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Newsletter #122 June — August, 2018

Short Recommendations
by Don Blyly

        Black Chamber by S. M. Stirling ($16.00, due early July) is an alternate history novel of World War I. In our history, Teddy Roosevelt was the leader of the progressive wing of the Republican Party, and he groomed William Howard Taft to succeed him as president. But he was so disturbed by Taft’s leading the country back in the conservative direction that he unsuccessfully challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination for president. He then started the “Bull Moose” party for the progressive wing of the Republican voters, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the election. In Black Chamber, Taft had a heart attack in the White House just before the Republican convention, Teddy Roosevelt wins back the White House, and starts leading the U.S. back in the progressive direction (including getting the equal rights amendment passed before entering WW I).
        One of the things Roosevelt did to prepare the U.S. to enter WW I was to establish the Black Chamber, a top secret group of elite secret agents. Most of the novel follows the adventures of Cuban/Irish-American Luz O’Malley Arostegui as she infiltrates the German secret plan to keep the U.S. from entering the war. While it was fun following her fast-paced daring adventures in Europe, I would have liked to see a bit more of the changes going on in the U.S.

        From 2004 to 2010, the 6 novels (The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, The Clan Corporation, The Merchant’s War, The Revolution Business, and The Trade of Queens) of the excellent Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross came out with covers that made it very clear that they were a series. In the series, some humans have the ability to step between parallel Earths that have differing levels of technologies. This ability only runs in certain families, because of a recessive gene, and the families control the breeding within the small group of families to try to produce more paratime travelers. The families function rather a lot like mob families, exploiting their abilities without regard to any laws on any of the Earths that they can reach. The last book left a lot of loose ends hanging, but it took until 2017 for the next book, Empire Games ($15.99), to come out, with a cover that looked nothing like the earlier books in the series. In 2018 the next book, Dark State ($25.99), came out with a cover similar to the cover of Empire Games, and there is supposed to be a third novel in this follow-up trilogy.
        It’s hard to say a lot about the two newer books without giving spoilers to those who haven’t yet read the first 6 books. But if you’ve already read the first 6, you definitely want to continue the series. One of the loose ends from the earlier series was the uninhabited parallel Earth with a huge concrete dome, and at the bottom of the dome is a door that leads to hard vacuum in another universe. We learn a lot more, but not yet everything, about the dome and the other universe. We also learn that the ability to travel between worlds comes from genetic engineering far beyond the technology of any of the parallel Earths that have been discovered so far.

        Hollywood Dead ($26.99, due early August) is the latest Sandman Slim book from Richard Kadrey. I’ve enjoyed all the Sandman Slim books, but up until the last couple books I felt that they were starting to get into a bit of a rut. But the story line has freshened up with the two most recent in the series.
        James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, is back from Hell again. The evil power brokers Wormwood have split into factions, each intent on wiping out the other faction. One faction has hired a necromancer to bring Stark partway back to life, with the promise that if he helps defeat the other faction within a time limit, he will be brought the rest of the way back to life. He knows that he can’t trust any promise made by either faction of Wormwood, but he hates them all and is willing to try to kill off the one faction and then try to force the other faction to keep their promise. But a partway alive Stark is not as powerful as a completely alive Stark, and some of his L.A. friends wish that he hadn’t come back from his year in Hell.

        I’ve enjoyed all of the Monster Hunter International books by Larry Correia, but I wasn’t very impressed by Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge ($7.99) by John Ringo and Larry Correia, the first of three books set decades before Monster Hunter International. A customer talked me into reading Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners ($7.99), the second of the Ringo trilogy. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed Sinners as much as Larry’s main Monster Hunter series. Lots of action, lots of humor, and almost none of Ringo’s obsession with his character wanting to have one night stands with every co-ed in town.

        I’ve enjoyed Eric Flint writing by himself and Ryk E. Spoor writing by himself, so I picked up Castaway Planet ($7.99), which they co-wrote.
        This is like a Heinlein juvenile version of Swiss Family Robinson in outer space, told mainly from the point of view of the 14-year-old daughter of the marooned family.
        A colony ship has a lifeboat drill, and somehow a lifeboat breaks free with the one human family and an adolescent alien Bemmie nicknamed Whips on board. They are lightyears from any colony world and must find a planet they can survive on and learn how to survive on the untamed planet.
         I normally don’t read juvenile novels, but this was good enough that I’ll probably get around to reading the sequel, Castaway Odyssey ($7.99). But both of the Castaway books are set in the same universe as the authors’ series Boundary ($7.99), Threshold ($7.99), and Portal ($7.99), and the packaging for Castaway Odyssey makes me think that perhaps I should read the other three books first. So many books, so little time.

