Them: "Oh, you don't drink? Will it offend you if I do?"

Me: "I'm not the boss of you."

Invincible by Jack Campbell

The second book in the Beyond the Frontier series (first reviewed here).  Still with The Lost Fleet emblazoned on the cover, even though it had ceased to be lost by the fifth book of the first series.  However, you learn to live with marketing departments.  And their covers -- this one has a jab at the accuracy of the pictures on the covers of the whole series. 

But that, of course, is not the point of the story which is exploration of space and high grade military SF. 

Spoilers ahead for the earlier books.  (I do not recommend tackling it first.  Like most good series, all the later ones will spoil the earlier ones.)

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The Story So Far…

 

THIRTEEN

The Voice of Doom was shrieking something indecipherable but clearly relating to the end of the world in my ear.  I shot awake and . . . nearly fell out of the bed I was in.  Wha’?  Where?  Huh?  Ugh.

            I located the source of the shrieking and hammered it till it shut up.  Okay.  Regroup.  I stared (blurrily—where were my glasses?  Okay, there.  Whew.  Put glasses on.  Let’s try this looking thing again) at the wall opposite, which was a sort of mottled brown with small square objects suspended on it.  These looked way too much like food squashed under glass and then inexplicably framed.  The frames looked like they were from the ‘sale’ bin of the local do-it-yourself store. I like ratatouille, but not on the wall.  A bowl of pasta dropped on the floor looked a lot like the one on the left. . . . Don’t ask me how I know this. . . . Oh gods, I’ve been kidnapped by Flowerhair’s wizard and imprisoned underground, and the wall decorations are to drive me mad with hunger.   I suppose after a few days vertical pasta will work as well as anything, but a giant poster of chocolate would be faster.

            I glanced toward the window which, mercifully, appeared to be letting sunlight in through the half-sheer curtains—around the giant toad monster squatting malevolently on the middle of the sill.  The silhouette of the toad monster looked vaguely familiar. . . .

            Oh.  It’s a Friendly Campfire.  Of course.  I knew that.

            And I want breakfast at Eats before I meet Hayley at ten.  Which means I have to walk that far before my first cup of tea (with the Eatsmobile in prospect, I was not going to essay the Friendly Campfire’s tea bags).  New life, new challenges.  Hey.

            I made it.  I didn’t get lost or anything.  I fell, to the extent that you can fall up, onto the first empty stool, and propped myself on the counter.  A sympathetic-looking waitress materialised in front of me.  “How do you like your caffeine?” she said.

            “Tea,” I croaked.

            “Special breakfast blend for that turbo-charged start to the day?” said the waitress.         

            “Yes please.”

            “Two cup, four cup or six cup pot?”

            I wavered.  “Four,” I said regretfully.  I had the rest of the day to get through, and I’d already concluded that eighteen cups a day was too many.  “You’ll warm the pot first, won’t you?”

            “Of course,” she said.  Her nameplate said Bridget.  Bridget, Mistress of Tea.

            She brought teapot, mug, sugar and milk on a little round tin tray.  The tray had purple irises on it.  The teapot had robins on it.  The mug had Pre-Raphaelite damsels on it.  The sugar bowl had red and pink polka dots.  The pottery milk jug was a sheeny, crackly teal blue.  The mug was hot too. Can you fall in love with a restaurant?  Bridget returned ten seconds later with a tea cosy.  The tea cosy had a clipper ship on it with an impressive bow wave.  It was official:  I was in love with this restaurant.  I also had the blueberry spelt pancakes with maple syrup and bacon.  If any evil magicians imprisoned me underground after last night’s dinner and today’s breakfast, I’d survive a very long time. 

            I waddled out the door, back down Bradbury, and paused at the corner of Schmitz Street.  It was a sunny, clear day, and the blue of the sky extended all the way down to the horizon in a way you don’t see in the middle of a city, even from your penthouse roof.  I looked around carefully, but all the shadows seemed to be accounted for:  buildings, stop signs, parking meters, people, including one being walked by her dog.  The dog came lunging up to me, dragging her person:  “Oh, Flossie,” said the person, in accents of resignation and despair.  I leaned down with difficulty over my stomach as Flossie attempted to bound up my leg, frantically wagging her tail and uttering little yips of, My long-lost best friend!  At last I have found you!  Terriers all have bedsprings where most other dogs have legs.  The person eventually dragged her away, no doubt to gladden the hearts and muddy the jeans of other long-lost best friends.  The Silent Wonder Dog would be friendly but reserved with everyone but me.  I of course would be the pinnacle of all aspiration, to the Silent Wonder Dog, who would behave accordingly. 

