David

There was a time when Larry Niven was one of my favorite authors. Of course, that time was when I was an immature SF geek who didn't read much else. Okay, I still think "Ringworld" was kind of awesome. And I have fond memories of some of his other collaborations with Jerry Pournelle, e.g. "Footfall" and "Oath of Fealty." But the last few I have read really unearthed things I didn't notice when I was younger, and this one, which was one of their early collaboration, really shows its age.

"Lucifer's Hammer" is fine plot-wise. In fact, I'd say Niven and Pournelle always do very well with the plots and the hard SF. This is an end-of-the-world post-apocalypse adventure, and I love those like candy. So I enjoyed it despite groaning every now and then at the authors', ah... issues.

Written in 1977, "Lucifer's Hammer" is your basic "comet strike devastates Planet Earth" scenario. The Hamner-Brown comet is spotted months away by a wealthy amateur astronomer, and as it approaches, excitement turns to apprehension as scientists keep revising the estimate of the odds of the comet striking Earth from "billions to one" to "millions to one" to "thousands to one," and... you get the idea. It is not exactly a spoiler to say that the comet does, in fact, strike the Earth — in fact, it fragments into pieces which land in massive strikes all over the globe. Pretty much every coastal area is wiped out, there are massive weather changes, tectonic shifts bring volcanoes to life, so yeah, pretty much the end of global civilization, as least for a few generations. It doesn't help that as soon as the strikes begin, the USSR and China launch nukes at each other. Thanks in large part to a joint US-Soviet space mission, with astronauts and cosmonauts watching the entire Armageddon playing out from orbit, they are able to prevent the US from launching and being targeted in return.

The remainder of the story takes place in California, where survivors in the San Joaquin valley go about preparing for the coming ice age and trying to rebuild what little civilization they can. Needless to say, this is complicated by both internal tensions and external threats from an army of anti-technology fanatics who practice ritual cannibalism, led by a mad doomsday preacher.

It's very exciting stuff, and also fairly realistic in how it approaches both the social and technological challenges of survival in a post-armageddon scenario.

So why only three stars? Well, for starters, there is Niven and Pournelle's usual problem with women. It was even worse in "The Mote in God's Eye," and I was (pleasantly) surprised that there was not a lot of gratuitous rape to spice up the fall of civilization, but the female characters all pretty much go into instant "Attach myself to the nearest alpha-male" mode, and one of the characters is even referred to (ironically, and with awareness of her role, which she does not particularly like) as the "Princess" because her Senator father is the current leader of the survivors, and whoever marries her will ensure the stability and succession of the dynasty. So there was a little bit of awareness there, and yeah, it was written in 1977, but still, one gets the distinct impression that when the Senator's aide reflects smugly to himself that one of the few good things about Hammerfall was that it put an end to "Women's lib," he's kind of speaking for the authors.

Oh, then there's the part about that cannibal army forming around a group of Black Nationalists who were going on a crime spree when the Hammer fell. The New Brotherhood Army eventually becomes a multi-racial, ostensibly egalitarian organization ("egalitarian" in the sense that anyone regardless of race who steps out of line gets killed and eaten), but the leaders are the Black Nationalists and a black former Army sergeant. Until a white preacher comes and gives them a cause - namely, fighting technology. So, let's recap: when the Hammer falls and ends civilization, white farmers, politicians, and engineers start rebuilding a stable community, while black people turn into rampaging cannibals taking orders from a white guy. Umm, did nobody see any Unfortunate Implications in this even in 1977? I suppose Niven and Pournelle's defense would be that not all of the New Brotherhood Army is black, and there is a black astronaut who's one of the good guys, and a few black farmers in the Stronghold are mentioned. Well, okay then.

There's also an awful lot of "neener-neener, how do you granola-crunching hippies like your 'natural living' now?" as the survivors of a former commune realize that gosh, they really did like having electricity and plumbing. Niven and Pournelle do this a lot, as in "Fallen Angels," where they spend the entire book poking at environmentalists and anti-space and anti-nuclear activists. In "Lucifer's Hammer," the only surviving nuclear power plant becomes potentially the salvation of civilization.

So, basically:

White people, nuclear power, and the space program = good.
Black people, religion, and women's lib: Bad.

