Singular Irregularity: Time Travel Gone Terribly Wrong by Kimber Grey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I was a Kickstarter backer on this anthology.

As usual for an anthology, here’s what I thought of each story.

“Standing Still - A police psychologist confronts someone that looks liek he’s going to blow people up. The entire short story is their conversation. I think it suffers only slightly from being in a time travel anthology because it takes a while for one of the characters to admit that. I thought I knew what the twist was going to be, but damn you, Donald J Bingle, for screwing with my emotions on that ending.Great job”

Just using the Weber Kettle mom got me last winter to make some AWESOME fajitas!

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I first added this book to my To-Read list on Goodreads about 3 years ago, I thought it was another take on the Akira concept - some kids being experimented on by the government and it turned out they made the kids too awesome and so the kids murder everyone and escape. It turned out to be much, much worse. I’ve read a lot of dystopias, but this one was the most disturbing one I’ve read. If you want to go in completely ignorant of the rest, go read it now. The rest of this review will contain mild spoilers (as in revealed in the first chapter) and any heavy spoilers will have the spoiler tag.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This version of The Forever War contains an intro by Scalzi. In it he basically talks about how he somehow avoided reading TFW when it first came out and it’s a good thing because he would have done Old Man’s War differently. He mentions that lots of fans and haters assumed he stole from Haldeman. I DON’T see it. At. All. Starship Troopers - that’s different. A case can be made that Scalzi updated Starship Troopers for OMW. (That, of course, is unfair to Scalzi and the creativity that went into OMW….I’m just saying if you’re going to be making “plot stealing” comparisons….that’s a much better one).

Absolute Power: Tales of Queer Villainy by Erica Friedman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

disclaimer: I kickstarted this anthology

Before I get to my usual anthology review in which I collect all my status updates into one place, I wanted to mention a bit about why I kickstarted this book and how I like the overall collection. One day I was trawling through the fiction section of Kickstarter when I came across this book (which had a different title at the time) and it ticked a few boxes for me. First of all, I’ve always found it fun to read a story from the villain’s point of view. So often authors take the easy route and create an anti-hero if they want to tell a story without a goodie-two-shoes protagonist. To make a villain sympathetic takes work. Second, it was clear some of the stories would take an irreverent tone. While good parody and satire are hard to pull off, I’m pretty tolerant about mediocre parody and satire. Finally, while LGBT characters are starting to take off - especially in YA fiction, it’s still somewhat of a relative rarity. Even harder to find is a LGBT character that doesn’t conform to heteronormative tropes: the sexy lesbian, the lispy gay guy, etc. Most aren’t aware of bears and other categories and that LGBT people come in as many shades of the rainbow (no double-entendre intended) as straight people do. So it was fun to read about things like seduction from a woman’s point of view, from a bi point of view, from a transgender point of view and see how they’re the same and how they’re different. And there are stories in which it matters that the characters are gay super heroes and stories in which it matters as much as the super hero being left-handed.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I never saw the movie that came out in the 90s (or was it 2000s) and it seems like that’s a good thing. From everything I’ve heard from others it has about as much to do with this book as World War Z has to do with its namsake. I added it to my To-Read list ages ago because I read somewhere - Wikipedia or TV Tropes that The Forever War was at least partially a response to Starship Troopers by someone who viewed war differently because of the Vietnam war. Both are often cited as seminal to the genre of military space science fiction. So as I continue to read the classics of both literary and genre fiction, I figured I’d check this one out. Boy am I glad I did.

Tampa: A Novel by Alissa Nutting

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am too young to have experienced it first-hand, but for a minute there in the 70s pornography went mainstream. Everyone was talking about it. It was “in” to see it. Regular theaters (as opposed to shady sex theaters) were showing movies like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. It was being discussed out loud rather than in hushed tones. To me, that’s what the buzz around Tampa about three years ago was like - everyone was talking about this book. While I do follow some smut fans on here who write VERY entertaining reviews, this was more like EVERYONE talking about it. So, after reading a portion of the first chapter and seeing the hyperbolic inner monologue of our main character, Celeste, I put it on my To-Read list. Also, it takes place in my home state of FL - where all the nutjobs live. There it sat for quite some time.

Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan by Nick Mamatas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Got this as part of a bundle at Storybundle.com and I have to say that it was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. Frankly, some of the stories are scary in that the crime depicted is horrific and yet it’s told in such an engaging way. Also, this is a book in which reading the introduction is a good idea.

The Emperor’s Agent by Jo Graham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

And so my first book of 2017 is done, although it’s a bit of a cheat as I started it at the end of 2016.

I purchased this book as part of a book bundle - I think it was on StoryBundle.com. The relevance of that is that I didn’t buy the bundle for this book and I hadn’t realized until starting it that it was the fifth book in a series. As far as that goes, I think the book functions quite well as a standalone book. Taking a quick look at the descriptions of other books in the series - it appears that only book 4 (the one preceding this one) is directly related to the characters here. So other than not knowing the conceit of the way the world works in the Numinous World series, you’re not out of luck starting here.

With modern technology, here’s the pattern I’ve noticed since college. New tech comes out and I can see that it’s neat, but not how I can make use of it. A few years later, I finally come across the right article and it all makes sense to me. I first noticed this with VMs. I couldn’t see a reason to want to use it outside of a server context. Then I used it to review Linux distros. Then I used it to run my network’s services. The same happened with tablets, smart phones, and Docker.