            I turned down Schmitz and stopped in front of Homeric Homes.  I took a deep breath.  I opened the door, which went, ding!  There were three desks and an open door into another office at the back.  There was a young blond woman who had been a cheerleader up until very recently, or perhaps still was in her spare time, at the first desk, standing up and stuffing papers into a red canvas briefcase.  She looked up at the ding! and smiled at me.  Nervously, I thought.  Probably because I wanted to live in Cold Valley.  “Are you Kes?” she said.  I nodded, wondering if I could talk to a cheerleader about Yog-Sothoth and the nightgaunt-shaped stain in the bedroom ceiling.

            “I’m Hayley,” she said, and held out her hand.

 

I just finished rewatching Battlestar Galactica and now am in the mood for some military science fiction. Can anyone recommend any good military scifi novels? Generally, I prefer a female protagonist but I wouldn't mind anything else as long as the plot is strong. Help, please?

....and I've decided that I hate it all and want to re-do the entire thing.

ENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FML.

It ain't easy being a fic writer, y0.

I'm hearing from people who've found early copies of Casket of Souls, so I'm setting up the usual space for conversing, with the caveat that THERE WILL BE SPOILERS most likely, so if you haven't read the book, don't come in!

( The books you love are not you. Hating a book you love is not a comment about you. Unless you love 'Twilight.' Then you suck. )

Previous Saturday Book Discussions.

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IT IS TOO HOT.*  I didn’t sleep particularly well last night and I woke up when Pooka chirruped at me in that ‘text message incoming’ way, which I will sleep through—if I’m asleep.**  It was a friend telling me that I’d just been mentioned on Radio Four as an author who had used a hedge as something fairies come through.  The things Radio Four thinks of to create programmes around.***  Also, THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE is thirty years old—and sold about thirty copies.  However.  Whoever that person with a deep and surprising interest in obscure fantasy literature is, thank you. 

            Meanwhile, it’s too hot.  We were promised a Cooling Breeze and what we’ve got is a sirocco.  It ripped out the velcroed-on piece of screen in my bedroom window and threw geranium petals gleefully all over the upstairs.†  I daresay I should be grateful it wasn’t the geraniums themselves.  But everything I laboriously watered this morning wants watering again because hot dry violent winds are . . . violently drying.  Various long whippy green things needed tying up NOW before they beat themselves to death and I have a novel to finish in between the handbells and the singing for Oisin.  At the end of the singing for Oisin he said mildly, I think it’s time for Phase Two.  PHASE TWO?  WHAT DOES HE MEAN, PHASE TWO?  Seeing me starting to panic, he hurried on:  you need to face me instead of facing away. 

            Ugh.  Unfortunately he’s got me on this one.  I face away so I’m not flapdoodling overwhelmed both by the fact that he’s the real thing and I’m not and because the piano is so much LOUDER than I am.  I’ve got louder, and while a Steinway baby grand is still a whole lot louder, he doesn’t pound the freller, you know?  But the crucial thing is that I keep going on in my weedy way about making music with.  Making music, if you’re a soloist by neither ability nor personality, is about doing it with someone else.  In a choir there’s a lot of you.  But when it’s a singer and an ‘accompanist’, the accompanist counts, you know?  And of the stuff I sing with/for Oisin, one of my big favourites, and I want to work on it more when I’ve got more to work with,†† is Britten’s arrangement of The Ash Grove, because the accompaniment is so perverse.†††  And . . . I just like doing it with.  Even when I come in wrong.  As I often do.

            Okay.  Face him.  I can do this.  I can.‡ 

* * *

* And I have a non-eating hellhound.  Arrrrrrgh.  Although I think in this case it has more to do with the ingestion of cat crap than it does with undesirably elevated temperature.  This is why I frelling hate cats.  I keep trying to tell myself it’s not the cats, it’s their owners—and the frickfracking law that allows people to dump their cats outdoors and let ’em fend however they like.^  And while, yes, most dogs have disgusting habits and the fact that my hellhounds think cat crap is a delicacy is also not the cats’ fault . . . but I don’t want cat crap ALL OVER MY GARDEN.  Which is where I have it, at Third House.  And so far as I can tell, they have crap rivalries where every neighbourhood cat strains to outdo all the others.  The chosen arena is, as it has ever been, Third House.   When we went up there this evening about six cats leaped for the fence as hellhounds and I came through the gate—the frelling fence trembled.  ARRRRRRGH.^^

            Meanwhile, back on the cottage cul de sac, the hellcat has started targeting me.  When I’m out front, fussing with my pots^^^, he sits in his driveway, stares at me, and howls.  His people are home!  I am not necessary to happiness (and food)!  

