Douglas E. Berry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk_(anthology)

Four Stars. This was an interesting anthology.

A rather unbalanced collection, to be honest. Some of the stories are amazing, complete tales, while others feel like they are entry into larger stories. All of the tales are interesting and remain true to their era. But in the end, I was slightly disappointed by some of the stories.

Five Stars

A novel where the primary character admits right from the start that he's a liar.

Eco is the master of the unreliable narrator, and this may be the height of the art. Starting in Constantinople in 1204 as the 4th Crusade loots and burns the Queen of Cities, Niketas Choniates is saved by the mysterious Baudolino, who confesses to having disguised himself as a crusading knight and offers safety to Niketas in exchange for writing his life story, which he had written a chronicle of, but had lost.

What follows is a fantastic tale of being adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, education in Paris, and a quest to discover the Kingdom of Prester John far to the East. The story slowly slides from reasonable to fantastic, adding each element slowly to keep you engaged. As always, there are no definitive answers, no clear explanations. We end with a sudden mystery worthy of Agatha Christie and a finale that resolves nothing but is satisfying nonetheless.

As always, Eco does not skimp on the setting. We see and smell the sack of Constantinople. The meals are richly described, and his descriptions of the Hagia Sophia and the area brought me back to our trip there. A very sensory-immersive novel that challenges the mind.

This was both an easy and deep read, and I loved every page both as a student of the history of Constantinople and as a fan of Eco's work. I highly recommend it.

https://www.blacklibrary.com/series/gaunts-ghosts/ebook-the-victory-part-two-eng-2022.html

Five Stars

I think this series has reached its natural end or a transformation point.

Picking up from the events in the first Victory Omnibus, the Ghosts, their Imperial Navy crew, and the Regiment's followers find themselves suddenly back in realspace, with shattered memories, fogged minds, and being boarded. After a fierce fight, they learn the truth. The loss of one of their war engines has cast them out of the warp, and ten years have passed.

They reach the vital forge world of Urdesh, where an essential campaign will determine the fate of the war. To his shock, Gaunt is named a Lord Commander and ushered into the highest circles of the crusade's command, and a deadly new world of political infighting.

The two novels cover the final acts of the Urdesh campaign and are filled with Abnett's great characters, brilliant imagery, and vile enemies. The last book resolves many hanging plotlines, and as I said at the top, it is a perfect chance for the series to take a new direction. Gaunt is now the second in command of the crusade, the voice of the Warlord. The 1st Tanith is now his personal guard. I'd love to see the series lean into this, showing the big picture and infighting in the highest circles, as Gaunt did leapfrog over several people to be named to his new post. It would be fascinating to see the Ghosts evolve after over twenty years of combat and so many losses to find their new identity.

A tremendous new omnibus in the Black Library's longest-running series following a single unit.

https://a.co/d/84L804L

3.5 stars out of 5.

The book is quite enjoyable and written in a friendly style that draws the reader in. The problem is in the first half; there is an incredible lack of focus as author Christopher Brooke tries to address broad aspects of life in the period covered. He wanders into digressions, fails to provide critical information, and for the most part, were just confusing. The best example comes in the "Travel" chapter, which never addresses many facts about travel in the Central Middle Ages. What were the roads like? How were caravans organized, and what tolls and hazards did they face? How many miles a day could you expect to make, and what would a weary traveler do at night? Sea travel? OK, describe the ships of the era, how they navigated, and what they could carry. What were the major trading ports?

Instead, we get a ten-page divergence into the Crusades and the Song of Roland.

The style settled down a bit in the second half, which is a more chronological examination of Europe that focuses on the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian states, which I'll admit is a decent focus to have.

In total, it was an interesting book, but as a proper history, it falls short.

Enemy Coast Ahead - Uncensored: The Real Guy Gibson by Guy Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was recommended by a friend, and I will be forever grateful. The story of Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson, VC, DSO & Bar, DFC & Bar isn't just his story, but of the evolution of the RAF and Bomber Command from the last fleeting days of peace in 1939 through fumbling with inadequate aircraft and a bombing technique best described as "fly under the clouds until you see your target and hope you hit something" to a highly-effective, thoroughly modern force that had made night bombing into a science and an art form.

