Author Ernest Cline’s debut novel, an homage to video games and 1980’s geek/pop culture, has been burning up the internet since its release in August of 2011. I have the distinct honor of being the very last person in the world to read it.

Yes, I’m being facetious, but that is the way it feels.

We all have those novels we can point to that we finally get around to reading, realizing all the while that it is inexplicable that we didn’t get to it long ago. I came of age in the 1980’s. My nostalgic hold on that time period has only grown stronger with each passing year. I have loved video games since the first time I sat in my uncle’s bedroom and played Pong. So really, any excuse would be a lame one.

I chose to experience Ready Player One via the unabridged audio for one very important reason: Wil Wheaton. I have become such a big fan of his over the last few years, first and foremost because of his autobiographical writing, and secondarily because of his ambassadorship of the geek culture that I love. I had checked this out from the library earlier in the year, had listened to five out of the thirteen CD’s, and had finally returned it unfinished after discovering that Witness Protection was my last option for dodging the tenacious library constabulary. I never got back to it, until this week when blogger Cori mentioned it in her Holiday Book Buying Guide. I did a drive-by on Monday, abducting the audio book from the library once more, and finished it last night after a five-hour listening marathon.

To Cori and to all of my other friends IRL and online: You were right. Ready Player One is a book I couldn’t help but love, debut issues and all. I will try to do a better job of listening to you next time (before making other inexplicable choices and missing out on discussing a book while it is a hot topic). 😉

Continue reading Ready Player One ~Ernest Cline →

Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others?

Who indeed, agrees Sigmund Ausfaller, one of Earth’s few remaining “natural” paranoids. His bosses feel likewise. Sigmund Ausfaller is the ace up the sleeve of ARM, the Amalgamated Regional Militia, whose Bureau of Alien Affairs on Earth employs a group of paranoid agents, most of them drug-induced, to ferret out the secrets of the Citizens, an alien race known unaffectionately by humans as the Puppeteers. Ausfaller sees conspiracies within conspiracies and his fearful distrust of everyone, most notably the Puppeteers, makes him the ideal agent to seek out the location of the Puppeteer homeworld.

Niven and Lerner’s series of prequel novels to the seminal classic Ringworld began with Fleet of Worlds, an excellent blend of interesting scientific concept and engaging adventure story, and continues with Juggler of Worlds.

This second novels builds upon the first by examining events of Fleet of Worlds largely from the viewpoint of a handful of key characters centered in and around Earth’s solar system. Intrigue and espionage viewed through the eyes of a brilliant paranoid agent makes for an exciting ride in which the reader quite naturally finds him/herself looking askance at every twist and turn in the plot.

Continue reading Juggler of Worlds ~Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner →

(Photo Credit)

6 Men–against 400,000,000

So the dramatic language of the back cover states, a battle against impossible odds, “the adventures of a handful of soldiers of the future, fighting to save America from a deadly invasion”.

Major Ardmore has just arrived at the secret location of a small scientific enclave as the news is broken that the United States has been summarily defeated by a combined Japanese/Chinese force referred to in this undisclosed future as the PanAsians. In an effort to stay protected from the spread of communism in Russia the United States had spent decades essentially ignoring the world outside its borders only to see Europe fall and the red menace coalesce the Asian and Indian continents into a juggernaut of world power. The PanAsians look upon the Americans as a lower species and with superior forces occupy and enslave the American people, creating a system in which the citizens of the United States are by and large an impotent and cowed populace.

Ardmore arrives to find that this group of scientists has discovered, through an accident of testing, a weapon that may provide the key to the return of freedom to the nation. That is, if Major Ardmore can marshal this 6-person team into a strategic force to infiltrate and reclaim America.

Robert A. Heinlein’s tale, originally published in serialized form in the early months of 1941 as a story entitled “Sixth Column”, could be accused of being a racially insensitive jingoist tract or is quite possibly one of the most eerily prescient stories ever written. Given the complicated nature of Heinlein and the curious origins of this story, I suspect that both are fair assessments of what is a compelling and highly readable novel, especially when considered in the light of the time period in which it was written.

Continue reading The Day After Tomorrow ~Robert A. Heinlein →

Poul Anderson is one of the authors I chose earlier this year as part of the Grand Master Reading Challenge hosted by Worlds Without End. Anderson was a prolific author whose career spanned many decades and consequently many eras of science fiction so I was unsure exactly where to start. I had toyed with the idea of starting with his Flandry series though the covers of the more recent collected editions tended to make me think these might be like the oversexed wish-fulfillment of Heinlein’s later years. I did not want that. When I saw this Michael Whelan cover for the first novel in the series my hopes rose and I decided to go ahead and snag the book for its cover, hoping that when I got around to reading it I would not be disappointed.

Guess what? I was not disappointed, not by a long shot.

My first foray into one of Poul Anderson’s created universes proved to be one filled with rip-roaring adventure, political intrigue, Bond-style romance and not a little bit of commentary on the soul-blackening compromise of world, or in this case Imperial, government. Ensign Flandry not only provided me with some of the everyman-hero-overcoming-all-odds storytelling I was hoping for but was also full of surprises.

Continue reading Ensign Flandry ~Poul Anderson →