^ If I had a two-pound coin for every person who’s told me complacently that they don’t even have a litter box because that’s what outdoors is for, I could buy the Isle of Wight.  

^^ Some forum person said that while if she had to choose, she’d choose cats, but she considers herself a critter person—sure.  Me too.  And, I suspect, most people who come out for any critter at all.  I think it’s that first yes/no that’s the most important—yes I want domestic fauna, yes I want something else in the house that breathes besides my human family+, if any, or no, I don’t.  I come down on the dog side, obviously, but I’m anti-cat because they are effectively vermin in this area.  I’ve told you, haven’t I, that the black cat that used to live on the corner of the cul de sac used to run under Wolfgang’s wheels, as we came home at mmph o’clock in the morning, so often than I had an actual plan for what I was going to do when I ran over it?  ARRRRGH.  Fortunately it moved house with its people—but a few weeks ago, coming home at mmph o’clock, a frelling black cat ran under Wolfgang’s wheels at the other end of town, which is where our nemesis moved, and I thought I KNOW YOU.++ 

+ This does of course also include plant life, even if they’re quieter about it.# 

# Someone tweeted me today that she’d love to have a dog but her significant other says that fish are less messy.  Hmmm.  Okay, you don’t have to sweep every day, but I’d rather sweep every day than clean out a fish tank ever.  It’s not just the enormous faff—and the way filters seem to exist to clog up or misbehave in some manner that involves gallons of water all over the floor and/or hidden invidious leaks that suddenly make the ceiling fall in downstairs—it’s the enigmatic quality of fish.  Other mammals are hard enough to read.  Dogs may wag their tails when they’re happy.  Cats may purr.  Fish?  The clue that a fish is happy is that it’s not dead.  

++ The other end of town is closer to the vet.  But the middle of the night emergency calls may happen pretty much anywhere in Hampshire depending on who’s on duty.  

^^^ And on the subject of the ‘I don’t live here and therefore these people and these people’s property don’t count’ tourist, one of my favourite examples of this behaviour was the day I heard loud voices under my sitting room window and saw one of my rose-bushes lashing back and forth as if it were in the grip of a sirocco, and when I went outdoors to see what the frell was going on . . . discovered some d—— yanking at the bottom of it.  There was an extremely anxious-looking woman with the d——.  I don’t think I managed to say, What the hell do you think you are doing?:  the d—— volunteered brightly, Oh, I’m just taking a cutting.  YOU F—— WHAT? I said.+ 

            He was offended.  He didn’t like my language.  )]#(*&^%£$”!”!!!!!  It’s not just cats, you know.  I hate people worse.  

+ Even aside from questions of courtesy, this is illegal.  Most modern roses—although I admit in this case it was not a modern rose, but I doubt this bloke had said to himself or his anxious companion, oh this is an old rose so it’s okay!—have what is effectively copyright on them.  I can grow the one I bought, but I can’t clone it and give it away.  And he’s stealing.  

** Yes, I sleep with my technology.  But remember Pooka is the phone number for the emergency button Peter wears around his neck.  

*** Although Oliver Rackham’s HISTORY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE is a fabulous book, and has a lot of hedges and hedgerows in it.  http://thedabbler.co.uk/2011/08/oliver-rackham-the-history-of-the-countryside/ 

† And speaking of undesirable indoor behaviour, and in answer to a number of people’s inquiries, I have no idea how my bats are doing.  I haven’t seen or heard a whisker of them this year.  And while every night I go back to the cottage and there aren’t any small furry frightened exhausted things with wings smashing themselves into the corners^ is a good night, still, I’d like to know they’re all right.^^  I haven’t made a dedicated effort to be, not merely in the garden, but paying attention to the significant corner of the eaves, some twilight, but when they’re in force you don’t have to be paying attention, and I haven’t seen them ducking and diving around either.  Maybe they’re just late—because of the funny weather.  I had them in April last year, which was early.  They’re supposed to reoccupy their nurseries in May. 

