'Redshirts' by John Scalzi

Redshirts is  a relatively short novel by American science fiction author John Scalzi, best known for his 'Old Man's War' military science fiction novel and its sequels. The book is about 300 pages, but the last 80 or so pages actually form three 'codas', linked short stories that add extra content to the book. The book won the 2013 Hugo Award, arguably science fiction's greatest accolade, but reader reviews on Amazon are decidedly mixed and some think a book as light and frothy as this shouldn't have won a Hugo.

Redshirts follows a group of junior Ensigns on a starship, the flagship of the United Union fleet. The main character, Andrew Dahl, is a new crew member who gradually realises that being an Ensign or 'redshirt' on the ship is a very dangerous occupation, as people keep dying horrible, meaningless missions on a seemingly endless stream of away missions. Senior officers never die however... What is going on?

The book starts off as a spoof on Star Trek - even referencing it in a couple of places. It gradually develops a rather interesting storyline. It's also rather funny, I laughed out loud in a few places, and quoted several bits to my wife - much to her delight! I read a few reviews of this on Amazon before picking it up, the most helpful of which said something along the lines of: 'If you read the first couple of chapters and think it is a really badly written story, then persevere. It intentionally starts out like this, and is an important part of the story.' Good advice, because this is exactly what happens.

A final note about the 'codas' at the end of the book. I got to about page 220 and went 'huh?'. The story had ended and what were these things at the end. Should I read on? I actually googled it and found a blog post from the author explaining about them. I did read them. The first was quite interesting, but not spectacular. The final two were shorter, and really good. The first coda adds a funny, interesting perspective. The other two add quite a touching, emotive and thought provoking element to the book and round off the whole thing nicely.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It a good story that had me hooked, it was very funny and also touching towards the end. While I see why some people complained, I feel it is a worthy winner of the Hugo Award, and am going to give it 9/10.

Classic Science Fiction TV - Crime Traveller

Crime Traveller was a 1997 British science fiction crime drama produced by the BBC, and created & written by Anthony Horowitz, prolific novelist and tv writer (most famous for his Alex Rider children's books and for creating the hit historical drama Foyles War).

Crime Traveller starred Michael French as police detective Jeff Slade, and Chloe Annett as a Holly Turner, a police scientist. Slade discovers that Holly has a working time machine built by her late father, and the two team up to use it to solve crimes. The workings of the time machine were quite clever - it would send someone - Slade - back in time but for a random amount of time, it could be a day or two or it could just be a few minutes. Slade has to use whatever time he is randomly allotted to try and solve the crime at hand, but he must get back to the time machine before the present (i.e. the time he started out) or he gets caught in an infinity loop and is lost forever. This adds quite a bit of edge of the seat drama to each episode - will he get back in time? Though secretly know he always will.

I liked this show because it was a clever concept, and the stories were all rather good. I also liked the problems they had coming up with explanations as to how they solved the crime that didn't involve time travel, to satisfy their boss Grisham, excellently played by Sue Johnston, who starts to get a bit suspicious after a while.

Unfortunately despite getting over 8 million regular viewers, the show was cancelled after one season due to management changes at the BBC. It may seem a little dated now, but is still fun to watch, or re-watch if you were fortunate enough to catch it first time!

Crime Traveller: The Complete Series on Amazon UK

Crime Traveller: Complete Series on Amazon.com

Patrick Leigh Fermor's final book

Patrick Leigh Fermor is considered by many to be one of the English Language's finest travel writers, and he was a real old school adventurer. In the early 1930/31, aged 18, he upped and left home after deciding to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople... thousands of miles. This involved walking through pre second world war Europe, a contintent with one foot in the past, one in the future. It was a fascinating time, and Leigh Fermor is an excellent chronicler of it, as well as an extremely intelligent, erudite scholar and writer.



Later, during the war he become a war hero, working behind enemy lines in occupied Crete, during which he orchestrated the kidnapping of the German commander of Crete (dramatised in the film 'Ill Met by Moonlight' where Leigh Fermor is played by Dirk Bogarde), and later become a writer.

In 1977 he published an account of the first part of his journey in 'A Time of Gifts', considered one of the best travel books of all time. It is not to everyone's taste but it is well worth checking out. There's more packed into this slim book than in 10 lesser books.  In 1986 he published part two, 'Between the Woods and the Water' finished it with 'To Be Concluded'. However the author went through a long period of writers block and it never quite happened. He died in 2011 aged 96, but now finally, the third and final book of his journey has been published. All the words are his own, it has just benefited from editing and polishing as well as introduction by his biographer Artemis Cooper and acclaimed travel Colin Thubron. I can't wait to read it.

If you want to read more about Patrick Leigh Fermor, check out his obituary, or read the recent article from the Telegraph about his final book including extracts.

Breaking all the rules of blogging

Ask anyone who is anyone in the online world, and they'll tell you that to have a successful blog, you've got to pick a good niche and burrow down. People don't want a mash up blog of this, that & the other. Well I've started lots of blogs over the years, picking a niche related to whatever I'm most into at the time. And you know what? It never works. After a few posts it just sort of peters out. I'm just not that sort of person that sticks on one topic or interest forever. A lot of my interests are kind of related, and most appeal to the same sorts of people but its still going to be a bit of a hodge podge. This is what I'm expecting to write about:

SF & Fantasy
Board Gaming
Science & Tech
History
Misc other stuff

I wanted to have tabs across the top for each of these areas, with a 'misc' catchall. Unfortunately it appears blogger doesn't do that, at least not easily. So instead once I get going I'm going to have a tag cloud which will link to the different sorts of posts.

