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 →

It must be my inner game-show-geek coming out, but I get a small thrill any time I can recognize the work of an illustrator, particularly in the SF/F field. So I couldn’t help but smile at my small victory when I came up the steps after returning from my afternoon run Friday to see the merest sliver of an image peeking out of my mailbox. I said aloud, “that looks like a Michael Whelan cover” and was rewarded to see his cover image for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles on the January 2013 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine as I extracted my mail.

I am not the most constant of readers. I have subscribed to Asimov’s in print form for the past year and most of the issues sit unread, awaiting my attention. That fact hasn’t lessened my enjoyment of seeing them arrive in the post. The thrill of wondering what the next cover image will be and which authors will have stories included makes it fun to be a subscriber.

Maybe it was the recent passing of Ray Bradbury and the fact that he has been on my mind, or the Whelan cover image, but I determined right then and there that I would sit down and start my Asimov’s year 2013 with a weekend read. I’ve read some really good issues of Asimov’s and others in which the stories were geared for readers with other tastes than mine. This was a good one. A really good one.

Continue reading Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2013 →

Last year around this time Andrea of Little Red Reviewer posted her thoughts on her first Andre Norton experience, Star Born. Her review coupled with the wonderful Dean Ellis cover combined to ensure that this would be my first Andre Norton experience as well. I quickly snagged a nice copy of the book off of ebay and this past week I could resist the lure no longer.

Star Born packs quite a lot of storytelling punch in its brief 187 pages. Andre Norton’s 1957 story examines such issues as slavery, racial prejudice, apocalyptic warfare and governmental oppression and wraps it all up in the kind of adventure-filled story that was a pleasure to read as and adult and would have had me gazing heavenward as a child. Star Born is an example of fine world-building and classic space adventure that remains accessible and surprisingly relevant 55 years after its release.

Continue reading Star Born ~Andre Norton →