2021

January 2021

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.)

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.