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THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD AND SKASKASH IS ITS PROPHET!

The Rosinante Trilogy

By Alexis A. Gilliland 

15 Sep, 2015

Military Speculative Fiction That Doesn't Suck

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Alexis Gilliland is a four time Hugo winner — but not for his written fiction. Only his 1982 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was for fiction; his fellow nominees were Robert Stallman, Paul O. Williams, David Brin, and Michael Swanwick 1. You may have heard of some of these guys. When he won, Gilliland had just two novels in print 2.

You may be wondering How did someone with such a small body of work manage to win the Campbell?” 

Partly it’s because most Campbell nominees tend to have only small bodies of work when they win, due to the whole New Writer thing. Cynics might say that Gilliland’s long career as fan and lauded fan artist ensured name recognition. But I would credit his Campbell win to the fact that those two novels, The Revolution from Rosinante and Long Shot For Rosinante , really are fun little books, books I was certain I would not regret revisiting after a gap of twenty-two years 3.

(I do understand that’s like saying Don’t worry, I know what I am doing” while playing with burning plastic.) 

They are also the first two volumes in the Rosinante Trilogy, the subject of today’s review. 

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The Other Winner of the First Tiptree Award

The White Queen  (Aleutian Trilogy, volume 1)

By Gwyneth Jones 

14 Sep, 2015

James Tiptree, Jr. Award

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Gwyneth Jones’ 1991 The White Queen is one of the two novels that won the first James Tiptree Jr. Award ever. Unlike the other winner (A Woman of the Iron People), I have not heard much about The White Queen, and have not been looking for a copy of it for decades. Having read it, I find myself unenthusiastic.

2038’s socialist revolution in America is big news, especially for Americans, but for journalist Johnny Guglioli it offers very little hope of an end to his exile in Africa. Johnny is, according to top American authorities, a carrier of a particularly nasty (although apparently not especially contagious) retrovirus disease and despite his claims that the diagnosis is a politically motivated sham, the new government is no more likely to let Johnny back into the US than the one it replaced.

What might earn Johnny a chance at a reassessment is to become the celebrity du jour. What better route to that than to interview Aleutians? Who, despite their misleading name, are the very first aliens to visit the Earth1.

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My first Cherryh

Downbelow Station  (Company War, volume 3)

By C J Cherryh 

13 Sep, 2015

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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Although Cherryh was active in the 1970s, I think her 1981 Downbelow Station was my first exposure to her work in general and to her Alliance-Union setting in specific. Not that this is strictly speaking an Alliance-Union novel … at least not until towards the end.

I remember finding it a bit of a slog at the time. Clearly other readers disagreed with me, because it not only won the 1982 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but was named by Locus as one of the top fifty SF novels of all time.

The good news for humanity is that by the 24th century, humans have spread far beyond the confines of the solar system, first at sub-light speeds and later with FTL. The bad news is that the human worlds outside the solar system are caught in a vast interstellar war, with the predatory Earth Company on one side, the authoritarian slave-drivers of the Union on the other, and a handful of neutrals, mainly merchants and a few stations, caught in the middle.

The war between Company and Union has dragged on and on, far beyond the point the balance sheets would justify. Earth Company is ready to beg Union for peace. The problem is, the Earth Company’s Fleet is not ready to stand down, and it answers not to the Company now, but to Commander Conrad Mazian. 

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There could be no mercy in the application of Commonwealth law.

The Bohr Maker  (Nanotech Succession, volume 1)

By Linda Nagata 

12 Sep, 2015

Special Requests

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1995’s The Bohr Maker was Linda Nagata’s debut novel, followed eight months later by Tech Heaven, which shares a common background with The Bohr Maker. Two strong novels in the course of a year is an effective way to get my attention; how annoying that I would then have to wait until 1997 for her third novel.…

Many are those who revere Kirstin Adair, Chief of the Commonwealth Police, for her unending efforts to protect Mother Earth from the threats posed to Gaea by modern nanotechnology (or makers). Few of those admirers revere her quite as energetically as Kirstin adores herself. 

Nikko Jiang-Tibayan is an outlier. Even though he sometimes shares Kirstin’s bed, he is not among those who admire her ideals. He himself is an example of just the sort of tampering in god’s domain that the Commonwealth’s laws were intended to eradicate. 

And while Nikko was temporarily granted a waiver allowing him to exist at all, that waiver had a time limit — and that time limit is about to run out.

