I was on vacation for two weeks in July, so I got a good bit
of reading done. As fate would have it, it was a largely
enjoyable batch of books as well.

As usual, the URLs are Amazon affiliate links which could, in theory,
make me a pittance should you buy something through one.

I kind of burned myself out on the first overly-detailed review below and had
to regroup a bit before continuing. I kind of wish I had reviewed the
McClellan first.

======

The Cruel Stars: A Novel (The Cruel Stars Trilogy Book 1)
by John Birmingham
https://amzn.to/3oOFlB0

The Shattered Skies (The Cruel Stars Trilogy Book 2)
by John Birmingham
https://amzn.to/3zOUPuR

The past series I have read from John Birmingham have started out well
and then limped to a close. He also has a Martinesque habit of killing
off sympathetic characters. So far his latest trilogy looks like it
may avoid the former, though the later is definitely in effect.

Hundreds of years ago, there was a Human civil war. Of course, the
Sturm, as the winners call the losing "Human Republic", see it
differently. In their minds there was a war between actual Humans
and mutants, cyborgs and watered down copies of Humans. Still,
the Sturm lost and withdrew from the field, so the surviving winners
figured good riddance to bad rubbish and got on with their lives.

Those lives included the normal human fissiparous tendencies and
the "Human Volume" of the galaxy is now divided into numerous
polities. Some like old Terra itself and Armadale fairly democratic
and not particularly bad places to live (though as always it helps
to have money), others are more corporate dictatorships, but perhaps
not as bad as they could be while probably most are standard examples
of the various types of misrule and misery history tends towards.

For the elite of any of the polities, life is very good if a bit strange
by our standards. Bodies are changed almost as often as clothes, with
no particular regard paid to genetic inheritance, neural meshes provide
skills on an as-needed basis with no learning required, and engram backups
ensure that you can always come back from the dead with very little time lost
(and the societies have gotten beyond the pesky SF question of whether the
reload is actually "you". As far as they are concerned, it is.). For the
lower classes, standard human reproduction and learning continues. In the
better societies, there is actually some potential to advance to the elite,
and a social safety net of sorts. In the worst, life for the masses continues
to be nasty brutal and short. Still even there, the systems in place
seem to be stable, and things are at a steady state.

Until they aren't.

As it turns out, the Sturm have not been off in exile just building a
happy enclave of Mark 1.0 humans. They continue to be horrified by what
has happened to the children of Earth and have had every intent to start
Civil War 2.0 when they were ready. Now they are. In general their tech
has advanced much more slowly than that of the Volume, but the one thing
they have been concentrating on, they have accomplished: They have figured
out how to hack the Volume's FTL communications network to load malware to the
neural mesh of anyone connecting to it. It's a true decapitation strike, and
suddenly all across the Volume, the overwhelming majority of the elite
suddenly become slavering zombies. Even the AI Intellects who direct fleets
and ships are targeted and thrown into catastrophic failure mode. With
the Volume leadership almost completely eliminated, the Sturm fleets move
in to remind the unaffected lower classes of what their true allegiance
should be..

Lucinda Hardy is an Armadalean Navy Lieutenant who had just joined
the crew of the Defiant. It's not an altogether happy posting as
one of her fellow officers is an upper class twit who seems to
have it in for the common born Hardy, but she is prepared to get
on with it and the ship's secret mission (to check if various
monitoring comms failures are due to Strum activity [spoiler: they
are]) seems to be important and interesting. However, things take
a very unexpected turn as they break comms silence and the Captain
suddenly starts to eat the XO while the ships AI goes catatonic.
In the chaos and aftermath, Hardy suddenly finds herself in command,
and apparently of the only Armadalen ship with a non feral crew,
not to mention the only such ship of any navy in the path of the
oncoming Sturm fleet.

Frazer McLennan plays at being an archeologist, but the ancient Scot
has another history that brings visitors to his digs and persuades the
university to keep him on staff despite no particular results over
several hundred years of investigations at his site. He doesn't
like the visitors and plays the vulgar and peevish Laird card whenever
they arrive, but still people are going to come to spend time with
the Admiral who won the Civil War despite his best attempts (pretty
good actually) to be obnoxious and unwelcoming. His almost equally
ancient Intellect, Hero, tries to mitigate things and keep him
within the pale, but the soap opera of the latest visitation is cut
short by the event McLennan had always warned about: the sudden return
of the Sturm. And what good is an Admiral on the ground..

Princess Alessia Szu Suri sur Montanblanc ul Haq is twelve and not
particularly happy. The conservative Montanblanc Corporation goes
even beyond the Armadalen Navy, who train their positions despite
the learning being immediately available over mesh. The Montanblancs
don't even implant mesh until adulthood, so Alessia has to do all her
lessons the old fashioned way, by actually studying when she would much
rather be playing with the few friends her position allows. It's even
more galling because she knows that her only worth to her (unloving and
rarely seen) parents is to be married off strategically to a boy she has
only met once and roundly dislikes and all her efforts will do her
personally no good whatsoever. Things continue in this unsatisfactory
matter until suddenly all the adults go crazy and the Sturm arrive and
it turns out that *different* is not necessarily an improvement..

Sephina L'trel is, to not put too fine a point on it, a thief and pirate.
Not a rich one, she started off at the bottom the the barrel and neither
she nor her crew have done quite well enough to get meshed and have the
backup plan of re-life if things go south, but they do well enough to get
by. Or they did. This latest mission involving double-crossing a group
of Yazuka was snakebit from the get-go, and they are in a bit of a last-stand
situation when the Yazuka all go crazy and start eating each other. It's
not an ideal situation, but still somewhat better than the previous one.
The escape still goes less than perfectly and Sephina and her surviving
crew find themselves dead in space. Except for a lone Armadalen ship..

