Author Archives: admin

Into the Fire by Elizabeth Moon

(Originally posted on SFRevu.com 02.2018)

Following 5 books in the Vatt’as War sequence, Ky Vatta now has a second book of peace, even if peace isn’t all that peaceful. Long ago in book one, Trading in Danger, we met spunky Ky Vatta, the next generation of the Vatta transport and trading fortune. Ky had elected to not follow the family business, but to go to her planet’s military academy, and just before graduating with honors got thrown out because she tried to help the wrong person. From there she went on to a brief trading career, and a longer military conquest, leaving that service at the rank of Admiral and hero of a war. In the last book, Cold Welcome, Ky came back to her home world only to get captured by enemies of her family and held prisoner in a secret facility for months until she managed to escape. That should have been the end of it, and she should now be relaxing with a small fortune in back pay with her fiancée Rafe, and wondering what to do with the rest of her life. Continue reading →

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault by James Alan Gardner

(this review was originally posted on SFRevu.com February 2016: All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault)

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault takes Urban Fantasy and runs it headlong into Superhero fiction with terrific results. James Alan Gardner takes four science students at Waterloo U and gives them superpowers in the traditional way (a lab accident) and pits them against the forces of darkness. It’s a very entertaining mashup of fantasy and superhero fiction, and scores some good points about both genres in the process.

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Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey

This review originally appeared in SFRevu.com on Dec, 1, 2017

Persepolis Rising is the seventh Expanse novel, and the first in what we expect to be the third story arc. The last novel, Babylon’s Ashes, ended with the establishment of the Transport Union, which gave former OPA types a role in galactic commerce, carving out a few decades of relative quiet while mankind moved out into the galaxy through the hyperspace ring created by the proto-molecule at the end of the first arc (Abaddon’s Gate). Continue reading →

Sony HX80 – A camera with just enough stuff

I’ve toyed with a number of Sony cameras in the past few months, looking for something that gave good enough results while being easy enough to carry that it doesn’t get left home. So far, the HX80, while not as impressive a camera as any of Sony’s RX series, is filling the bill. Granted the Zeiss lens has a narrow range of f stops (3.5-8.0), but it delivers up to 30x optical zoom (24-720mm equiv) decent low light performance, a pop up viewfinder and tilt lcd display. All for a list price of $369, though I managed to get mine down around 275 thanks to some credits I had at Best Buy. For that price, it’s a great camera that slips comfortably into a pocket. Continue reading →

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

Set 125 years from now, Annalee Newitz’s debut novel comes at the question of property from two angles: slavery (both robotic and human), and intellectual property. It does so through the voices of its main characters, Judith, aka Captain “Jack” Chen, a pharmaceutical researcher turned pirate who clones high-priced drugs to distribute them to those who have more need than means, and a freshly-activated bot named Paladin, designed for security work for its owners, work like tracking down pharma-pirates.

Paladin is sent, along with Eliasz, its human partner/handler, to stop Jack’s piracy, so it comes as no surprise that the two are on a collision course as Paladin and Eliasz roll up Jack’s network with bloody determination.