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 →