I am being a little snarky here. The authors weren't quite as horribly axe-grinding as, say, certain authors of political thrillers or grimdark fantasy. But still, this is a book that you will enjoy if you like the premise and don't pay much attention to subtext, but will probably annoy you if you do notice things like ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE BECOME CANNIBALS!

Entertaining, suspenseful, a very good post-apocalyptic thriller for hard SF fans, and also slightly sexist and really (if unintentionally) racist.

Whether or not you like Harry Dresden will depend on your tolerance for annoyingly cliched tools used to entertain you. I mean, I like reading Ian Fleming, so it would be silly (or at least inconsistent) for me to claim that Jim Butcher is particularly egregious or untalented. Butcher is not a great writer — at least not in this book — but he's not an altogether bad one, and Storm Front is a moderately entertaining caper about a Chicago wizard/PI who has the usual problems of scraping up rent, a missing person to find, mobsters on his case, shadowy nemeses who want him dead, femme fatales, and magic and vampires and faeries and a lecherous talking skull thrown into the mix for fantasy flavor.

Suspensions of disbelief are always required in UF, and my biggest one was actually a fairly prosaic concern: dude has magic powers, in a world where those are pretty rare (the book is not altogether consistent about whether the wizarding world — yeah, I'm gonna call it that — is "secret" or just generally goes incognito) and yet he's struggling to pay his bills. Okay, I get it, Magic Has Rules and you can't just conjure up a pile of gold, but still, as the only wizard in the entire Chicago area, and supposedly a pretty formidable one (despite the fact that he gets his ass kicked by everyone he meets, magical and mundane alike), you'd think Dresden could come up with more innovative ways to profit off of his talents than advertising in the phone book as someone who will find your lost wallet.

Some of the worldbuilding is intriguing (the White Court, the rules of wizardry which seem to be reasonably well thought out without being excessively infodumped) and some are just lazy (vampires, faeries, ghosts, etc., Butcher seems willing to drop the whole fantasy kitchen sink into his universe).

As a character, Harry Dresden is a neckbeard's wet dream, a clueless virgin who most of the gorgeous women he meets (all of the women he meets are gorgeous) throw themselves at, so he can manfully refuse their advances and congratulate himself on what a stand-up guy he is for not exploiting the chicks whose boobs he's totally not ogling. We get lots of passages about what a tortured bad-ass he is: his "soul-gaze" routine, where he looks into someone's eyes and they see into each other's souls and most people faint because Dresden is so, so dark inside, man! — is kind of contradicted by everything else he does, which is bumble around cluelessly, get bushwhacked by thugs with baseball bats, bullied by cops and mobsters, and try to figure out those mysterious confusing lady-creatures.

That said... the book was fun in a well-trodden way, there were some small bits that were neat, and I found it passably entertaining. Do I really want to go on and read the rest of the series? Practically every Dresden fan says that the first few books aren't very good but Butcher gets a lot better deeper into the series. That's not exactly an alluring prospect: "Read two or three mediocre books before you really get into it." But at some point I'll probably pick up the next one.

"Ghost Road Blues" was kind of like Diet Stephen King: no calories, half the flavor. Jonathan Maberry apparently scripts comic books too, and that was apparent in the melodramatic prose and the prolonged fight scenes in this book.

Thirty years ago, the small town of Pine Deep was victimized by a serial killer in what became known as the Black Harvest. A bunch of redneck cops killed the man they believed responsible, an itinerant black guitar-player known only as "the Bone Man," but in fact the Bone Man had already killed the real killer. Except he didn't because the real killer is a supernatural something-or-other who, of course, returns. As does the Bone Man, to give occasional dream-like warnings to the protagonists.

Now, Pine Deep is famous nationwide for its elaborate haunted hay rides, which basically turn the whole town into a horror amusement park every fall. A couple of survivors of the Black Harvest are still alive, but most of the town has forgotten or would like to forget about the origin of its highly profitable "scary" reputation.

