Last 10 Books Read, Newest to Oldest

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February 2022

Kroese, Robert. Messiah (Mammon vol. 2). Grand Rapids MI: St. Culain Press, 2022. ASIN B09GZM9YRC.

After the asteroid diversion and capture scheme chronicled in volume 1 of the Mammon trilogy, Titan (October 2021), seen as the last chance to rescue the U.S. and world economy from decades of profligate spending, borrowing, money printing, and looting of productive enterprise by a venal and corrupt political class, aborted due to industrial espionage and sabotage, an already dire economic situation implodes into exponentially accelerating inflation, across the board economic collapse, widespread shortages, breakdown of civil order, and cracks beginning to appear in political structures, with some U.S. states enforcing border controls and moving toward “soft secession”.

Billionaire Davis Christopher, who further increased his fortune by betting against the initial attempt to capture Mammon, has set up shop at the former OTRAG launch site in the Libyan desert, distant from the intrigue and kleptocratic schemes of the illegitimate Washington regime. In a chaotic and multipolar world, actors at all levels and around the globe vie for what they can get: the U.S. Treasury, now out to plunder cryptocurrency as its next source of funds; the Los Angeles Police Department, establishing itself as a regional rogue state; the Chinese Communist Party, which turns its envious eyes toward the wealth created by offshore paradise Utanau; the emerging Islamic State in Egypt and the Maghreb, consolidating its power after the collapse of regimes in North Africa, and providing some stability in the face of doomsday Salafist cult Al-Qiyamah, which sees the return of Mammon bringing Allah's well-deserved judgement on the world.

With these and many other threads running in parallel and interacting with one another in complicated and non-obvious ways, the story, told mostly through the eyes of characters we met in the first volume, and now confronted with a global collapse in progress, is gripping and illustrates the theme that runs though much of the author's work: that, when faced with existential global threats, the greatest challenges humanity must confront are often those created by the mischief of other humans, not exogenous peril. So it is here, with the asteroid inexorably approaching the Earth for its second pass, probability of impact jumping all around the scale as observations and calculations are refined, and multiple actors seeking their own desired outcomes from the event and to thwart the ambitions of rivals.

This is a masterful continuation of the story that began in the first volume, reaching a climax which is not a cliffhanger, but will leave you eagerly anticipating the conclusion in volume 3, Nemesis, scheduled for publication on July 28, 2022.

The Kindle edition of this book, like volume 1, is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

 

October 2021

Kroese, Robert. Titan (Mammon vol. 1). Grand Rapids MI: St. Culain Press, 2021. ASIN B09DDHZ4R7.

With each successive work, science fiction author Robert Kroese is distinguishing himself not just as one of the most outstanding writers in the genre today, but also one of the most versatile. He seems to handily jump from laugh-out-loud satire worthy of Keith Laumer in novels like Starship Grifters (February 2018), cerebral quantum weirdness in Schrödinger's Gat (May 2018), to the meticulously researched alternative history time travel Iron Dragon epic (August 2018 et seq.). Now, in the Mammon trilogy, of which this is the first volume, he turns to the techno-economic-political thriller and, once again, triumphs, with a work worthy of Paul Erdman and Tom Clancy.

By 2036, profligate spending, exponentially growing debt, and indiscriminate money printing trying to paper over the abyss, has brought the United States to the brink of a cataclysmic financial reckoning. Both parties agree only on increasingly absurd stratagems to keep it from crashing down, and when entrepreneur Kade Kapur offers salvation in the form of a public-private partnership to exploit the wealth of the solar system by mining near-Earth asteroids (as the only way to keep grabby government from seizing his wealth), desperate politicians are quick to jump in the lifeboat.

But they are politicians, and in a continental scale empire in decline, populated by hundreds of millions of grifters and layabouts, where the “rule of law” means the rule of lawyers in dresses (judges) appointed by politicians, nothing can be taken for granted, as Kade discovers when he chooses to base his venture in the United States.

