All the Windwracked Stars (Sci Fi Essential Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is set in the same world of her stories 'Ice' & 'The Devil You Don't' from her collection The Chains That You Refuse. In fact, 'Ice' seems to be an excerpt or something that expanded into the novel, & from side references in Windwracked Stars it looks like 'The Devil You Don't' actually happened too. But you don't need to have read either story to read the novel.
Muire is a waelcyrge, a valkyrie in the Norse sort of world of the book. Ragnarok happened. Unfortunately, she ran away. She comes back after the battle to find everything she has ever known dead, except for an almost-dead valraven (two-headed intelligent pegasus) and the empty place where the body of Mingan the Wolf (sort of Loki & Fenris combined) had lain. The valraven convinces Muire to make a stab at living, at least as an emotional cripple, & in turn is reborn when Muire asks for a miracle.
Fast forward a few thousand years to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the last city alive on Valdygard (the earth/planet). It's protected from the wastes outside by the Technomancer, & Muire is living a quiet life when she suddenly meets both the reincarnation of Strifbjorn, the einherjar (angel/Norse god) she had loved from afar, & the still-dangerous old incarnation of Mingan, who vampyrically kills a man before disappearing. Muire has to deal with a shock to her emotional stability & the threat of her old enemy's reappearance.
Elizabeth Bear seems to like Norse mythology, as it was also the background for A Companion to Wolves, co-written with Sarah Monette. This is a novel about surviving and about being reborn, & reminded me at various times of parts of Bujold's A Civil Campaign ('the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn'), my favourite Fire Logic, by Laurie J Marks, & parts of Diane Duane. It also has intelligent animal-people (including a catgirl with a whip) who serve the Technomancer, called moreaux in a nod to HG Wells. I was waiting the whole book for some kind of reference to C'Mell (which didn't come). It was a really hard book to put down, & I liked it very much.

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Stars & Stripes Forever (Stars & Stripes, Book 1) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been a big fan of the alternate history genre for years, and this probably comes from the fact that I love history and have the kind of mind that always asks "what if?" The premise of this book is an excellent and plausible one - Britain and the United States going to war in 1862 following the "Trent Affair". However, as I read along in the book I was disappointed by how improbable some of the twists and turns in thestory are.
- Would the British have dared to mount an invasion of the US from Canada when they had only a few thousand troops whereas the US could send tens of thousands and still have plenty to face the Confederates (even if they had to go on the defensive vs. the CSA)?
- If the British had accidentally attacked a Confederate fort and gone on to sack the town nearby, wouln't they have tried to patch up relations with the CSA who were, after all, their allies. Even if they were overly confident, it is extremely improbable that they would have just thrown up their hands & said "what the heck, we'll just go to war against the CSA too!"
- The USA and CSA would not have been able to resolve their differences so quickly, even if they were up against a common enemy. This is the most improbable point in the book. Having a common enemy does not necessarily make nations (or people) friendly toward each other. Also, the Confederacy agreeing to give up slavery so readily - not likely! Harris seems to think that all the US needed to solve its sectional and racial hostilities was a good foreign enemy for everyone to fight! Its never been that easy.
- Even if US ironclads like Monitor had better armor and could beat anything in the Royal Navy, the Union only had 1 or 2 of them at the time (same for the CSA and its ironclads). Furthermore, these ironclads could only operate in coastal waters. In any deep water, the US had only wooden ships which were greatly outnumbered & outgunned by the British. The US got a couple of deep ocean ironclads by the end of the Civil War, but that would take quite a while to build and by the time they were finished the British could have built better oceangoing ironclads to match the US.
- Would French/Quebecois in Canada rise up in favor of an invading US army? They didn't much care for the British but they hadn't shown any interest in supporting the US cause in the American Revolution or War of 1812, so why would it suddenly be different? The English speaking Canadians would certainly have been against the US, considering that many of them were descended from Loyalists in the American Revolution who had all their property in the US confiscated for supporting the British cause.
I don't think that the author is anti-British in the sense of being against the whole British people, but he definitely has a hstrong hostility to the elite aristocracy. He portrays them almost universally as extremely arrogant, overconfident, anti-American, and completely ignorant of the technological changes going on in warfare. No doubt there were quite a few who matched the above description (all you have to do is read a little about the Crimean War!), but not every officer/gentleman in the British army was a pompous, drooling moron. The USA and CSA had their share of officers who were ignorant and owed their commission to social background & political influence too. In short, the premise is fascinating and certain parts but the direction the story takes is too improbable and too slanted against the British to make this a really good work of alternate history.

