Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Weinersmith acknowledges on the last page that he may have ignored notes from PhDs to make a joke work. That said, there’s enough truth in here that every one I’ve shared the section of their degree with has found it really funny. It’s a quick read and a great gift for the science nerd in your life.

The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is like God Is Disappointed in You except each book of the Bible is only 1-2 setences. Like the other book, the humor comes from finding a funny way to express what’s actually in there. I think this book (if you bought the e-book version) makes for a bunch of fun pages to put up on your cubicle or print up in a calendar with one book per month for a few years. But I enjoyed GiDiY more because the extra text allowed the satire to be a bit deeper by being even more truthful to content of the Bible. That said, it was pretty fun to read the entire Bible in about five minutes.

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: