Recent Reading

Exaltations by Richard Garfinkle

A strange, almost indescribable, and most inventive meta-fiction, as a narrator of lives gets tangled, along with some of his subjects, into the machinations of the archetypal Quest. And as a tale about telling (or Telling), it scatters the seeds for a small library's worth of tales in passing. As airy ephemera, just to decorate one short scene, we are shown the three different-yet-similar versions of the Trojan War and the founding of Rome that spin from Paris' choice of which goddess to give the apple of Eris; and none of that is really important.

This time, the ending is satisfying if understated, rather than just fading out.

Star Carrier by Ian Douglas

Somewhat a change of pace, a good solid hard mil-SF trilogy that shows that the John Campbell school of SF still lives, as the US Space Force squares off against an ancient Galactic Empire, intent on subjugating the human race.

A solid page-turner of space battles and some seriously alien races in a purely relativistic setting with Alcubierre warps (handwaving away the engineering details involved).