the horror that you pick up from the author still gives a certain frisson.

There. That should be polite enough.  After all, I do buy Charles Stross in hardcover. Continue reading Book of the Week: The Delirium Brief.

“From the Afterword to Pillars of Hell: The Birth of the Republic of Terra Navy, 2030-2080”

From the Afterword to Pillars of Hell_ The Birth of the Republic of Terra Navy, 2030-2080

Don’t know where to take this from here, to be honest.

From the Afterword to Pillars of Hell: The Birth of the Republic of Terra Navy, 2030-2080.

 

The Terran Navy was born in a hundred desperate orbital battles, fought by a handful of national wet navies that had been hastily converted into spacefaring (barely) vessels.  The first crews took to Earth orbit and fought using clumsy copies of captured, half-understood technologies; and they mostly died.  The ships that did survive were the ones whose captains were mad enough and lucky enough to get their ships within visual range of the enemy, using reckless speed and ignoring all thoughts of safety as a matter of course.

 

This tactic worked.  Not ‘worked better than anyone could have expected it to:’ it simply worked. Nobody in the Galaxy voluntarily fought ship battles at that range, and the swarming planetary looters who were Humanity’s first spacefaring enemy were swept from control of Earth orbit (at terrible cost) before the invaders could change their tactics. And once Earth controlled its own high ground again, the end was inevitable. The nascent Terran Navy had the resources of a planet backing it up, and in that campaign their enemy did not.

Continue reading “From the Afterword to Pillars of Hell: The Birth of the Republic of Terra Navy, 2030-2080”

In the Mail: Gotham by Gaslight.

No picture for it tonight: my wife’s reading it at the moment, and it’s her birthday so there you go.  Gotham by Gaslight was good, though. Batman generally comes close to a Victorian aesthetic anyway — it’s sort of implied by the word “Gotham” — so having the comic just drill down and embrace it fully works pretty well. Fair warning, though: it’s more of a mood piece than an action comic.

In the mail: Armistice: The Hot War.

Harry Turtledove’s latest in his Hot War series, which is set in an alternate universe where we started throwing A-bombs around in response to setbacks in the Korean War.  Armistice: The Hot War is shaping up to be one of those series where people don’t precisely win; they just kind of survive it.  Which is kind of interesting, because his last series (The War That Came Early) is the exact opposite.  In that alternate history the world thinks that it went through the wringer, even though having the war start over Czechoslovakia ended up ensuring that most of Western Europe got through it all relatively easily.  Heck, even the Germans ended up in that one with no Hitler, continued union with Austria, and the Holocaust stopped before it could even begin.

Sorry; geeking.  Anyway, it’s good, so far, but Armistice is the third book in a series. So read the first two… first.

In the (E-)Mail: The Monster Hunter Files.

I actually wasn’t over on Baen E-books for this — it’s been a while since the latest Honor Harrington, David Drake’s no doubt going to write another Leary & Mundy story any day now, and of course there’s all the 163X stuff — but I’ll grab the ARC of The Monster Hunter Files, ya, you betcha.  It is, after all, now on my list of wait-fors.  This one is a compilation of other authors playing around in Larry Correia’s universe, so it should be of particular interest.  I’m there largely for the “Agent Franks vs. Nazis,” myself.  Should prove to be… entertaining.