I'll also over time be using this blog to pull in other content I've written over the years on other blogs, article sites etc, so the best stuff at least is all in one place.

Am I going to get thousands of people reading? Nope? Am I going to have fun? I hope so!

Edit: Just discovered the 'import/export blog' function, so I've imported some of my recent blogs here. So there's a few posts up already.

'Redemption Ark' by Alastair Reynolds

Redemption Ark is the sequel to 'Revelation Space' and the second book in the Revelation Space trilogy. There are actually five books in the Revelation Space universe, but the other two are standalone novels that don't add substantially to the overall story arc. So if you haven't already, start with Revelation Space. You could read this book on its own, but you'll get a lot more from it if you read them in order.

Humanity is teetering on the brink. The Inhibitors have been awoken, and their cold machine sentience starts the process of wiping out the human race. They've sanitized the galaxy of intelligent life countless times before in the billions of years since their creation, and they will do it countless times again. Can anything stop them?

This book, as with Reynolds other books, is part space opera and part Hard SF. It is set a few years after the events of Revelation Space; there are some overlapping characters, but a cast of new characters as well. The story starts slowly, and the first quarter of the book takes time setting the scene, introducing new characters and backplot. The last 10-15% of the book is also quite rushed, almost as much happens in the epilogue as in the rest of the book. Still, these are minor points in what was an extremely good book. It's got great characters it is easy to care about, a cracking plot and a real sense of wonder about it.

I'm really starting to like Alastair Reynolds stuff, after just two books and one short story. Inevitable comparisons can be made to Peter F Hamilton's epic space operas. Reynolds books, so far at least, are darker and a bit stranger along with being more tightly focused. Each book seems to be focused on at most several sets of characters. Peter F Hamilton, in contrast, fills his books with countless different groups of characters on many diverse worlds. Given the effective lack of faster than light travel/communication in Reynolds book, it is always going to be this way. It does make Alastair Reynolds books easier to keep up with and remember what is going on!

Overall I'm giving this book 8/10. Not perfect by any means, but pretty damn good nonetheless. Roll on Absolution Gap (book 3/3 in the trilogy).

Kindle Daily Deal

I've been getting the 'Kindle Daily Deal' email for about six months now. One book each day is 99p. Most of them aren't much to get excited about, but this week they've had an SF & Fantasy Daily deal as well. Too bad I didn't realise this until day 6 of 7, but I've now bought the book two days in a row. First there's the 'Mammoth Book of SF Wars' by Ian Watson & Ian Whates. Military SF isn't really my thing, but for 99p I thought I might as well give it a try - I got the Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic Fiction on a similar deal a few months ago, and read quite a few good stories from that one so far. Will keep you posted.

The other book I bought is 'Dark Eden' by Chris Beckett. It's the story of a group of people on an alien world - the descendents of two survivors of a ship sent from Earth. It's a planet that is completely dark, the only light comes from luminous trees in one valley which all the colonists huddle together. They're all waiting and hoping that Earth will send a ship to rescue them, but it's been 160 years and there's still no sign of anyone. One young man, John Redlantern is determined to stop just surviving and actual make this alien world a home, and wants to set off to explore.

It sounds a really interesting book, so on the basis of the 99p price, some good Amazon/Goodreads reviews and the description I decided to go for it. I'll post the review when I'm done.

I'm also going to try and keep more of an eye on SF & Fantasy deals on Kindle UK, and post them on here when I find them.

'Way Station' by Clifford D Simak

I read this while on holiday in Shropshire. Pastoral SF is the ideal book to read while staying in a country holiday cottage on a farm in rural Shropshire, England! Anyway, here's the review.

"They don't make 'em like they used to" is an apt phrasing fitting many different things, not the least of which is science fiction. Way Station was written in the 1960s, and I can't imagine a book anything like it being written today. I don't think we have anyone like Clifford D Simak writing science fiction today though.

Simak writes 'pastoral sf', a heady mix of technology, philosophy, and a love of backwoods America. He is equally at home describing the beautiful countryside, or the sound of skylarks on a spring day as he is imagining strange aliens, advanced technology and weird science.

Way Station centres around Enoch Wallace, an American Civil War veteran, living in backwoods America, who meets an alien one day and is asked to be the keeper of a Galactic 'waystation' for travellers journeying between the stars. As it is not a part of the Galactic community, Earth is off-limits but is a necessary stopping place (like a rest area service station on the motorway or interstate I guess!) Enoch meets many strange creatures and wonderful things, but keeps his feet firmly on the ground of mother Earth. Things stay this way for more than a century with Enoch barely aging. Eventually though, someone's bound to notice...

Way Station isn't a long book, but fits quite a lot in. We learn a bit about the strange - and some not so strange - aliens that Enoch Wallace meets as they travel through his station, and find out something of what he has learned about the galactic community. We get a bit of philosophical musings, and Enoch's worries about the state of humankind, as Earth teeters on the brink of nuclear war (this was written in the 1960s, so at that time nuclear war was a very real and dangerous threat). Slowly though, Enoch's century of peace and quiet is shattered as a crisis builds both on Earth and out in the galaxy too.

Not everyone will love this book. If you like your science fiction full of nasty aliens with big guns, or hot bosom babes with lots of sex in it, you are going to be sorely disappointed and very bored! But if you like experiencing a sense of wonder, a little adventure and aren't a bit put off by the slightly dated historical backdrop and old fashioned technology, you might just enjoy this. It is a classic of golden age science fiction and well worth the reading. I'm giving this 9/10, and will be reading more by Clifford D. Simak soon.