So, besides the repetitious and melodramatic prose, the characters were flat archetypes. Malcolm Crow, a recovered alcoholic, is an ex-cop who runs a comic book store and has a black belt in jujutsu, and if the triumph-of-the-nerds point is missed, he befriends a fourteen-year-old boy who fantasizes about being a superhero while getting beaten at home by his stepdad. The main characters are likeable if cliche, but the villains, well, they're all not only evil, but Eeeeeeeevil! First we have a trio of thugs running from a drug deal gone bad; the alpha-thug is a hyper-violent psychopath who spends much of the book dwelling on just how violently and evilly he's going to hurt people. There is the crazy tow truck driver who hears voices in his head and who turns into a cannibalistic serial killer without a qualm. And there is that evil stepdad who also turns out to be a minion of the Big Bad, but just in case being the willing servant of a demonic serial killer and beating his wife and stepson black and blue on a regular basis doesn't make him evil enough, Maberry underlines how really, really evil he is by offhandedly having him also publish a white supremacist newsletter. You know, so we won't miss that he's really, really evil.

So here's what really torqued me about this book: it's the first in a trilogy and it was obviously written with the next two books in mind, meaning, there isn't even an attempt to make it self-contained. We're given hints of the supernatural Unspeakably Bad Thing that's about to happen all through the book, but the entire novel is just a build-up. The author is putting the pieces in place for the real badness to go down in the next volume. We meet the villains and the heroes, there is some intestine-chewing, and a few minor characters get kacked to jerk some tears, but oh boy, things are really gonna hit the fan in the next book! Umm, no thanks.

It's not bad, if you like completely mainstream horror novels, but Maberry really does seem to be trying too hard to be Stephen King. While he's certainly a more economical writer and he gets to the point waaaay faster than Evil Stevie does, his characters have none of the dimensionality and gruesomely interesting detail that even King's villains possess, and Ghost Road Blues uses violent evil goons and a few maggoty gross-outs like a hammer. A defter horror writer (like King — yes I'm a fan, for all his flaws) can convey spine-chilling dread with everyday objects or a half-remembered phrases from childhood. Maberry tries to do it by repeating ghoulish incantations over and over and over in the characters' heads.

Ultimately, there just wasn't anything original here and definitely nothing scary, so I don't care enough about what happens to read the next book.

I found the narrator annoying, frankly. He uses a gravelly, snarling voice for all the villains, adding a Translyvania accent for the Big Bad, and I didn't like the breathless, whiny, or chirpy way he conveyed female voices. The narration was clear enough, but I'm just not a fan of the reading.

There are two groups of readers for this book: those who have read Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, and those who haven't.

If you haven't... then you may or may not like this book, depending on your tolerance for old-school sci-fi adventure tales. Because Jane Carver of Waar is not even a little bit subtle about the material it's imitating: it's quintessential "high concept" science fiction, that concept being: what if John Carter was a chick? And of course, if you have no familiarity with the Confederate-gentleman-turned-warlord-of-Mars, then Jane Carver has to stand on her own and you're not going to get a lot of the jokes. That said, it's fun and fast-paced and Jane is kind of awesome in a ridiculous pulp fiction way, but you're only going to love it if you can get into planetary romances with swashbuckling sky pirates and alien hotties wearing nothing but jewel-encrusted dental floss.

There is, however, a modern sensibility to this novel: Jane gets to team up with a couple of mostly-naked princes — to her immense gratification, Waarian men wear as little as the women. And Jane is an unabashedly lusty lass (and for all that, it takes her quite a while to get some).

If you have read the Barsoom books — well, then, this book is a treat. There's always a risk in reading something that is a parody/"tribute" to a classic work: either it will be too earnest and just read like a cheap knock-off, or it will be too acerbic in its satire, or even mocking, as if to make readers who love the original, however cheesy it may be, feel like saps. (Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" is one of the biggest offenders in that regard.)

Jane Carver of Waar is a shameless imitation, but it's a loving one. Jane, an ex-Airborne Ranger biker chick, gets popped off to "Waar" through a magic cave in just the same way John Carter went to Mars, and the adventures that follow are pretty much a mirror of those of everyone's favorite Virginian. The "Orans" are purple instead of red, and instead of initially being captured by green-skinned Tharks, Jane is captured by tiger-centaur Aarurrhs. Exactly like John Carter, Jane finds that Waar's lower gravity gives her superhuman strength and the ability to leap great distances.