        One day I had just finished both of the novels I had been reading and needed to quickly grab something to read while standing in line at a fast food place for lunch. I went to a pile of advance reading copies and picked up What Makes This Book So Great ($15.99) by Jo Walton. Jo Walton is a professional writer, but she also reads an enormous number of books, within and outside the field, and re-reads many books. She writes (primarily) short essays on why she considers so many books to be worth re-reading when there are so many other books that she hasn’t yet read. Most of the essays are only 3-5 pages, so I thought I’d see how many essays I had time to read while waiting in line, and then I’d look for something else when I got back from lunch. Instead, I read the entire book, agreeing with many of the essays, disagreeing with a few, and making mental notes of titles that I had not yet read but now wanted to read. And not all of the essays are positive. There’s one on series that go downhill, one on “I’d love this book if I didn’t loathe the protagonist”, one on the changing attitudes of major publishers regarding profanity in novels, but the overwhelming majority of the essays are recommendations of books that she thinks are worth reading more than once.

        In April, D. J. (Dave) Butler was in Minneapolis for other business, stopped into Uncle Hugo’s, introduced himself, signed his books Witchy Eye ($7.99) and Witchy Winter ($25.00), and chatted for a while. He will be back to Minneapolis on other business in September and will be signing at Uncle Hugo’s. Watch for more details in the next newsletter.
        I had heard some good comments from customers about Witchy Eye, so I gave it a try. This is an alternate history fantasy set in what is now the U.S. in the early 1800s. Nashville is protected by a stone wall and gates, as if it were an older European city. The American Revolution never took place. A descendant of William Penn is the emperor of most of North America south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi. Sarah Calhoun is an Appalachee girl with a witchy eye and some magical abilities, who does not realize that she is one of the triplets born of the last rightful empress. The triplets were secretly snuck out of the palace on the night of their birth and placed in adoptive homes in different parts of the empire, shortly before the current emperor locked up their mother (claiming she was insane), and eventually killed her. Now agents of the current emperor are searching for the triplets, and a few people loyal to her mother are trying to protect the triplets.
        In a story as complex as this, there are two ways to fill in the reader with the information they need to understand what is going on: 1) stop the story to do info dumps, or 2) keep the story rolling along and occasionally drop in a brief piece of information. Butler keeps the story rolling along, and takes a bit longer that I would like to drop in the brief pieces of information. But Witchy Eye was so good that I had to immediately start on Witchy Winter, which is even better than the first. In Witchy Winter, he drops little bits of information such as that Napoleon is in charge of the European Caliphate, that after the Borgia pope “turned Turk” the Catholic Church stopped electing popes, and that there are still giant sloths and saber-tooth tigers roaming around in Missouri.
        While Witchy Eye concentrates on Sarah, her friends, and those (human and otherwise) who are after her, Witchy Winter also involves the other two triplets and those who are trying to find them. Witchy Winter also introduces an Ojibwe man as a main character, and adds Ojibwe magic to the other magics portrayed in the series, including voodoo in New Orleans, English necromancy, German hex magic. and many others.
        One foundation of the series is that Eve was Adam’s second wife, and the humans are the descendants of Adam and Eve, while the Firstborn are the descendants of Adam’s first wife. St. Martin Luther is remembered for persuading the church that the Firstborn do not have souls and should not be allowed to be baptized or to hold any office religious or secular. The followers of St. Martin are dedicated to exterminating the Firstborn. The father of the royal triplets was a Firstborn who the current emperor arranged to have murdered. And the Firstborn have their kind of magic. And then there is the Heron King, who rules the beastmen, and the beastmen have their kind of magic.
        In spite of all the complexity of the world, the story moves along briskly and I’m now impatiently waiting for the third book, probably around next May.
        Before he signed a multi-book contract with a major publisher, he had a lot of novels issued by a small press and we’ve picked up a few of the more interesting sounding of the small press titles and hope to have a lot more of them for his signing in September.



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