We follow Gibson from his early days flying the HP.52 Hampden in early raids against German forces and industrial targets, through his brief time as the pilot of the night-fighter variant of the Bristol Type 156 Beaufighter, and back to bombers in the new Avro Lancaster. Throughout the book, we see both the strategic and personal effects of the war. Gibson is careful to note deaths, and how they occured if known. We see the crews celebrating, breaking regulations, dodging official sanctions, and how they dealt with the stress of upcoming missions.

As this is the Uncensored version, it contains Gibson's unfiltered opinions of of his commanders, Bomber Command, and the Government in general. Which is to be expected of an officer leading men in combat and seeing them die. There is always room for complaints! We meet the people he served with and knew, and he shows a great skill in describing people with a few broad strokes.

Near the end of the book there is a brilliant narrative that shows just how far the RAF had come in night bombing. Staring with AVM Harris picking the night's target, it follows the chain of events on all sides, including how the German response worked, how the Lancasters navigated, and how the use of diversionary streams of bombers diluted the Luftwaffe's night-fighter response. Finally, the role of Pathfinder planes, flying ahead of the main body and dropping coded flares to mark distance to the target and dropping a flaring marker bomb to indicate the exact center of the raid. Then the mainstream, flying straight and level despite flak, enemy fighters, and seeing bombers bursting into flame and crash to Earth as the bomb-aimer keeps calling for the pilot to stay on course until the call of "bomb away!" is heard. Then, the giant four-engine bombers claw for altitude and speed, maintaining group, as they exit occupied Europe.

It takes your breath away reading it.

The final chapters concern the Dambusters raid carried out on the night of 16/17 May 1943 by 617 Squadron RAF Bomber Command, commanded by Gibson. His writing about the utter secrecy surrounding the project, the cloak-and-dagger aspects of just learning even the basics of the mission, and training his hand-picked crews according to orders that made little sense is riveting. The actual raid is a story of heroism and loss. They accomplished their mission at a terrible cost.

Wing Commander Gibson died on 19 September 1944 when the Mosquito he was piloting - possibly against orders - crashed in the Netherlands after a failed raid. He never lived to see Germany brought low, not to see his predictions of peace through massive strategic bombing f0rce take form in nuclear weapons and MAD. But he left this chronicle of this singular aspect of WWII, and I learned a great deal.

My one complaint is I could have used a guide to the various rank and other contractions used in the book.

"For some men of great courage and adventure, inactivity was a slow death. Would a man like Gibson ever have adjusted back to peacetime life? One can imagine it would have been a somewhat empty existence after all he had been through. Facing death had become his drug. He had seen countless friends and comrades perish in the great crusade. Perhaps something in him even welcomed the inevitability he had always felt that before the war ended he would join them in their Bomber Command Valhalla. He had pushed his luck beyond all limits and he knew it. But that was the kind of man he was…a man of great courage, inspiration and leadership. A man born for war…but born to fall in war." - Barnes Wallis



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Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In the 1820s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. In the 1880s, a steamship is destroyed exploring Antarctica. In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact. Each excursion goes horribly wrong. And on every journey, Dr. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves. And it's up to him to figure out why and how. And how to stop it all from happening again.

Reynolds hits it out of the park. Normally known for galaxy-spanning space opera, Eversion is a taught. a first-person, mystery wrapped in horror, as events keep repeated in different eras, always with the mysterious Edifice as the goal of the expedition. The same characters appear in similar roles, but only Dr. Coade seems to see the changes.

This story kept me guessing. The clues are subtle, but there. The characters, all of them over time, are interesting. This is a locked room mystery where the murder keeps happening over and over. The revelation, when it comes, is shocking but totally makes sense. It's tragic and fulfilling. The finale is gripping. One thing is because the book is told entirely from the p[ersp[ective of Silas Coade, the ending leaves some loose ends, but still works.

Great book. Alastair Reynolds has become my favorite Hard SF/Space Opera writer.



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Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World by Thomas F. Madden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love Istanbul. I've been fascinated by the Queen of Cities for a very long time, and even got to visit in 2016 (just before the coup attempt, yikes!) and have read many books about this city, the empires it ruled, and the area.

