Category: Review

Review: Nothing Last Forever

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Nothing Lasts Forever

Sidney Sheldon’s Nothing Lasts Forever is the worst book of his I’ve read since The Other Side of Midnight. The story of female doctors in a California hospital, romance, drama, and of course murder, it has all of his weaknesses but very few of his strengths. Namely it’s overloaded with the “pop” part of “pop epic” while totally lacking the “epic” part.

It’s less pretentious than Midnight but otherwise has the same problems. His female main characters are simply wicked or shallow instead of ambitious and powerful. That combined with low stakes and a decided lack of interest makes it hard to care about anyone or anything.

So it seems like he was in the decline by this point. But that’s understandable, as nothing lasts forever.

A Thousand Words: Noita Conjurer

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One of several things responsible for my slowdown in reading, writing and blogging has been the Conjurer mod for Noita (previously reviewed here). The problem with Noita was that it had excellent and complex interactions, an incredibly customizable magic system, and more… thrown into a punishing roguelike. Even respawning mods didn’t really solve the latter problem for me, as it just still felt like luck and brute force.

Enter Conjurer, which turns the entire game into a silly sandbox. It’s great for getting the hang of wand mechanics… and just seeing what happens when you pour lava on things. For me it turns Noita from one fun game into two.

Review: Bush vs. The Axis of Evil

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Bush vs. The Axis of Evil

Another former internet timeline turned book, Bush vs. The Axis of Evil amounts to “What if World War III broke out in the early 2000s”?

It starts with Hezbollah conducting 9/11 while thinking it’d just be a minor message-sender, which gets it off to a “good” start. All this is told in a long series of blocky exposition posts with the occasional in-universe “book excerpt” that mysteriously resembles a blocky exposition post. Anyway, this leads to a spiraling 200X WWIII against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea at once, with such amazing things as:

  • Millenium Challenge 02 being used as a serious reference for a Battle of Hormuz, which leads to a carrier (the Lincoln) being sunk. This is a “good” benchmark for how militarily plausible all of it is.
  • A copy-pasted Christmas Truce straight out of 1914 pop culture.
  • Divergences into music festivals and pro wrestling pay per views, since every contemporary internet AH timeline MUST have a “what about the thing?” pop culture segment.

There’s some potentially interesting divergences like the Unification Church converting ex-northerners en masse, but it squanders all of them. The bulk is just horrible gore-atrocity descriptions done with all the immediacy and intensity of the instruction manual for a 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer.

Stuff like this has made me a lot more respecting of Larry Bond, because he manages, however imperfectly, to combine storytelling competence with knowledge of military operations. Often you get one, or as in this case, neither.

Review: Three Week Professionals

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Three Week Professionals

Though not the deepest sports book, Ted Kluck’s Three Week Professionals tells the story of the 1987 NFL replacement players with humor and the right tone. On one hand, the players had more of a justification for striking than was often the case given the lack of free agency and the sport being incredibly harsh. On the other, it was poorly handled and working-class people even at the time thought little of it.

As both a time capsule and a short breezy history, this book is good. Not deep, but it’s not supposed to be. It is fun and that’s what matters.

Review: Tiger Chair

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Tiger Chair

The recent Tiger Chair is the Max Brooks short story of the Chinese invasion of the American West Coast. Told in the form of a letter back home from a Chinese, it mentions how all the high-tech contraptions that were supposed to win were countered by know-how.

I’ll be blunt, this is not a good story. It’s told entirely through less-than-ideal exposition, and is loaded with both references that are bound to age like antimatter (mentioning some minor celebrity controversy from four years before this post that a normal person like the narrator would almost certainly not even know about) and older ones (there’s a ton of Iraq War lingo that makes me think at least part of this was originally written back in the 2000s).

But the real problem (at least for a military nerd like myself) is that Brooks’ Pentagon Reformerism is on every page. Obvious from as early as the Zombie Survival Guide (where he praised the AK and scorned the M16), this goes from “there are counters to high-tech contraptions” to “they make high-tech contraptions useless”. This is hammered home in a hamfisted manner continually.

Don’t get this.

A Thousand Words: Some Kind of Monster

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Some Kind of Monster

One of the best musical documentaries of all time, Some Kind of Monster covers Metallica in the early 2000s during the making of the St. Anger album. Given a surprising amount of access, including their arguments and therapy sessions (seriously), the filmmakers put together a tour de force. At times it’s like a ‘real’ Spinal Tap in its ridiculousness, but at other times it’s earnest.

Besides being a well made film, there’s a couple factors that help this along. The first is that it ultimately has a ‘happy’ ending: The band managed to overcome their difference, reunite, finish the album, and get a replacement bass player who has remained with them since. The second is that with hindsight it’s at just the right time. The band members are clearly past their absolute height and have grown with families and responsibilities. Yet at the same time, they aren’t in the pathetic, irrelevant “Fat Elvis” phase that every aging rocker inevitably falls into.