There are some divergences because of Jane's sex. She doesn't have a princess to rescue: instead, she befriends a hapless Oran prince named Sai, whose beloved Wen-Jhai was bride-napped by another Oran noble. Sai is honor-bound to meet the dastard's challenge and steal his fiancee back; the only problem is, the other guy is one of the greatest swordsmen on the planet, and Sai is, well, kind of a wimp. And a coward. They make a cute couple, and when Sai's best friend, Lan, joins in the fun, the three of them go from one adventure and narrow escape to another in pursuit of Wen-Jhai.

Jane, being a woman, notices all the sexism that John Carter didn't see fit to comment on in his own adventure, and has great fun shocking and scandalizing everyone from the Orans to the Aarurrh. She's a crude, brazen Valkyrie, but she also gets her butt kicked fairly regularly. Her adventures are perfectly in keeping with the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition, but told with a 21st century viewpoint.

Edgar Rice Burroughs fans can read this book without fear that it's making fun of our beloved John Carter. It's almost a worthy "sequel" to the Barsoom series. If you haven't read the originals, though, you may well find this book fun, but I'd really recommend reading A Princess of Mars first so you'll catch all the references and winks.

Jim C. Hines's Princess series is just thoroughly enjoyable light fantasy. Not brilliant or radically inventive, but it's perfect comfort listening. The third book in the series gets a little bit further away from the "Disney Princess" tropes and more into Hines's own world, even if it is a very recognizable medieval fantasy world with all the usual genre staples. But he does a lot more with the different kinds of fairies, and this time Danielle (aka Cinderella), Snow (White), and Talia (aka Sleeping Beauty) go to Talia's homeland of Arathea, which is a vaguely Thousand-and-One-Knights-ish sort of place.

This time, the antagonist is Little Red Riding Hood. Or as she's better known, the Lady of the Red Hood, the most feared assassin in the world. As with previous installments, Hines reinvents and inverts the old fairy tales while making the "real" story plausibly something that could have given rise to the fairy tale version. Of course it's always the darker fairy tale versions he's working with. Here, Roudette is a shapechanging assassin whose goal is vengeance, and as in previous books, the true Big Bad is not revealed until after our heroines have worked their way through several red herrings.

This is really Talia's book. The plot is mostly about Talia and her homeland. We meet characters only vaguely referenced in previous books, and of course since Talia is a superhuman warrior with fairy gifts and Roudette is a superhuman warrior with a magical cape, we know there will be epic smackdown chickfights. There is also romance, political intrigue, and some very touching moments in the final chapters.

There are character arcs working their way through this series, such as the ongoing tension between Talia, who is in love with Snow, and Snow, who loves Talia as a friend but isn't quite sure what to do about her attraction. So far Hines is handling the lesbian characters in a nuanced and realistic way, neither making it a Great Big Issue overshadowing all character interactions nor reducing it to a quirky "diversity" checkbox.

It's a good listen if you like fantasy that's right on the mid-line between light & comic and dark & serious, with that ever-elusive set of "strong female protagonists" handling problems politically, socially, romantically, and with the occasional judicious decapitation with a magic sword.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for book one, Bitter Seeds.

This is one epic, high-stakes alt-history series. After reading "Bitter Seeds," I thought book two would pick up where book one left off, at a turning point in World War II. Instead, it skips forward two decades and we're now in 1963 and the height of the Cold War.

But it's a very different Cold War. In Bitter Seeds, Britain unleashed the power of the Eidolons, vastly powerful demonic beings who live in the cracks in time and space, in order to stop the Third Reich and their supermen. When we last saw Klaus and Gretel, two of those Nazi supersoldiers, they had been captured by Soviet troops.

The Coldest War begins twenty-two years later. Britain won the war, but at a horrific cost. While the nation has completely bought into the myth of "Britain's finest hour" and how the brave people of England beat back the Nazi hordes with sheer determination, people like Raybould Marsh and William Beauclerk know better. Britain beat back the Nazi hordes by sacrificing thousands of innocent people to pay the Eidolons' blood prices. Following the collapse of the Third Reich, the USSR spread uncontested across Europe and now controls the entire continent.

