Midnight Riot (Rivers of London #)1by Ben Aaronovitch

Format 392 pages, Hardcover
Published January 10, 2011 by Gollancz
ISBN 9780575097568 (ISBN10: 0575097566)

Peter Grant’s a constable on the cusp of being assigned to what comes after the obligatory two-year apprenticeship on the streets of London. His superiors don’t think he’s a “proper copper,” a heads-down thief catcher and keeper of the peace, and they’re right. All his life he’s been too easily distracted to keep on one track, he’d failed out of his science courses to the dismay of his professors, and now he’s about to be consigned to a desk to do the paperwork for cops too busy (or illiterate) to fill out their own forms.

But things go sideways, as they often do for Peter, when he and Leslie May, his best friend and fellow copper, are assigned to block off a particularly gruesome murder scene in Covent Garden. While Leslie heads off to grab coffees for them, Peter notices a man in a “shabby old fashioned suit, complete with waistcoat, watchfob, and battered top hat” standing in the graveyard of the church where the murder took place. Then things get interesting. Continue reading →

So, you probably didn’t notice, but I took the month of January off from all social media. Yeah, I’d found myself checking my feeds every few minutes and didn’t like to think that I couldn’t get along without social media to distract me, so I put my Facebook account on hold and must ignored my other feeds.

image credit Jeff Swensen—Getty Images

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There’s something about tractors that draws a boy’s attention. I learned to drive in the 1960s on a 1948 Farmall Cub on my grandfather’s land in Vermont, and at a recent visit to a farm stand, I was delighted to find an almost identical, so it’s not surprising that Tractor Wars caught my eye.

In Tractor Wars, Neil Dahlstrom gives us an inside look at the birth of the farm tractor starting in the late 1800s and culminating with Ford’s transition to overseas manufacturing in Ireland at the end of the 1920s. Drawing heavily on biographies, board room records, and newspaper clippings, the book’s focus is on corporate strategies, alliances, and competitions. Readers may be surprised to discover how late to the game John Deere was, but not especially surprised that when Henry Ford entered the fray with his Fordson tractor, his techniques of mass production and ruthless pricing gave him immediate dominance in the field(s). Continue reading →

When Canadian science fiction author Glynn Stewart realized that mainstream publishers weren’t interested in his brand of science fiction, which mixes fantasy and SF while holding on to mil-sf to account for the realities of space war, he turned to online publishing.  Now, more than fifty books later, he’s not looking back. SFRevu was happy to get a chance to talk to Glynn about mixing the streams, good versus evil, and why he’s on Kindle Unlimited. Continue reading →