Not to worry! Nikko has a cunning plan.

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And now for a collection

High Sorcery

By Andre Norton 

11 Sep, 2015

50 Nortons in 50 Weeks

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I was surprised when I first encountered a short work by Norton; I had never thought of her as someone who worked in short lengths. In fact, she wrote dozens of short pieces. If ISFDB’s list of her short works looks comparatively small next to a list of her novels, that only reflects how many novels Norton wrote. Her output may not have been quite Asimovian but it was certainly Andersonian.

Which brings us to Norton’s 1970 collection, High Sorcery.

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Kitchener Public Library is feeding my Kaoru Mori habit

A Bride’s Story, Volume Three  (A Bride’s Story, volume 3)

By Kaoru Mori 

10 Sep, 2015

Translation

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Until Kitchener Public Library’s supply of volumes of A Bride’s Story runs out, I am going to keep revisiting this series. 

Unlike the previous two volumes, the focus in Volume Three isn’t on Amir, but someone previously a supporting character and info-dump facilitator: wandering ethnologist and linguist Henry Smith. In this volume the inquisitive Mr. Smith gains the answer to a question he never asked: 

Just how much trouble can an Englishman traveling alone in Central Asia get into?

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Batiya Abroad

Fealty’s Shore  (Across a Jade Sea, volume 3)

By L. Shelby 

9 Sep, 2015

Special Requests

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In L. Shelby’s 2014 Fealty’s Shore, the third and (probably) final volume in the Across a Jade Sea series, Batiya Dachahlra finally gets to meet her father-in-law. She has accompanied her husband, Chunru Dachahl Pralahnru, to his distant homeland, the vast and wealthy Changali empire — a powerful nation whose customs, laws and language are all quite unfamiliar to Batiya.

A powerful nation whose crown prince is none other than Chunru Dachahl Pralahnru, and whose emperor does not look kindly on the whirlwind romance between his son and heir and an odd-looking barbarian engineer with an unpronounceable name. 

Of course, there’s an obvious way for the emperor to deal with his son’s inconvenient foreign wife. He can simply have her assassinated.

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Wartime First Contact

Cold Allies

By Patricia Anthony 

8 Sep, 2015

Special Requests

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1993’s Cold Allies was the late Patricia Anthony’s debut novel. It was followed by six more novels over the next five years: Conscience of the Beagle (1993), Happy Policeman (1994), Cradle of Splendor (1996), God’s Fires (1997), and Flanders (1998). After Flanders, silence save for one short story, 1999’s Mercy’s Children”, and one posthumous novel, The Sighting, published by Wildside in 2015.

Cold Allies introduces us to a 21st century transformed by abrupt and dramatic climate change. Desperate economic migrants flee across North America only to find themselves confined to camps or worse. In the Old World, new armies follow ancient invasion routes to win a new homeland for themselves.

Climate change, agricultural collapse, and invasions are only part of the story. There are also the aliens.…

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She knew a happy ending when she saw it.”

The Witling

By Vernor Vinge 

6 Sep, 2015

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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Someone — I cannot recall who and Googling has not helped — used to assert that each Vernor Vinge novel was significantly better than the last. I don’t think this is quite true1, but it is often enough true to be useful. The corollary is that the older the Vinge novel, the more likely it is to be bad. Now you must be wondering: just how bad is the worst Vernor Vinge novel? 

I have 1976’s The Witling at hand, so I can tell you the answer to that question: 

Pretty damn bad.” 

Spoilers

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You don’t treat your cousin like a chicken!”

Jupiter Ascending

By Lana Wachowski & Andy Wachowski 

5 Sep, 2015

Miscellaneous Reviews

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I will admit I was not impressed when I saw trailers for 2015’s Jupiter Ascending. Still, reaction to the film was varied enough that I decided to give it a chance. (Only on DVD, which may have been a mistake. More on that later.) 

What I found was a movie that kept me entertained for a couple of hours, a movie that reminded me very strongly of a particular Hugo-winning novel (or two) … but also a movie that broke one of the fundamental rules of movie story-telling.

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an illegal alien who makes a meagre living cleaning other people’s toilets. Jupiter Jones is also a space princess who, if only she knew how to assert her rights, owns the entire planet Earth and everything on it. 

The first fact keeps Jones relegated to low pay and subject to constant risk of deportation. The second puts her life at risk.

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