This book was a good, fun read. Nothing really in-depth, but a nice walk through the history from the earliest founders through to the aforementioned coup. What I really enjoyed was the detours that Madden took into some of the more obscure moments, like how the transit of an Egyptian mummy through the city set off Ottoman fears of the legend that Constantine XI, the last Roman Emperor, was in fact lying in wait for the right time to return. To protect themselves, they beheaded the mummy, cut it in half, and sealed it up in the Theodosian Walls. (A Frenchman later stole the head.

Madden also goes into detail about the modern era of Istanbul, recounting in detail how directed hatred almost eliminated the Greek and Jewish populations of the city, and how the city grew explosively as shantytowns were quickly replaced by sometimes illegal apartment blocks.

As I said, a fun read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this, the Queen of Cities.



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The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was an utterly fascinating book.

Freeman takes us through the history of Greek philosophy and intellectual curiosity, spending time explaining how the open debate of ideas helped advance the greater understanding of human nature and the beginnings of natural philosophy.

The second main section addresses the religious and intellectual state of the Levant in the century before Jesus, showing how various groups would eventually influence Christian thought. We then meet Jesus, analyzed in light of the times and religious feelings of the era. Then comes Paul, and his weird hangups that sadly defined many aspects of early Christianity.

The endless debates and heresies swirling around the nature of Christ occupy a good chunk of the book. The main theme is that the arguments were driven not by real intellectual debate but by personal attacks and rigging church councils. Augustine is introduced, and his journey from Neoplatonist to his view of a harsh personal God is explained as part of his own history as a bit of a momma's boy and his seeming fear of women and sex. Brilliant writer, but he really was the man responsible for the end of the honest debate in the West for several centuries, writing that only faith is needed to explain the universe.

The last chapter introduces Thomas Aquinas, who finally successfully justified Aristotelian rational examination of the world into the church, stretching Aristotle's teachings out to encompass Church doctrine. Aquinas, more than any other westerner, jump-started what would become the Renaissance and the later Enlightenment. The contributions of Arabic scholars in translating and preserving Greek writing are mentioned, and a brief allusion to the Islamic Golden Age is made when pointing out that Islamic scholars accepted rational debate as essential to faith while the Christian west was mired in church doctrine.

This was a great book, and I learned a lot from it. I am now inspired to learn more about Ambrose of Milan, for example. A good history should create a desire to learn more in the reader, and this succeeds brilliantly.




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Guide to Glorantha Volume 1 by Greg Stafford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was drinking from the firehouse.

Glorantha, the world where the Runequest is set, has to be one of the most detailed, beautiful, fantasy worlds ever conceived. It's not a planet, but rather a lozenge-shaped self-contained place, with the Land sitting under the Middle Air and the Sky, and sitting on the Waters above the Underworld. Gods and spirits are very real, and factor in daily life.

Since it was first introduced in 1975's White Bear and Red Moon, Glorantha has been detailed by both creator Greg Stafford and many, many others, writing in magazines, old APAs, official releases, and homebrew notes that reached Greg Stafford. The result is a rich, detailed world.

The The Guide to Goorantha Volume 1 collects much of that information. The various human cultures of the world, the Elder Races, a history of the world since the Creation (including a detailed set of illustrations showing the war over the Sky during the God Age), and then a region-by-region examination, with maps, population details, history, and story hooks for every region of Genertela, the northern continent.

Drinking from the firehouse. It took me close to seven months to finish this because there is just so much information! If you play Runequest, or just love fantasy worlds, this is a must-have!

Now onto Volume 2!



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A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Good grief, if you weren't pissed off before. . .

This is a history of our nation with all the glory stripped off, the high ideals we get taught in schools sanded away, and all the concepts that this is a fair and equal nation stripped off and tossed in the junk pile. This is a history of the people who actually build this nation, bled for it, and died to make it. The workers, be they slaves, indentured servants, or just the average working class.

It is also the story about how, from the founding of Jamestown, the scales have been tipped towards the rich. This book examines without mercy the treatment of Indian tribes, especially when they began taking in runaway slaves and servants. It turns a cold eye on the real reasons behind the Revolution, and how the Constitution was by the rich, of the rich, and for the rich. It is an endless litany of massacres of anyone who defied the order, Black, White, or Indian; and how every attempt to organize labor was met with violence from the state.

It's disgusting. It's engrossing. And every American should read it.



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