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_Carte Blanche_, Jeffery Deaver for the Fleming estate
_Empire in Black and Gold_, Adrian Tchaikovsky
_Outies_, J.E. Pournelle with permission of Niven and J. Pournelle


The literary chronicles of James Bond did not end with Ian Fleming's death; several other novelists have given it a shot with the Fleming estate's permission. Jeffery Deaver went a bit further than the others by rebooting Bond. Rather than ignore the contradiction of Bond fighting ex-Nazis and Smersh just post-WWII and still being spry and nimble today, he reinvents Bond as an RN vet of Afghanistan now working for a non-MI6 deniable agency. The gadgets are kept to a minimum, women appear as more than just toys and temptresses, and the villain plots are slightly less farfetched.

And as long as I am on the subject of authorized sequelae, Jerry Pournelle's daughter decided to continue the storyline from _The Mote in God's Eye_ (and _The Gripping Hand_) with a book which starts slowly, then turns out to be much better written in almost all respects than the N+P sequel. I'm still not sure about the evolutionary relationship of the Apes and the Moties, and the pronoun gimmick was obvious after the first page or so, but otherwise very well done. If you found yourself reading _The Gripping Hand_ and just barely finishing it, this might be for you.

Finally, Adrian Tchaikovsky is apparently turning out more novels in this series (Shadows of the Apt) at a rate likely to devastate forests. It's a steampunk-with-magic book set in a world where entomology and ancestry have gotten really strangely confused; humans are separated into tribe/races which derive powers and characteristics from various insects. It's weird, but also weirdly compelling. Expect war and treachery.

_So Vile A Sin_, Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman
_Circle of Enemies_, Harry Connolly
_Tales of the City_, Armistead Maupin
_A Calculated Magic_, and _A Logical Magician_, Robert Weinberg
_One Salt Sea_, Seanan McGuire


_Sin_: the continuity of fully licensed and authorized Doctor Who media makes Harry Potter fanfic look as well-organized as a Russian May Day parade. If you aren't a fairly ardent Who fan, don't bother trying to make sense. If you are, give up. In that context, this novel is fairly well written and seems to be internally consistent.

_Circle of Enemies_: third book in a series, in which the first book was very good and each subsequent volume has continued an upward trend. Don't start here. Start with _Child of Fire_ -- assuming, that is, you're in the mood for Lovecraftian monsters, violent paranoid magicians, and a protagonist who is desperately trying to do the right thing, as soon as he figures out what it is.

_Tales of the City_: is a soap opera set in 1970s San Francisco, apparently notable for being a sympathetic treatment of sexual minorities as actual human beings. The only real flaw is that every character is related to every other character in a web simultanously more tightly-coupled and secretive than usually happens in real life.

Weinberg wrote two 1960s-style urban fantasy predecessors -- the sort of thing where rational modern people defeat occult horror through solving logic puzzles and researching mythology -- in the middle 1990s. Amusing storylines, but I couldn't help noticing that every female character was initially described in terms of breast size and hair color. Oh, and nymphs turn out to be highly attracted to intellectual chair-sitters.

McGuire continues her series about the faeries of San Francisco with an entry about the proposed war between the land and sea folk. Tragedy intervenes repeatedly. I'm getting tired of the trope where a female protagonist with two potential romantic interests has the monogamy problem solved for her by a death -- not her fault, of course.

_Supergods_, Grant Morrison
_Across the Great Barrier_, Patricia Wrede
_God, No_, Penn Jilette

Grant Morrison summarizes the history of superhero comics, writes an autobiography inside that, and displays a general derision for people on the Internet who might criticize him. Contains enough superhero comic trivia to do a special edition game at WorldCon; not enough for a non-fan to get through it. Hallucinogens and syncretic ritual magic play a big role. Also contains some details on his key to understanding world cultural trends (sunspots).

Penn pens an amusing raw collection of anecdotes hung on a skeleton of atheist and libertarian propaganda. Not for the easily offended.

_Across the Great Barrier_ is a pleasant sequel to _Thirteenth Child_, a highly alternate history with magic and young adult concerns. Fragments of a multivolume plot emerge, though not too obtrusively.

_Ready Player One_, Ernest Cline


To a certain cohort of nerds, this book is irresistible crack.

If you're not in or interested in that cohort, you won't care much.

Most of my friends are in that cohort, as am I.

I seem to have fallen a little behind.

Rain Fall
Hard Rain
Rain Storm
Killing Rain
The Last Assassin
Requiem For An Assassin
Fault Line
Inside Out
-- all by Barry Eisler

The Bricklayer
Agent X
-- by Noah Boyd

Quarter Share
Half Share
Full Share
-- by Nathan Lowell

Stand By, Stand By
-- by Chris Ryan


The Eisler books: ok, so there's this assassin what only kills bad people. He has rules, you know. No women or children, and only principals -- no killing random henchmen, please, he's too l33t. His name is John Rain. Yes, that's why the stupid title scheme. In theory Mr. Rain's specialty is in killing people so that it looks like natural causes, but he really only does that a few times in the whole series. He kills lots of people, often for very little reason, and never suffers any emotional repercussions. The author likes to namedrop moderately expensive knives, for no obvious reason. _Fault Line_ and _Inside Out_ are nominally about an American ex-Special Forces agent who discovers his government is untrustworthy, and kills lots of people. However, it's tied to John Rain through secondary characters and apparently they will unite to kill people together in a book coming this fall.