This is a compelling page turner and, once again, Kroese demonstrates how thorough is the research behind these yarns. He not only gets the economics of hyperinflation absolutely correct, but, in the best tradition of science fiction, “shows, not tells” the psychology which grips those experiencing it and how rapidly the thin veneer of civilisation can erode when money dies.

This novel ends at a point that will leave you eager to discover what happens next. Fortunately, we won't have all that long to wait: book two in the series, Messiah, will be published on February 28, 2022, and you can pre-order your copy today.

 

August 2021

Corcoran, Travis J. I. Escape the City, Vol. 1. New Hampshire: Morlock Publishing, 2021. ISBN 979-874270303-7.

In early 2014, the author and his wife left the suburbs of Boston and moved to a 56 acre homestead in rural New Hampshire. Before arriving, he had done extensive reading and research, but beyond the chores of a suburban homeowner, had little or no hands-on experience with the myriad skills required to make a go of it in the country: raising and preserving garden vegetables; maintaining pastures; raising chickens, sheep, and hogs, including butchering and processing their meat; erecting utility buildings; planting and maintaining a fruit orchard; tapping maple trees and producing syrup from their sap; managing a wood lot, felling and processing trees, storing and aging firewood and heating with it; and maintaining a tractor, implements, chainsaws, and the many tools which are indispensable to farm life. The wisdom about how tradesmen and contractors work in the country in the section “Life in The Country: Cultural Fit: Scheduling” would have been worth more than the modest price of the book had I learned it before spending a decade and a half figuring it out for myself after my own escape from the city in 1992.

This massive work (653 large pages in print) and its companion Volume 2 are an encyclopedic compendium of lessons learned and an absolutely essential resource for anybody interested in self-sufficient living, whether as a “suburbanite in the country”, “gardener with chickens”, “market gardener”, “homesteader”, or “commercial farmer”, all five of which are discussed in the book.

The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. The numerous illustrations are in black and white in print editions, but colour in the Kindle version.

 

January 2021

Wood, Fenton. The Earth a Machine to Speak. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2020. ASIN B08D6J4PJ8.

This is the fifth and final short novel/novella (134 pages) in the author's Yankee Republic series. I described the first, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves (May 2019), as “utterly charming”, and the second, Five Million Watts (June 2019), “enchanting”. The third, The Tower of the Bear (October 2019), takes Philo from the depths of the ocean to the Great Tree in the exotic West and the fourth, The City of Illusions (January 2020) continues the quest, including a visit to a surreal amusement park in the miasma cloaking the Valley of the Angels.

In this concluding installment, it's time to pull all of the various threads from the earlier episodes of Philo's hero quest together, and the author manages this deftly, in a thoroughly satisfying, delightful, and heart-warming way. This is a magnificent adventure which young adults will enjoy as much as I did the Tom Swift novels in my youth (and once again when bringing them to the Web), and not-so-young adults will enjoy just as much or more, as there are many gems and references they'll discover which younger readers may not have yet encountered.

This book is currently available only in a Kindle edition. An omnibus collection including all five novellas, Yankee Republic Omnibus: A Mythic Radio Adventure, is available as a Kindle edition from Amazon, or as a 650 page trade paperback directly from the author.

 

Goetz, Peter. A Technical History of America's Nuclear Weapons. Unspecified: Independently published, 2020. ISBN Vol. 1 979-8-6646-8488-9, Vol. 2 978-1-7181-2136-2.

This is an encyclopedic history and technical description of United States nuclear weapons, delivery systems, manufacturing, storage, maintenance, command and control, security, strategic and tactical doctrine, and interaction with domestic politics and international arms control agreements, covering the period from the inception of these weapons in World War II through 2020. This encompasses a huge amount of subject matter, and covering it in the depth the author undertakes is a large project, with the two volume print edition totalling 1244 20×25 centimetre pages. The level of detail and scope is breathtaking, especially considering that not so long ago much of the information documented here was among the most carefully-guarded secrets of the U.S. military. You will learn the minutiæ of neutron initiators, which fission primaries were used in what thermonuclear weapons, how the goal of “one-point safety” was achieved, the introduction of permissive action links to protect against unauthorised use of weapons and which weapons used what kind of security device, and much, much more.