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Final Winter (Five Star Mystery Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This pacy novel reflects a scenario not a million miles away from the movie 'Speed.' In this case, we have a fleet of airborne airliners that will unleash havoc on the world if they descend below 3000 feet. The action is fast and well-written and it's just the kind of escapism that will make an ideal vacation read. But there's one vast flaw with the plot. You'll find some real nailbiting stuff as they try to solve the problem of getting the jets safely down to earth. Seems nobody thought to simply land them at airports over 3000 feet high, however! Oh well, that shouldn't stop you from enjoying a zippy read.

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The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics and Ancient Texts Review

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(More customer reviews)In COSMIC WAR, Dr Farrell tackles a subject previously muddled if not thoroughly mucked beyond redemption by the likes of Z. Sitchen and E. Von Daniken. If you are not put off by the ruthless wackiness this subject has already inspired, Farrell will repay your patience many times over.
The book's premise is that Planet Earth was, at minimum, one of the proverbial ants under the dancing elephants at some point at least ten thousand years ago, but more likely much more distant in time from the present. It was a war, a real war, in "heaven" if you like, but very decidedly remembered by most world cultures: Farrell's strength as a researcher is finding nooks and crannies you'd never imagine existed at all, in folklore and lurid biblical accounts of giants, as one example, that, once assembled and placed in a reasonable context, actually support the case for this ancient but galaxy-shattering war.
And make no mistake: Farrell is not outlining some penny-ante Star Wars type shoot-em-up. As another example, he is able to include fairly recent and well-vetted research and speculation about pulsars which, placed in context, indicate this war was, from our point of view, almost vast beyond our ability to imagine. Farrell wisely frames it all as techical speculation, but there is no doubt that human prehistory has some real shockers coming for H Sap. When these shockers start to make the newspapers, I don't doubt they'll look at least something like Farrell's outline indicates. Unless the truth is worse than any of us are capable of speculating, that is (and there is a chance of that, too.)
Minor caveats are probably called for: The book treats texts of a religious nature (Genesis, eg) as allegorical accounts of real history, far removed from their actual source events in time and then redacted down to morality tales. This might be annoying to scriptural literalists of at least two monotheisic religions, so exercise discretion if gifting a local pastor or rabbi.
That aside, THE COSMIC WAR is that greatest of oddities, unabashed speculation that does justice to its subject. With so much "alternative" hisory, science and religion in the hands of cranks and quacks, this present book is an oasis of sanity and a perfect template for the up and coming researcher who wants to see this sort of thing DONE RIGHT.
The Cosmic War, no more and no less, is the way these subjects should have been handled from the start. Had researchers on, say, Atlantis been as careful and bold as Farrell, Plato's story would have had a distinguished academic pedigree by now. Imagine that!

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This work presents the full history of the Exploded Planet hypothesis. There is ample evidence across our solar system of cataclysmic and catastrophic destruction events, and many planets are scarred from incredible impacts, and teeter in their orbits from unexplained causes. Rejecting naturalist and materialist assumptions of catastrophism forwarded by other researchers, Farrell seriously asserts that the causes are based in ancient myths of a Cosmic War in the heavens. Incorporating extraterrestrial artefacts, cutting-edge ideas in contemporary physics, and the texts of ancient myths into his argument, Farrell maintains that an ancient interplanetary war was fought in our own solar system with weapons of extraordinary power and sophistication. The book includes: secret technology behind the ancient Tablets of Destinies, the ancient texts telling of such destructions: from Sumeria (Tiamats destruction by Marduk), Egypt (Edfu and the Mars connections), Greece (Saturns role in the War of the Titans) and the ancient Americas; ancient and current mechanisms which could explode planets; and, the true scientific reason for our solar system's asteroid belt.

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