Now the Soviets are trying to kill off Britain's warlocks while preparing to take over the world with their own army of supermen. If Britain can no longer summon Eidolons, nothing will stop the USSR from swallowing the last bit of independent Europe.

(Where is the U.S. in all this? Pretty much off-stage. Nixon is President and there are mentions of race riots, but Americans apparently played no part in World War II and play no part in this book.)

The alternate history here is interesting, and the book is rife with moral dilemmas. Pretty much everyone does horrible things for what they perceive to be the greater good; some have an easier time living with their conscience than others.

Ironically, Klaus, the former Nazi assassin (though he was never really a Nazi, just a tool raised and used by the Nazis) is one of the most sympathetic characters. He realizes he just wants the "normal" life he's never had, and is willing to engage in heroics to get it.

But his sister, Gretel, is the dark heart of this book. Gretel is a mad genius who can see the future, with an accuracy that verges on omniscience. No matter what anyone does, it turns out to be something Gretel planned. So the big question looming over the course of the last two books has been: what is Gretel's long game? She let Germany lose the war, she let herself and her brother be captured by the Soviets, and it looks like she's going to let the world end.

At the very end of this book, we find out what Gretel's game has been, and the pieces on the board get rearranged in a big way. I am ambivalent about what to expect from the next book: in a way it seems like a cheat. But this is a brilliantly plotted story arc, with elements of alternate history, time travel, and of course, "superhero" battles and eldritch horrors. Characterization gets more attention in this book, but the action is still fast-paced and violent.

Highly recommended: sci-fi/fantasy adventure with spies, super-soldiers, warlocks and demons in a grim alternate history.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for "Feed," the first book in the series.


The second book in the Newsflesh trilogy picks up where Feed left off. Feed introduced us to George (Georgia) and Shaun Mason, two bloggers in a post-Rising world in which the Kellis-Amberlee virus means zombies are now an everyday part of life, and have reshaped society accordingly. People huddle in enclaves, road trips are for heavily-armed truckers and the borderline suicidal, and you can't go from point A to point B anywhere without sticking your hand in half a dozen blood testing units, and people are always standing by to shoot you in the head if any of those tests indicates you are positive for infection. Much of book one was a commentary on this post-Rising world in which people have allowed fear of the walking dead to take over their lives, curtailing their freedom of movement, autonomy, and privacy.

Now, while I think that was a valid point to make, I also think the author and her characters really failed to offer any alternatives. I mean, if the entire world now has to live with this highly-contagious virus that in minutes can turn anyone into a mindless flesh-eating zombie, and any large gathering of people is a potential bloodbath if just one thing goes wrong, of course everyone's life is going to change and heavy security measures are going to make them a lot less free than we are in our zombie-free world. That's kind of unavoidable.

But in book two, Mira Grant expands the scope of this zombie apocalypse, and addresses one of the other weaknesses of book one, the cartoonish villainy of Vice Presidential candidate Tate, who was apparently evil for the sake of evil. In Deadline, we learn the conspiracy was much bigger than him, and there are people who want the virus to keep people living in fear, with the government telling them what to do.

Which is a metaplot that, again, the author delivers with not a lot of subtlety, and maybe the logic holes were a little more noticeable to me this time around. That said, I really liked Deadline, just as I liked Feed, because what it has, and a lot of it, is Plot and Pacing. Something horrible is always just around the corner. A new twist, a serious complication, or another near-death experience. And as is par for the course in any zombie story, you know not all the characters are going to make it to the end and you're kind of laying mental odds on who survives and who doesn't.

At the end of the last book, George died. The author gets around this by having Shaun be "insane" in this book; George is constantly talking to him, and sometimes he even sees her. His friends are used to him talking to his dead sister, albeit a little disturbed by it. George's voice sometimes even tells him things that supposedly he shouldn't even know, which made me wonder if there was going to be some bizarre twist in which it turns out that George somehow really is inside his head.

I did get kind of tired of Shaun and his angst over his dead sister. I mean, yeah, it's tragic, she was his sister and best friend, but seriously the degree of closeness and his inability to live without her started skeeving me out a little. When, for the first time in two books Shaun actually shows interest in another female (I was wondering until then if he was a virgin), he ruins it by... saying George's name at a very inappropriate time. Now that was creepy. Seriously? This guy has problems, and hearing his dead sister's voice in his head is not the worst of them.