I think the best and most poignant part of the film comes when the album is finally done and the band members talk about the strange mixed feelings they have. As I’d just finished A Period of Cheating when I saw the movie, I understood completely that feeling.

Anyway, even if you don’t like Metallica (I’m not exactly a fan), this is a great film to watch.

Review: Vacuum Diagrams

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Vacuum Diagrams

Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams is a series of linked stories intended to tell the Xeelee from cradle to grave. I mentioned before that like Harry Turtledove, his writing style is a lot more suited for that. And like Turtledove, this is still uneven. There’s attempts at coherent arcs, including a later one where primitive humans have to escape their stone age prison the Xeelee built for them (it makes sense in context), but those really don’t work so well.

Others are basically just “here is a thing. Here is a description of a thing. Here is a character who exists as a camera to show you the thing.” Baxter has managed a sense of wonder and splendor a lot better. Here the scope is so big that it feels tiny. Going billions of light years to a megastructure/portal is done so often that it feels like running an errand (and I’m talking about the human characters, not the aliens).

Some of this has been retconned by later books, although “retcon” isn’t really the best word when time travel exists in universe. Either way, this is not one of Baxter’s biggest hits.

Review: Xeelee Vengeance

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Xeelee: Vengeance

I wanted to like Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee: Vengeance, a tale of time travel, Clarketech, and the most alien aliens that ever aliened.

Unfortunately, this book has one problem. One central problem that is common to all extreme setting-first stories. One central problem that it does absolutely nothing to try and fix: Namely it’s mostly exposition about worldbuilding and speculative physics and whatever. So we get a ton of detail on this futuristic Earth (and Baxter’s other stories), the aliens (and Baxters other stories), every little quirk and thingy (and Baxter’s other stories) and even… Baxter’s other stories. The problem is that if you’ve read a decent amount of the other stories, none of the twists or mysteries work.

When we finally get to the showdown between protagonist Michael Poole and the time-warped Xeelee nightfighter, the book has already dragged on forever and even that drags on forever as well. It’s conceptually interesting but the execution is just terrible. Like “have a detour of padding to reference the John Carter of Mars books” terrible.

Thing is, as an eager worldbuilder myself, I can understand why Baxter did what he did. But as a reader it becomes hard to like it. You have to balance, and this was intentionally unbalanced.

Review: Starmada

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Starmada 30th Anniversary Edition

I was looking for something to scratch my spaceship wargaming itch. A set of generalist rules that you could apply to basically any setting and have a semi-reasonable approximation of things. Enter Starmada. Now its newest 30th anniversary edition, it lets you build and battle on the tabletop whatever ships you can imagine.

Naturally as a generalist set it lacks specific gimmicks, with anything offensive having to be translated into weapon qualities (ie a big area blast would be “proximity”, and a powerful kinetic cannon shell would be “crushing”) and anything defensive being translated to either “screens” (roll above X or the attack fails) or “shields” (takes a hit before anything else). You get the idea.

It requires some imagination. But if you have imagination and a willingness to abstract, well let me just say that even my initial crude playtesting sessions had me beaming bright. Want to play as a cumbersome pure brute force fleet going against an agile but brittle rapier? This lets you do all that and then some.

Review: The War of Return

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The War of Return

A very timely book, Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz’s The War of Return is a look at the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That the two support a two-state solution and a return of Israel to pre-1967 borders makes it all the more credible. Trying to go and see why the Palestinians have been more intractable than even the other Arab states, they come to a “temporary UN program”.

I knew about the legitimate beefs the Palestinians have with Israel (yes they exist), and how the other Arab nations have used them entirely as political props and tools for decades without wanting to care for them. Yet the key in the lock they’ve explained is the UNRWA, which ended up becoming both a local government (seriously) with an international fig leaf and something that fanned the fires by using the term “refugee” in a way completely different than what everyone else, including the rest of the UN, uses.

(Short oversimplified version: The UNHCR which handles refugees literally everywhere, has a narrow definition and formal apoliticality. Once someone is settled, they aren’t a “refugee” anymore. So WRT Syria, if they’re settled they’re no longer a refugee. Be it in Turkey, Germany, the UAE, Ireland, America, or Bangladesh, that’s that. Also, whether they were pro-or-anti-Assad is irrelevant in that case. In contrast, the UNRWA has effectively made every single Palestinian family into a dynasty of “refugees”.)

It’s hard not to read this book and think that just a bit of negotiation here and a settlement there can still work (or could even before the current war). This makes it a sad but excellent and true story.