If the production quality of this work matched its content, it would be an invaluable reference for anybody interested in these weapons, from military historians, students of large-scale government research and development projects, researchers of the Cold War and the nuclear balance of power, and authors setting fiction in that era and wishing to get the details right. Sadly, when it comes to attention to detail, this work, as published in this edition, is sadly lacking—it is both slipshod and shoddy. I was reading it for information, not with the fine-grained attention I devote when proofreading my work or that of others, but in the process I marked 196 errors of fact, spelling, formatting, and grammar, or about one every six printed pages. Now, some of these are just sloppy things (including, or course, misuse of the humble apostrophe) which grate upon the reader but aren't likely to confuse, but others are just glaring errors.

Here are some of the obvious errors. Names misspelled or misstated include Jay Forrester, John von Neumann, Air Force Secretary Hans Mark, and Ronald Reagan. In chapter 11, an entire paragraph is duplicated twice in a row. In chapter 9, it is stated that the Little Feller nuclear test in 1962 was witnessed by president John F. Kennedy; in fact, it was his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who observed the test. There is a long duplicated passage at the start of chapter 20, but this may be a formatting error in the Kindle edition. In chapter 29, it is stated that nitrogen tetroxide was the fuel of the Titan II missile—in fact, it was the oxidiser. In chapter 41, the Northrop B-2 stealth bomber is incorrectly attributed to Lockheed in four places. In chapter 42, the Trident submarine-launched missile is referred to as “Titan” on two occasions.

The problem with such a plethora of errors is that when reading information with which you aren't acquainted or have the ability to check, there's no way to know whether they're correct or nonsense. Before using anything from this book as a source in your own work, I'd advise keeping in mind the Russian proverb, Доверяй, но проверяй—“Trust, but verify”. In this case, I'd go light on the trust and double up on the verification.

In the citation above, I link to the Kindle edition, which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. The print edition is published in two paperbacks, Volume 1 and Volume 2.

 

L. D. Cross. Code Name Habbakuk. Toronto: Heritage House, 2012. ISBN 978-1-927051-47-4.

World War II saw the exploration, development, and in some cases deployment, of ideas which, without the pressure of war, would be considered downright wacky. Among the most outlandish was the concept of building an enormous aircraft carrier (or floating airbase) out of reinforced ice. This book recounts the story of the top secret British/Canadian/U.S. project to develop and test this technology. (The title is not misspelled: the World War II project was spelled “Habbakuk”, as opposed to the Old Testament prophet, whose name was “Habakkuk”. The reason for the difference in spelling has been lost in the mists of time.)

 

Carr, Jack. Savage Son. New York: Pocket Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-9821-2371-0.

 

Martin, Clay. Concrete Jungle. Unspecified: Self-published, 2020. ISBN 979-8-6523-8596-5.

In this book, a U.S. Army Green Beret (Special Forces) veteran shares wisdom for surviving if urban warfare breaks out in your community. This is a survival guide: the focus is on protecting yourself, your family, and your team against the chaos of urban conflict perpetrated by others, not on becoming a combatant yourself. The advice is much more about acquiring skills and situational awareness than on collecting “gear”, with tips on when things degrade to the point you need to pack up and bug out, and how to do so.

 

Benford, Gregory and Larry Niven. The Bowl of Heaven. New York: Tor Books, 2012. ISBN 978-1-250-29709-9.

Readers should be warned that this is the first half of a long novel split across two books. At the end of this volume, the story is incomplete and will be resumed in the sequel, Shipstar.

 

December 2020

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player Two. New York: Ballantine Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-5247-6133-2.

