Category Archives: Reviews

Aubrey in Space: To Honor You Call Us

The author doesn’t hide the fact that he’s out to clone O’Brien’s Master and Commander in space, and the story’s strength and weakness lies in how closely he comes, right down to the stilted dialog and naval tradition. Which ironically, makes it both anachronistic and accurate. Oh, and fun.

Lest you think author H. Paul Honsinger is trying to slip one by you, he puts his intent on the board from the start: to take the Jack Aubrey character created by Patrick O’Brian from the deep blue to the deep black and create a series showing the master and commander as he might be in a future time and war. He’s not the first to channel heroes from the age of sail into the age of starships. Among others, Gene Roddenberry based James Tiberius Kirk in no small part on C. S. Forester’s naval hero, as did David Weber in Honor Harrington, who shares the character and initials if not the exact chromosomes.  It’s only fair that they should inspire others, as they both almost certainly were inspired by Edward Pellew, a captain in Nelson’s navy who eventually rose to admiral, brilliant at sea, but driven by the poverty of his childhood to occasional lapses of judgement ashore. Continue reading →

Strangely Familiar – Under the Skin

Under the Skin channels Kubrick's disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerising the viewer in a vouyeristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansenn's character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

Under the Skin channels Kubrick’s disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerizing the viewer in a voyeuristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansson’s character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

I caught a showing of Under the Skin recently while visiting my nephew Jon at college in Austin. On the one hand he wasn’t in love with the minimalist science fiction flick, despite the exposure of Scarlett Johansson’s titular assets, but after walking back from the art house we saw it at to the co-op he’s living in, he allowed that it had managed to provide an hour’s worth of discussion. So that’s something.

Set in Scotland, both urban and rural, amidst pervasive mist and rain, Scarlett Johansson’s alien wrapped in human flesh prowls the streets, backroads, and beaches looking for unattached males to entice back to her place. When you put it that way, it sounds more like a serial killer movie than science fiction, and you can look at it that way too, because the challenge presented to the audience is to get inside the creature’s head to understand what’s going on. There’s no FBI profiler explaining the parameters that lump her victims into a tidy package which exposes the psychological underpinnings of the killer offered up. Instead, the script gives us as little information as possible, forcing us to watch the glacial flow of scenes intently so as not to miss the little clues. You will, by the way. Continue reading →

Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley

Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley
John Clay is a Navy geek working out of the Pentagon who gets a call to look into how a nuclear submarine could find itself suddenly fifteen miles off course while cruising in the Caribbean. Alison Shaw is a dolphin researcher working on machine translation to provide communication between us and our flippered friends. He’s not having any luck figuring out why that area is causing weird things to happen to ships, robots, and the ocean itself, while she’s having unhoped for success with her research, which maps the dolphin’s motions and sounds in situational context to enable two way communication. He’s Navy. She has a bad taste in her mouth from the last time the government appropriated her research, not to mention the Vietnam era dolphin bomb project. Naturally he winds up turning to her and her team to help figure out what’s at the bottom of the mystery. And why the ocean level is dropping, despite global warming. It’s not a bad read, and it’s not really mil sf, mostly. Call it a techo-thriller. Fans of Startide Rising (David Brin) and anything by Clive Cussler will like it pretty well. I gave it a 3 out of 5.

Samsung GALAXY Camera 2: TouchScreen, WiFi, and More

galaxy2frontInnovation in digital photography doesn’t trickle down from professional DSLRs, it bubbles up from point and shoot cameras that are more interested in offering features than ultimate image quality. More’s the pity.

Samsung’s GALAXY Camera 2 (GC2) is a case in point. It’s got a list of brilliantly innovative features that goes on and on, starting with the use of the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system which allows you to take advantage of Android apps and WiFi connectivity, and a beautiful 4.8 inch display, but its image quality is only pretty good.  Continue reading →

SFRevu Review: Honor’s Knight by Rachel Bach

In Fortune’s Pawn, the first book in the Paradox series, we met Devi Morris, the space-going mercenary who seems to live in her custom-made powered armor, and who’d signed on for a tour as security on a notoriously dangerous trading ship to get the resume bullet she needed to be considered for the most elite force in Paradoxian space, the Devastators, the King’s hand-picked armor troops. But that was a whole book ago, and by now we know that the Glorious Fool isn’t really a trading vessel, that the cook isn’t really a cook, and that Devi’s been infected with something that lets her see the invisible alien menace that’s been reducing planets to rubble for the past seventy odd years. We know that, but Devi doesn’t, because at the end of Fortune’s Pawn she got a memory wipe of all the interesting bits, none of which she was cleared to know.

Including the part about falling helmet-over-spaceboots in love with the “cook.”

Now Devi’s wandering around the ship wondering what the hell happened during the last attack on the ship, the one she evidently beat off before blacking out, and why she can’t stand the sight of that cook.

The cook in question is Rupert, and like the captain he’s part of a secret project to stop the spread of planetary destruction caused by the invisible creatures. Devi’s encounter with an alien derelict left her infected with an experimental virus that gave her the ability to see the phantoms, which are composed of psychic energy, and grown to full size cause matter to destabilize, resulting in quakes, or ultimately the creation of an asteroid belt where a planet used to be.

Up till now, the only defense against the phantoms has been to use the “plasmic” energy of a girl called Maat to destroy them Maat was the product of earlier experiments by the aliens that infected Devi, and her energy gets channeled through a host of girls that she’s psychically imprinted to be extensions of herself. They didn’t volunteer for the job, but were kidnapped as soon as they showed psychic ability, similar to Halo’s Spartans. Their usable lifespan is measured in a handful of years at best…when their former self starts to break through and they have to be killed before they go berserk and turn their energy on their handlers.

It’s a dirty business, but the “daughters” of Maat have the ability to kill phantoms, and nothing else can touch them…at least until Devi got infected. A few lives taken to save a few billion seems like a fair deal to the handlers, but not to Devi, who is starting to understand what’s going on and why her memory went missing.

She’s also developing her own “plasmic” powers, and though various factions want to use her as a pawn, or possibly even a knight, she doesn’t like any of the options she’s being offered. Offers, as they say in certain quarters that are “too good to refuse.”

Throughout the book Devi struggles with eluding those that would turn her into their weapon at the cost of her freedom and possibly even sense of self. Striking off alone while there’s a universe to save isn’t really an option, so she’s going to have to take her pick of strange bedfellows, assuming she doesn’t get snatched by aliens, rebels, or the gang she’d originally signed on with. She’s also going to have to come to terms with her feelings for Rupert, who she’s been brainwashed to loathe, despite being in love with him.

Like a lot of middle books, Honor’s Knight gets to do a lot of work but doesn’t get to enjoy a happy ending, or really, any ending at all, just a pause before the next book picks up the story. Devi does manage to resolve a lot of issues, but the larger conflict with the phantoms looms over the horizon, and there’s still no shortage of people, aliens, and psychic monsters eager to get their hands, claws, or ethereal tentacles on her.

Of course, if she can work things out with Rupert, getting his arms around her might make up for a lot of it. If he can get her to take off that damn space armor.