Noah Boyd, on the other hand, is an ex-FBI agent who writes about an ex-FBI agent who is called back to solve some special cases, even though he does not play well with others and cannot respect authority. The ex-FBI agent (fictional) only kills bad guys, and only in the middle and ends of the books. Due to a lack of available characters, the exciting twist near the end of _Agent X_ was rather predictable.

Chris Ryan is an ex-SAS soldier who writes about an SAS soldier whose family is killed by an IRA bomb. Soon he swears revenge and eventually gets to kill people. It had some of the tone of James Herriot's veterinary life books. Make of that what you will.

Finally, the books by Nathan Lowell contain no killing people whatsoever, no wars, no soldiers, no assassins, and almost no politics. Instead we get the refreshing tale of an orphan who joins the Space Merchant Marine Service, rises through the enlisted ranks, and eventually goes off to the academy. Both calm and engaging; a perfect antidote for kill kill kill.

_The Fixer_, _The Invoker_, _The Kensei_, all by Jon Merz.

These are books 1, 2 and 5 of the series about a ninja vampire who lives in Boston and is called Lawson. I think his first name may be Marty Stu.

The bits about Boston are reasonably correct, including traffic patterns, socio-economic neighborhoods, and climate.

Lawson loses his special wood-bullet pistol about twice per book. Then he is forced to go hand-to-hand, or sometimes fight with the special lignum vitae bokken hand-crafted for him as the culmination of a lifetime's work by Japan's finest swordsmith (now deceased).

Ninja vampire. Boston. Go write your own jokes.

_Version 43_, Philip Palmer
_The Magician King_, Lev Grossman


Two failures, for me.

_Version 43_ is about a Galactic Policeman sent to the most corrupt human planet in the galaxy. The setting is complex and not particularly cliched, but the plot is a horrible mess. The Galactic Policeman is a cyborged serial clone, with a last-ditch memory dump that generally means a quick resurrection in a new body, with factual memories intact but lacking all emotional context. (I strongly suspect that human minds don't work that way.) There are problems with power density, but that's a mere peccadillo compared to the 0.10 c tramlines used for in-city transport (hello, acceleration?) which is a mere peccadillo compared to the total abandonment of physics later on in the novel. Spoiler: in the end, quantum magic wishing can make it so.

_The Magician King_, sequel to _The Magicians_. So Grossman has to come up with a plot that means something after his protagonists become kings and queens of a magical parallel universe in the last book. So random things occur, there is a quest which looks like it is going somewhere, but in the end, no, it's a different quest. Also, tragedy occurs randomly because, I assume, the author wanted the reader to know that the universe is not fair. As a B-story, we get the tale of how magic is learned by everyone with aptitude didn't go to Hogwarts, err, Brakebills. I suspect this book of attempting to be highly symbolic, but not in a way which is either decipherable (by me) or fun to argue about.

Currently reading: vampire ninjas in Boston. At least he gets the Boston bits right.

_Hammered_, Kevin Hearne
_7th Sigma_, Steven Gould

In _Hammered_, the third book in an entertainingly funny magic-action series about an immortal Druid who runs a head shop in Arizona, the druid pays off his debts by taking a vampire, a werewolf and a few other assorted high-magic types to Asgard on a mission to assassinate Thor. Prior to departure, a couple of deities warn the druid that this is all a bad idea, but they also don't want to suggest that he break an oath, so...

I think _7th Sigma_ is a Hugo contender. While low on the sense-of-wonder scale, it's a really well-written story taking extensive inspiration from Kipling's _Kim_. The technique and flavor reminds me of Kagan's _Mirabile_. Although there's no particular sign of it, I certainly hope Gould commits trilogy here.

_X-Men: Dark Mirror_, Marjorie Liu
_Mistborn_,
_The Well of Ascension_,
_The Hero of Ages_, by Brandon Sanderson


The prose X-Men book is interesting primarily because hardly anyone uses a superpower in the entire book. Unfortunately, all the characterization is done by reference to established continuity, so there's nothing here if you don't already know large chunks of backstory. No sex and almost no violence. Bizarre.

The Sanderson books are a trilogy of EPIC FANTASY set in a world completely different from our own, except that the people are all humans. EPIC FANTASY. As is good practice in a trilogy, the first book pretty much stands alone, but once you start reading the second, you will need to finish the third to get resolution. He comes up with novel magic systems, defines them nicely, and then exploits the bugs and loopholes and unstated assumptions ruthlessly. Some science fiction authors who like to contort physics could learn lessons here about the effective use of rules. Also notable for characters who make plausible sacrifices, have reasonable emotions and motivations, and people who generally act like people. Phoebe wants me to pet her more now, so I'm done.

_Robopocalypse_, Peter Wilson

- there is a distinct lack of original ideas
- radio DF doesn't work that way -- you track transmission sources, not receivers
- no mention of automated factories, but they have to exist
- where's the power coming from? Apparently someone invented super-batteries and forgot to tell the author to revolutionize the world.
- (related) you're telling me the entire power and communications infrastructure of the US and Europe was completely automated?

Overall, don't bother unless you're a real fan of end-of-the-world scenarios.