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was an enormous success, blending an imaginative but plausible extrapolation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual worlds into a mid-21st century network called the OASIS, which has subsumed the Internet and its existing services into an immersive shared virtual world encompassing communication, entertainment, education, and commerce. Ready Player One chronicled the quest of hunters for the Easter Egg hidden by the deceased co-creator of the OASIS, which would confer sole ownership and control over the OASIS on its finder, with independent egg hunters (“gunters”) contending with a corporation bent on turning the OASIS into an advertising-cluttered Hell and perfectly willing to resort to murder and mayhem to achieve its nefarious designs.

James Halliday, who hid the Egg, was obsessed with every aspect of 1980s popular culture: film, music, television, fads, and video games, and the quest for the Egg involved acquiring and demonstrating encyclopedic knowledge equal to his own. The story is thus marinated in 1980s nostalgia, and has a strong appeal for those who lived through that era, which made Ready Player One a beloved instant classic and best-seller, from which Steven Spielberg made a not-entirely-awful 2018 feature film.

With the quest and fate of the OASIS resolved at the end of the original novel, readers were left to wonder what happens next, and they had nine years to wait before a sequel appeared to answer that question. And thus, Ready Player Two, which is set just a few years after Parzival and his bang of gunters find the Egg and assume control of the OASIS, was eagerly awaited. And now we have it in our hands.

Oh dear.

One common reaction among readers who have made it through this sequel or abandoned it in disgust and dismay is that it “reads like fan fiction”. But that is to disparage the genre of fan fiction, some of which is quite good, entertaining, and obviously labours of love. This reads like bad fan fiction, written by somebody who doesn't get out enough, obsessed with “transgression” of the original story and characters. This fails in just about every way possible. While the original novel was based upon a plausible extrapolation of present-day technology into the future, here we have a randomly assembled midden of utterly unbelievable things, seemingly invented on whim in order to move the plot along, most of which were developed in just a few years and in almost complete secrecy. Rather than try to artfully give a sense for how this novel “transgresses” even the most forgiving reader's ability to suspend disbelief, I'll just step behind the curtain and make an incomplete list of things we're expected to accept as the landscape in which the plot is set. Many of these are spoilers, so if you care about such things, don't read them until you've had a crack at the book (or it has had a crack at you, as the case may be).

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.   (Show Spoilers) (Hide Spoilers)

