The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Failed Slut, A Successful Farmer, And A Pair of Soldiers

— Wombat-socho I’m going to lead off this week’s book post with a short review of a book which is itself all too short: Kathy Shaidle’s Confessions of A Failed Slut. Ms. Shaidle, proprietress of the Five Feet of Fury blog and columnist at Takimag, has a lot of uncomplimentary things to say about the […]

Jet Lag Blues

— Wombat-socho Apologies for the lack of Live At Five this morning, or even the token offering of In The Mailbox, but after being up since 0300 in order to make my 6 AM flight to Las Vegas, I was in no position to give either of those posts their due justice. However, before I […]

Monsters And A Mystery

— compiled by Wombat-socho I confess to having failed the Loyal Readers by not mentioning that I’ve finally gotten around to reading the first two Monster Hunter novels by International Lord of Hate Larry Correia, which were conveniently packaged in The Monster Hunters along with the first one I’d read, Monster Hunter Alpha, which is […]

Not Saying It Was Aliens…

— compiled by Wombat-socho …which I guess could be construed as sort of a spoiler for John Barnes’ disappointing The Last President, which is the last of the Daybreak novels. I hated this novel for at least a dozen reasons, not the least of which is that Barnes pulls a diavolo ex machina out of […]

Things Fall Apart

— by Wombat-socho Literally and figuratively, this is the plot of John Barnes’ Daybreak novels, which start with Directive 51 and continue on through Daybreak Zero and The Last President. These have a very weird feel to them; the basic plot, in which ecosaboteurs spread genetically engineered plastic- and gasoline-eating bacteria along with nanobots designed […]

Holy Guacamole, A Decent Sequel!

— by Wombat-socho I did manage to sneak in some reading before getting buried under the deluge of work that is the Death March to April 15, and they’re very different kinds of books. Leaving aside all the various subgenres of science fiction, it strikes me that there are two basic attitudes expressed in SF: […]

This Is Not A Bolo Combat Unit. This Is Not The Concordiat.

— by Wombat-socho Just about everybody familiar with the combat SF subgenre knows about Keith Laumer’s Bolos, which evolved over a number of short stories from moderately advanced main battle tanks into cybernetic war machines utterly loyal to their human commanders and their comrades of the Dinochrome Brigade. Whether in the era of the Concordiat […]

Picking Up The Signal

— by Wombat-socho A pox on Verizon for taking nearly a week to repair/replace the stone knives and bearskins that deliver the Intertubes to my humble burrow in the Virginia suburbs, after said high-tech devices were blown down during the windstorms last week. (As an aside, what kind of crappy 21st century infrastructure gets blown […]

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