Notwithstanding the one-dimensional Shaun "I can't get over my dead sister" Mason and his deathwish vengeance crusade, this book did cook along, a little improbably at times, but with so many thrills and twists that it was never boring and I had to know what would happen next. Mira Grant even makes all the virology infodumps interesting. In Deadline, we learn that even in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, things can indeed always get worse.

That said, the BIG twist at the end? I totally saw it coming. But nonetheless, I have to read book three, and soon.

This is an endearing light fantasy series, like a Disney Princess adventure for grown-ups. Although billed as "the darker side of fairy tales," Jim Hines doesn't really get dark-dark, he just takes traditional fairy tales and treats them as stories about adults in a fantasy world.

In "The Stepsister Scheme," we were introduced to Danielle Whiteshore, aka "Cinderella," newly married to Prince Armand and just learning that her mother-in-law Queen Beatrice has a predilection for collecting girls in trouble with unusual gifts. Hence, Snow White and Talia, aka "Sleeping Beauty," both of whom come from their own tragic real-life fairy tales. The three women go forth to rescue Armand from malevolent faeries, and a buddy team-up fantasy series is born.

In book two, the threat is mermaids. Hines adapts the tale of The Little Mermaid this time. Lirea, the mermaid who fell in love with a human prince, has subsequently gone mad, killed her own sister and her father, and has taken over her tribe and is leading the Undines (merfolk) in a war against the humans. Danielle, Snow, and Talia discover trouble brewing on a diplomatic mission to the Undines that goes badly wrong. Lirea is apparently hunting for her surviving younger sister, convinced by the voices in her head that her little sister (and everyone else) is trying to kill her.

Hines is definitely writing in response to, though not in imitation of, the Disney versions we are all familiar with. Lirea is no Ariel (her sister is a little closer), but we do get a Sea Witch, far more complex than the Disney version (first she's evil, then she's not, then she is) and a more complicated version of the "mermaid and her human prince" story (they were in love - no, he was a cad who used and abandoned her - no, he was actually in love with her - they were married - no they weren't). There's also a lot of magic treated with some complexity as well, as the details of what really happened to Lirea, what her grandmother the sea witch is really up to, and how Cinderella, Snow, and Talia will save the day all depends on understanding how certain spells work.

Snow White and Danielle both "level up" a bit in this book, while Talia is still the same butt-kicking ninja she was in the first book, but what she gets more of is character development. We learn a little more about her background — specifically, how she came to the Kingdom of Lorindar and wound up under Queen Bea's protection — and her love for Snow, revealed in the first book, is revealed to more people in this one. I am not sure where Hines will go with this, since so far, Snow seems pretty heterosexual, constantly flirting, and, it's strongly implied, going well beyond flirting, with anything in trousers. I suppose for many fans it would be a "happy ending" if Snow reciprocates Talia's feelings, but an unrequited love seems more likely.

There is a bittersweet happy ending, a twist or two on the traditional ending of the Little Mermaid's tale, and generally things are wrapped up in a satisfying manner while leaving a few dangling threads (like Talia's so-far unrequited love) for the next book.

This isn't brilliant fantasy, but it's very enjoyable fantasy written with a thoroughly modern sensibility — the characters are living in a medieval fantasy world, and somehow they manage to act like enlightened people without outright spouting 21st century viewpoints. The presence of non-straight characters does not come off as gimmicky or an arbitrary checking off of diversity boxes, nor is there any hint of exploitation. And of course, this is a book with multiple strong female characters - in fact, a ton of them - but not all are in the Exceptional Woman Who Is Superior to Any Man mold. The men don't suffer for the formidability of the ladies, though they do tend to be more minor characters.

This is possibly the most annoying book I have ever listened to.

Annerte Bening is great as the narrator of this audiobook: she catches the stream-of-consciousness voices of the characters perfectly. The problem is that listening to these voices is exactly like listening to someone's interior monologue as they natter to themselves about every detail they observe going throughout their day.