^ Or unfrightened, unexhausted things swooping around my chandelier. 

^^ Speaking of being a critter person. 

†† . . . I live in hope.  I will run to the end of Nadia’s miracles sooner or later, but I hope it’s later. 

††† Mind you, Oisin can provide perverse.  When my voice is in a funny mood, which it is in this heat, we often start with a simple, unBrittened folk song.  Oisin looks at the accompaniment that even I can almost play, and launches into the ad lib Stockhausen version. 

‡ WARNING:  TOO MUCH INFORMATION FOLLOWS. 

            Chaos threw up the extremely unlovely contents of his stomach and then . . . ate his dinner.

            That fish tank is suddenly looking pretty good.

 

A vampire story that sucks the blood out of weak-ass YA novels, and will also make you deeply uncomfortable.

Shori is a mystery. Found alone in the woods, she appears to be a little black girl with traumatic amnesia and near-fatal wounds. But Shori is a fifty-three-year-old vampire with a ravenous hunger for blood, the lost child of an ancient species of near-immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humanity. Genetically modified to be able to walk in daylight, Shori now becomes the target of a vast plot to destroy her and her kind. And in the final apocalyptic battle, her survival will depend on whether all humans are bigots-or all bigots are human.

( Only Octavia Butler could get away with this, and I'm still not sure what she was thinking. )

Verdict: Octavia Butler iswas :( brilliant and I have yet to be disappointed by her, and I loved this modern, highly intelligent take on vampires done in her signature style, which incidentally also happens to be a brilliant subversion of the YA & PNR vampire shit that has been afflicting shelves these past few years, though I don't think Butler intended it. I wish I could shove Octavia Butler into the hands of everyone who coos over the writing in a YA novel. But, this is also a book with some huge freakin' squicks for which it makes no apologies, so be warned.

And boy am I sucking at my Mount TBR challenge. This is only the second book I've picked off of it this year.

Also by Octavia Butler: My reviews of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

---

My complete list of book reviews.

Alexia Tarabotti is soulless, meaning she has the ability to drain someone of their paranormal abilities with just one touch. When she’s attacked at a party by a starving vampire, Alexia realizes that something is not quite in the supernatural community. In Soulless: The Manga Volume 1, the first book in the Parasol Protectorate series is adapted into manga format, showing Gail Carriger’s alternate Victorian London, a world filled with vampires, werewolves, steampunk technology, and silly hats, in an all new light.

Adapting an existing property into a comic format can be tricky. At best, the adaptation can give us a new view of an already beloved story. At worst, the result can come off like a poorly condensed novel with some inconsequential pictures thrown in here and there to cash in on the graphic novel trend. The manga version of Soulless, fortunately, falls into the first category. What makes it shine the most is the artwork, done by REM. Although a few of Alexia’s outfits are unrealistically revealing for the time period, REM otherwise does a great job of capturing the feel of the series. The character designs, although not always how I pictured them, are well done, and a nice amount of attention is spent on the detail of the backgrounds and outfits. REM also has a knack for capturing the facial expressions of the character, making it easier for the audience to understand how they feel.

Soulless: The Manga: Vol 1 is 224 pages long, where the novel is 373. You’d expect this to result in a lot of ridiculous cuts and changes to the story, but it’s actually an incredibly faithful adaptation. Some readers may be disappointed to see certain characters who are less central to the story be pushed aside, but I was okay with how much screen time everyone was given. I found, just after reading the fifth and final book of the Parasol Protectorate Series, that it was actually quite satisfying to see where characters like Alexia, Connall, Akeldama, Lyall, Ivy and Biffy began. One thing that bothered me a bit with the Soulless novel was how large a role the romance played. Although this hasn’t changed in the manga version, I found that I was actually okay with it this time around, perhaps because I was better prepared for the romantic focus.

The first volume of the Soulless Manga is one of the best graphic novel adaptations that I’ve come across in a while. I felt that the manga-style artwork was really lovely and fit the story well. I was also impressed at how faithful the story was to it’s source material. I am planning on continuing to read the Soulless Manga. The second volume is set to be published in November.

Rating: four and a half stars
Length: 224 pages
Source: Readfield Community Library
Other books I've read by this author: This is my first

Next I will be reviewing Fair Game by Patricia Briggs

xposted to temporaryworlds,bookish, and goodreads