As you can see Birmingham has a lot of balls in the air for this one
and generally he keeps them in motion pretty well. Given the dire situation,
there is more humor (or humour -- Birmingham is Australian, and a Commenwealth
feel comes through) than you might expect, as well as more introspection.
Although you can see the Sturm do live up to the "Space Nazi" title flung
at them by the other characters, there are certainly issues on which they
have a point, and McLennan in particular raises a number of issues with the
Volume status quo which the inhabitants are reluctant to address.

As one of the Sturm points out in book two, there is still a central mystery
of the series (which I had not noticed until that point) to be addressed,
and somehow the whole Sturm invasion (which, overall, is going pretty well
for them) somehow has to be resolved in just one more book.

Which apparently is more than a year away. Still I consider this Birmingham's
best series (so far), and will be on board for that when it drops.

Sky on Fire (Dragon Gate Book 5)
by Lindsay Buroker
https://amzn.to/3oKJ2r4

To some extent the Mother/Son duo of Jadora & Jak are responsible for
the loss of thousands of lives and the near destruction of their world.
In particular, Jadora would never have dropped her first love, herbology,
to become an archeologist if her son Jak had not been determined to
continue his late father's quest for the World Gate. Sure you can blame
King Uthari, who is in fact a complete SOB, but they set the ball rolling,
and look at the state of things now!

Instead of contacting the fondly remembered Elder Dragons, and finding an
ally for normal humans against the oppressive mages, the World Gate has
unleashed the Younger Dragons on Torvil, and they are raining destruction
on human and mage alike. If that is not enough, Uthari has taken actions
that prevent a coordinated response against the dragons, released a
parasite of unknown deadliness on the world as well, and ordered Jak's death.
All of the power gifted to Jadora by the one surviving Elder Dragon is
not enough to deal with any part of the situation, and in the end the only
hope may be yet another fraught expedition through the World Gate as Torvil
crumbles..

I'm afraid this series continues to be a bit of a mess with too
many characters, and events unfolding with frustrating slowness.
As I have said before, I appreciate that Buroker is trying to do
something bigger and more involved than her previous series, but
here in the penultimate book of the series it still seems that she
had bitten off somewhat more than she can chew. We do finally get
resolution on some points which have dragged on for far too
long, like the situation of General Tonovan and Malek's unwillingness
to commit, but there continue to be characters with no
clear purpose (still talking about you Tezi!) and some of plot
lacunae. For instance, when King Uthari orders Jak's killing,
Captain Rivlen takes the call, and very much does not this to happen
as Jak is now her lover. The clear argument to use with her King
would be: "Well, have you gotten everything you need from his mother
then? Oh, you haven't? Well I guess it wasn't that important after all.
Oh, it's *critically* important? Then maybe you might want to hold
off on killing her only child.." Yet somehow this is not an idea
that occurs to this highly intelligent and composed character.

Ted Nolan wrote:
> I was on vacation for two weeks in July, so I got a good bit
> of reading done. As fate would have it, it was a largely
> enjoyable batch of books as well.
>
> As usual, the URLs are Amazon affiliate links which could, in theory,
> make me a pittance should you buy something through one.
>
> I kind of burned myself out on the first overly-detailed review below and had
> to regroup a bit before continuing. I kind of wish I had reviewed the
> McClellan first.

My followup needs some "witglass." FWIW, your overly-detailed reviews
are about the only non-PR SF recently read by me.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

On 5 Aug 2022 at 06:05:07 BST, "Ted Nolan <tednolan>" <Ted Nolan
<tednolan>> wrote:

> I was on vacation for two weeks in July, so I got a good bit
> of reading done. As fate would have it, it was a largely
> enjoyable batch of books as well.
>

You seem to have addded about 10 books to my wishlist, which doesn't
happen often! Good work.

I think I'll start with the prior McClellan trilogy, rather than
starting Glass 1 and having to wait for years.

Cheers - Jaimie

--
"If you can't make fun of it, it's probably not worth taking seriously"
-- http://survivingtheworld.net/Lesson494.html

In article <jlhqgoFtdgmU1@mid.individual.net>,
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:
>On 5 Aug 2022 at 06:05:07 BST, "Ted Nolan <tednolan>" <Ted Nolan
><tednolan>> wrote:
>
>> I was on vacation for two weeks in July, so I got a good bit
>> of reading done. As fate would have it, it was a largely
>> enjoyable batch of books as well.
>>
>
>You seem to have addded about 10 books to my wishlist, which doesn't
>happen often! Good work.
>
>I think I'll start with the prior McClellan trilogy, rather than
>starting Glass 1 and having to wait for years.
>

Yeah, I kind of wish I had found "Glass Immortals" next year :-)

Always glad to know someone is reading the reviews!
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 9:57:47 AM UTC-4, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
[snip]
> Always glad to know someone is reading the reviews!

I am, but, between working on the ISFDB and being a few decades
older, I rarely have the time or the energy to comment.

Where are the antiagatics when you need them?..

In article <f65f9d31-f8bc-47e5-afc2-712d87755569n@googlegroups.com>,
Ahasuerus <ahasuerus@email.com> wrote:
>On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 9:57:47 AM UTC-4, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>[snip]
>> Always glad to know someone is reading the reviews!
>
>I am, but, between working on the ISFDB and being a few decades
>older, I rarely have the time or the energy to comment.
>
>Where are the antiagatics when you need them?..

Probably about 20 years out from the last time we would have any use
for them :-(.
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..