I haven't read James Joyce's Ulysses, but apparently the writing style in Mrs. Dalloway is often compared to that book. I can't say it makes me eager to tackle Joyce. There isn't really a plot in this book, just character studies. Clarissa Dalloway is a high-society woman planning a party; we follow her throughout her day starting with a walk along Bond Street. She meets an old flame who's just returned from India, prompting reflection about why she married her stodgy, reliable husband Richard Dalloway instead of the more interesting but less stable Peter Walsh. Then the narrative switches to Walsh's point of view, as we follow him going about London, reflecting on Clarissa and her refusal of his marriage proposal and the married woman he's now hooked up with.

The book drifts in and out of viewpoints, shifting perspectives and threads of narrative. Mrs. Dalloway is the main character whose head we get into, but we are also treated to the thoughts of Septimus Warren Smith, a traumatized, suicidal veteran of the Great War, whose Italian wife can't understand why he keeps acting ill when the doctors say nothing is wrong with him.

The prose is elegant and pretty and Woolf is quite artful in the way she gets us thoroughly into the characters' heads, telling us all about their hopes, fears, secrets, and entire life histories in snippets of rambling internal monologue. It's one of those "literary" novels whose craft I can appreciate while making me never want to read it again. I can see why Woolf is studied by graduate students, but nothing here spoke to me or interested me, and listening to Clarissa Dalloway go on and on and on and on, treating every precious thought she has like a precious little diamond, listening to self-involved Peter Walsh go on and on and on about his love lives past and present and his failure to "make a success" of himself, listening to Septimus Smith go on and on and on about his dead friend who haunts him and how detached he is from society, made me feel like someone trapped on a bus between people talking on their cell phones.

A snarkier review of this book could legitimately be hashtagged with #firstworldproblems, aside from Septimus's PTSD, which I'll grant that Woolf treated with a fair degree of nuance and sympathy for the time this was written. There's also a hint of a past lesbian infatuation and a lot of ruminating on the basic dissatisfaction of upper-class married life, which I guess is why this book is supposed to be an early "feminist" work.

It was not to my taste. Virginia Woolf may have been a genius, but I suspect you have to have your head somewhere like where Clarissa's or Septimus's heads are at to love this book. Maybe I'd have found the stream-of-consciousness prose more interesting and less annoying in print.

This was pretty good contemporary cyberpunk. Morgan doesn't have William Gibson's way with words, but his characters are more interesting and his pacing and action scenes are much better.

There is the potential for a space opera here - the world of Altered Carbon is a far future in which humans have spread to the stars, and the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, was born on another planet, but this story takes place entirely on Earth, in "Bay City" (what used to be San Francisco). That and all the Japanese names and yakuza and such seem to be conscious nods to Gibson.

Kovacs is your basic bad dude ex-commando killing machine with a tortured past. He used to work for "Envoy Corps"; in this far future, the U.N. is apparently the interplanetary government and it trains super-soldiers as "Envoys" to go do all the usual killing and pacifying for what turns out to be corporate interests and rich people. Same as it ever was. Kovacs gets disillusioned and turns rogue, and the book opens with a criminal enterprise he and his girlfriend are running going very badly. This is how we are introduced to the most interesting technology in this world: "resleeving." Basically, human minds can now be digitized and transferred ("sleeved") in new bodies. People convicted of crimes can be sentenced to virtual "storage" — your mind goes into a data bank for some period of time (potentially centuries) and in the meantime, someone else can buy the right to walk around in your body. Mix this with artificial intelligences and virtual worlds and you can see the possibilities for cons, grand schemes, and cunning plans is enormous.

Kovacs winds up on Earth, freed from his virtual sentence following his botched enterprise in the prologue, because a very rich "Methuselah" (someone who's been resleeved repeatedly for hundreds of years) wants him to do a job for him. Mr. Bancroft died, violently, a few days ago, and upon being resleeved from his backup storage, he of course has no memory of what happened prior to his last backup. The police say either he killed himself or his wife killed him. Bancroft refuses to believe either scenario, and wants Kovacs to find out who actually blew his head off and why.

