Book Reviews

An Airless Storm follows up on the adventures of Andrew Cochrane and his security service of interstellar mercenaries. Following their initial success in funding their operations, the company has ordered more ships and larger ships. But their enemies are doing the same. The book has the same vaguely Heinlein-juvenile feel, and the plot armor is less perfect. Mostly it represents an improvement, but the ratio of people talking about their plans and engaging in covert operation shenanigans versus space battles is still pretty high. The characters are also a bit weak, with most of them feeling like masks the narrator is wearing. That’s one of the fundamental risks of delivering information to the reader through characters having conversations, but it takes a bit of skill to hide.

Peter Grant’s new novel, The Stones of Silence, is set in his science-fiction universe, sharing it with his two other series starting with Take the Star Road and War to the knife . It’s unclear to me if the setting is intended to be the same, or just happens to be similar in a generic science fiction way. The setup for his new series is interesting, but shares the flaws of the earlier works. In particular, the protagonist appears to wear plot armor. While his efforts to be prepared justify the resulting success, it significantly reduces the sense of peril – not to mention the sense of realism. The story remains entertaining, but lacks a certain vigor and immediacy.

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher is a collection of short stories in the very popular Dresden Files series, named for the central character Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard – or at least the only one with an ad in the phone book. I don’t normally go in for short story collections, but occasionally with an established universe my completionist instincts will kick in. In this case I had already read Side Jobs, a similar collection by the same author in the same universe.

A sequel to Sufficiently Advanced Magic , On the Shoulders of Titans manages to significantly complicate the plot. The number of characters who may not be trustworthy or whose interests may lie in a direction other than that of their allies grows to very nearly equal the number of characters in the book. Thankfully, the “magic school” elements of the plot are reduced almost to insignificance; the main character barely attends class and spends only a limited amount of time on screen taking tests. Which probably explains why he isn’t doing so well in school, despite having powerful friends (met as a results of events in the first book) basically tutoring him.

What do you get when you combine an interesting magic system, a lot of influence from video games, a competent but emotionally distant author, a dash of gender ambiguity, a token pinch of political preaching, and yet another book about a child who goes to magic school? Apparently, you get a pretty good stew of a book that’s enjoyable to read, intellectually interesting, and only rarely makes me want to throw it against the wall for brief periods.

Many years ago, when I was a young man, or perhaps a boy in the process of becoming a young man, I walked into a bookstore and bought a book that would change my life. I bought the book on the basis of the cover, because the cover was the coolest thing I had ever seen: a man wearing sunglasses drives a car in a futuristic city.

You understand, I say he drives the car because that is what one does with a car. But the car driven by the man in the sunglasses is a Chandler MetalSmith, and with the autocomp left off (as all autocomps were left off, until the driver requested otherwise, until the law required otherwise) the man may be driving the MetalSmith, but the proper word for what the MetalSmith is doing is flying.

There’s not much to say about Adapt and Overcome (The Maxwell Saga), the third book in Peter David’s series about a young man who joins the space navy and comes of age amongst a series of increasingly improbable coincidences. It’s fast, reasonably fun, and the infinite improbability drive is set to just a notch below winning the lottery without buying a ticket. The author’s complete failure to grasp his readers’ comments about his main character’s plot invincibility in prior books is a charming mirror of his main character’s casual stroll through explosions, firefights and love affairs that never seem to leave a scratch on him.

In case you are ever hit by the supernatural version of a meteor strike out of a blue sky and magically bound to a succubus and an angel, there are a number of steps that really should be followed as soon as practically possible:

• Have a lot of sex with the succubus. Duh.
• Convince the angel to join in.
• Move out of your mom’s basement

That last step can get tricky when a werewolf wants to mate with you – as forcefully as required, two witches are worried they are getting left out of the fun, heaven is threatening to demote your angel, and the vampires have an all-points-bulletin out on your ass.

Knights Magi, the fourth book in the Spellmonger series, focuses on the adventures of Tyndal and Rondal as they grow into their roles as Knights Magi. At over 600 pages, there’s a lot of material to cover, but the content is perhaps best described as an adolescent romp. It’s not serious enough to qualify as a coming-of-age tale (though probably the author intended it as such), nor explicit enough to qualify as soft porn. As the main characters are themselves adolescents in that awkward phase of life, it is perhaps not surprising that (in addition to the usual magic, intrigue, and goblins) the nature of femininity and how to obtain access to a woman’s virtue without being tied down by it occupies a major part of the book.

Good Intentions is somewhere between male adolescent wish-fulfillment, soft-core erotica, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy. The plot revolves around a pretty ordinary guy, still living in his mom’s basement, who decides to sneak into the local graveyard to get a few atmospheric pictures. He’s hoping to use the pictures to impress a pair of cute goth chicks in his photography course, lacking the gumption to simply approach them without a prop.