Orbital by Andrew Mayne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recieved this book in anticipation of a review

As I mentioned in my review of the previous book of this Duology, I got this book free and so I went back and bought the first book. Where the first book is a self-aware reconstruction of the thriller action book, this book is more of a detective novel; in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE! So it’s a MUCH, much slower pace than the first book. As I mentioned in my status updates - that’s fine with me because the pacing should serve the story. And detective stories are usually a much slower pace than thrillers.

Station Breaker by Andrew Mayne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let me start off with the only thing that bothered me. Our protagonist, David Dixon, is so genre savvy that he knows he’s in a thriller novel. Not on a 4th wall breaking sort of way, but I’m his inner monologue he knows all the tropes to avoid. He even refers to the McGuffin as the McGuffin. But for the plot to kick off, he has to hold the idiot ball for the first couple chapters, ignoring sign after sign that something is up. The inconsistency threatened to take me out of the story for the first bit.

Wild Cards by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With anthologies, I *usually* just present the status updates I made while reading, sometimes with some modifications since there are character limits on the updates. However, Wild Cards is a bit different. Like the Machine of Death anthology that Dan gave me, Wild Cards takes place in a shared universe. However, MoD was very loose in its canon and sometimes the stories even contradicted each other as long as the premise of how the machine worked remained. Wild Cards is more like the comics it is adapting to a novel format - it’s a shared universe with a coherent timeline and characters appear in subequent stories - especially Croyd. So I’ll have a slightly more conventional review followed by my traditional anthology style.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 124 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great issue. As always Neil Clarke selects some pretty amazing stories for this issue.

The Ghost Ship Anastasia - It’s the space trope no character is ever wise to - you DO NOT inspect a distress call on a space ship!

So of course things go pear-shaped. The specifics of this story involve ships run by AIs and an experimental Bioship in which the ship is partly metal and partly living matter.

I had been experimenting with a Van Dyke and I would soon be shaving it off, so I took a few self-portraits with the facial hair. First a straight-forward one:

Then I couldn’t decide between a high key (which I rarely do) or a straight-forward black and white, so here are both:

Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.

Jumping forward (I’m still generally working on photos from August because I’ve fallen behind with other responsibilities and playing some video games for Extra Life), we get to Halloween photos. Once again these awesome costumes were sewn by my mother-in-law.