This is where Altered Carbon crosses cyberpunk with a hard-boiled detective novel. Kovacs has to go looking for clues, and of course runs into all sorts of people with conflicting interests all of whom threaten him or bribe him to do what they want. The way in which he eventually uncovers what's really going on, gets caught up in an extensive web and snagged on multiple hooks and conflicting obligations, was quite skillfully plotted. He eventually unleashes bloody vengeance as is typical for this sort of story, and of course he runs up against multiple dangerous dames with whom he has a lot of graphically and sometimes laughably-described sex.

If you are fond of the "hard-boiled lone wolf bangs babes and carves a swath of bloody vengeance" genre, then Altered Carbon is the book for you. The whole digitized humans angle contains no ideas that haven't been floating around in cyberpunk for decades now, and certainly other cyberpunk novels have been written with a noir feel to them, but this is the best of the lot I have read recently.

There were some authorial indulgences (the sex scenes, the Jimi Hendrix AI-run hotel, and a whole lot of prostitutes) which are characteristic of a freshman SF novel (though I kind of liked the Hendrix). But overall, this paid tribute to its predecessors while not being wholly derivative, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, and wouldn't mind seeing a little more extra-solar SF next time.

I wanted very much for this to be better than it was. But while it was not bad, neither was it particularly good. It's a Big Mac of a space opera, a perfectly average, standard, processed serving delivering a pleasant if unexceptional taste but no nutritional value. Mike Shepherd seems to be trying to imitate David Weber or Lois McMaster Bujold, and since I am not particularly a fan of either of them (I know, sacrilege), this story did little for me. It was entertaining enough for the time I spent listening to it, but I don't really care about Kris Longknife and her future military career and whatever political shenanigans will continue through the next few books, nor was I even lured by the promise of the aliens repeatedly mentioned in this book but never seen.

Kris Longknife is a daughter of privilege in this far future where Earth is a corrupt, decadent old world at the center of a union spanning hundreds of colony worlds. Her father is the Prime Minister of Wardhaven, and he's been a cold, political creature since Kris's little brother was killed following a botched kidnapping when she was ten. Kris, following years of guilt and a bit of teenage alcoholism, was inspired by her war-hero grandfather to join the Navy, much to her parents' horror.

In the first part of the book, we are introduced to Kris as a boot Ensign in charge of a bunch of space marines who are on a rescue mission to save a little girl who's been kidnapped by terrorists. Of course this dredges up all of Kris's issues, and already she was trying me, because the whole time it was "OH, the angst! I'm coming, Tommy! I won't let this little girl die like you did! Oh, how can I focus on the job when I keep remembering my dead little brother angst!angst!angst!"

I'm sure something like that will haunt you for your entire life, but it happened when she was a kid, and now she's an adult and a naval officer. One would think she'd have developed some coping skills by now. But saving the little girl was clearly meant to be the point where she finally is able to put her brother to rest.

Then we get more family background, Kris takes a lot of flak from fellow officers because of course she's one of "those Longknives" and everyone knows she's a rich girl who decided to join the military for whatever reason. She is assigned to a humanitarian mission on a nearly-abandoned colony world where people are starving and facing floods and plagues, and since she's so exceptional, she manages to whip the green, bottom-of-the-barrel unit she's assigned to into kick-ass troops who beat off bandits and save the starving farmers, etc.

In the meantime, there's some kind of plot where political enemies of her family are trying to set her up to be killed, which introduces the main bad guys and a dubious romantic interest for future books.

The "mutiny" of the book's title does not take place until nearly the end of the book, and like all the things Kris does, it's an act that requires a certain amount of bravery and competence, but no hard moral choices — throughout the book, the reader is never left in doubt that Kris is absolutely doing the right thing and anyone who opposes her is wrong.

If you really like military SF and female protagonists, this may be worth checking out, but I'm unlikely to pick up the rest of the series unless I'm starved for something better.

I also cannot recommned this narrator: Dina Pearlman put far too much "sneer" into the sneers; whenever a character spoke with sarcasm, or worse, an accent (there is a Scottish Highlander regiment in the book), it became a bit painful to listen to her, and honestly, I have listened to many audiobooks and found men can do women's voices well and women can do men's voices well, but in Pearlman's case, I could never forget that it was a woman trying to voice a man's lines, and it kept throwing me out of the story.