• James Halliday, before his death, funded the successful development of an Oasis Neural Interface (ONI), which provides a full, bidirectional, link to the neurons in a user's brain, allowing complete stimulation of all senses and motor control over an avatar in the OASIS.
• The ONI is completely non-invasive: it works by sensors it places on the outside of the skull.
• The development of the ONI was conducted in complete secrecy, and was not disclosed until a trigger set by Halliday before his death revealed it to the finder of the Egg.
• The ONI is able to provide a fully realistic experience of the OASIS virtual world to the wearer. For example, when an ONI wearer eats an apple in the virtual world, they have the sensation of crunching into the fruit, smelling the juice, and tasting the flesh, even though these have not been programmed into the simulation.
• The ONI can, in a brief time, make a complete scan of its wearer's brain and download this to the OASIS. This scan is sufficient to create an in-world realisation of the person's consciousness.
• Halliday made such a scan of his own brain, creating (in total secrecy) the first artificial general intelligence (AGI), which he called Anorak. In attempting to modify this AI, he caused it to go insane and become malevolent, but the lovable nerd Halliday let it continue to inhabit the OASIS.
• Every time a user logs into the OASIS, the ONI makes a nearly-instantaneous complete backup of their brain, sufficient to create a conscious intelligent copy inside the simulation. This has been done in complete secrecy, and not only OASIS users, but its new owners are unaware of this.
• The ONI can be used a maximum of 12 hours at a time, after which (the same precise time for all wearers, regardless of their individual physiology) it causes severe and irreversible neural trauma. Disconnection from the OASIS without a proper log-out can leave the user in a permanent coma. Regulators are perfectly fine with such a technology being deployed to billions of people, relying on the vendor's assurance that safeguards will prevent such calamities.
• Over a period of three years, largely in secrecy until it leaked out, Parzival and three of his partners have had built, at a cost of US$300 billion dollars, an interstellar spacecraft with a fusion drive in which they plan to make a 47 year voyage to Proxima Centauri to “search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along.” They plan to set out on this voyage without first sending a probe to determine whether there is a habitable planet at Proxima Centauri or having a Plan B in case there isn't one when they get there. Oh, and this starship is supposed to get its power from its “solar panel array and batteries” for the four decades it will be nowhere near a star.
• Halliday, after creating the flawed artificial intelligence Anorak, leaves open the possibility that it can seize control of the OASIS from his designated heir.
• Because ONI users logged into the OASIS are effectively unconscious and completely vulnerable to attack in real life (which they call “the earl”), the well-heeled opt for an “immersion vault” to protect themselves. Gregarious Simulation Systems' (GSS) top of the line was MoTIV, the “mobile tactical immersion vault”, [which] “looked more like a heavily armed robotic spider than a coffin. It was an armored escape vehicle and all-terrain weapons platform, featuring eight retractable armored legs for navigating all forms of terrain, and a pair of machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on each side of its armored chassis—not to mention a bulletproof acrylic cockpit canopy for its occupant.” The authorities are apparently happy with such gear being sold to anybody who can pay for it.
• The rogue AI Anorak is able to bypass all of GSS's engineering, quality control, and deployment safeguards to push a software update, “infirmware”, on more than half a billion ONI users, which traps them in the simulation, unable to log out, and destined for catastrophic brain damage after the twelve hour limit is reached. This includes four of the five owners of GSS. And “Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they've never seen before”—and it worked the very first time it was mass deployed.
• Despite having the lives of half a billion hostages, including themselves, in their hands and with the twelve hour maximum immersion time in the ONI ticking away, Parzival and partners find plenty of time to wisecrack, taunt one another about their knowledge or lack thereof of obscure pop culture, and costume changes.

  Art3mis snapped her fingers and her avatar's attire changed once again. Now she wore Annie Potts's black latex outfit from her first scene in Pretty in Pink, along with her punk-rock porcupine hairdo, dangling earrings, and dinner-fork bracelet.

  “Applause, applause, applause,” she said, doing a slow spin so that we could admire the attention to detail she'd put into her Iona cosplay.

• On top of all of these inanities, the main characters, who were just likeable, nerdy “mixed-up kids” a few years ago, have now become shrill, tedious, “woke” scolds.

  “Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?”

  Parzival: Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She'd been DMAB—designated male at birth. … Around the same time, she'd changed her avatar's sex classification to øgender, a brand-new option GSS had added due to popular demand. People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn't limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation.

• The battles, the battles….

  The rest of the Original 7ven joined the fight too. Jimmy Jam and Monte Moir each wielded a modified red Roland AXIS-1 keytar that fired sonic funk blast waves out of its neck each time a chord was played on it. Jesse Johnson fired sonic thunderbolts from the pickups of his Fender Voodoo Stratocaster, while Terry Lewis did the same with his bass, and Jellybean Johnson stood behind them, firing red lightning skyward with his drumsticks, wielding them like two magic wands. Each of the band members could also fire a deadly blast of sonic energy directly from their own mouths, just by shouting the word “Yeow!” over and over again.

  “Yeow?” … Yawn.

Spoilers end here.   (Hide Spoilers)

I'm not going to even discuss the great quest, the big reveal, or the deus in machina switcheroo at the very end. After wrecking an interesting imagined world, destroying characters the reader had come to know and like in their first adventure, and boring the audience with over-the-top descriptions, obscure pop culture trivia, and ridiculous made-up reasons to plug all of the myriad holes in the plot, by the time I got to the end I was well past caring about any of them.