Scattered Thoughts on a Foggy Day

Some of the melting snow has turned to fog, but personally that's a small price to pay for 24 hours of melting. Here, have a few scattered thoughts.

Hilary Clinton

As you may have heard, Hilary decided she needed a private email server in her house to do official business with. It is exactly these sorts of shenanigans that make me hope she doesn't run for President.

Autism

I was reading an article in the dead-tree version of the Chicago Tribune about how working with animals seems to help autistic people. So, I was wondering - is some of the apparent increase in autism due to the lack of interaction modern humans have with animals? I mean, up to the 20th century, everybody "worked" with animals like horses. Now we don't.

Good Old Fashioned SF

The various puppy-flavored SF movements and my friend jeff_duntemann have expressed distaste for modern SF, and think various "gatekeepers" are holding the good stuff back. Well, from Tor, a big New York publisher, comes the heavily-marketed Unbreakable: A Novel. Written by Mr. W. C. Bauers, it's a straight-up space opera with starship battles, ground actions and libertarian colonists.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Review: Unbreakable, Book One of the Chronicles of Promise Paen

Title: Unbreakable: Book 1 in The Chronicles of Promise Paen
Author: W. C. Bauers
Genre: SF, Space Opera
Price: $12.99 (ebook) $19.50 (hardcover)
Publisher: Tor
ISBN 978-0-7653-7542-1
Point of Sale: various, via author’s website

Regular readers of my blog know that there is a big debate in science fiction fandom at the moment, with one group saying that “all SF is just ‘social justice stuff’ and the ‘gatekeepers’ have been repressing the Good Old Stories.” I have not had much patience with this line of argument. Having just read the new novel Unbreakable by Mr. W. C. Bauers, my patience has been exhausted.

First, the “gatekeepers.” Mr. Bauers’ novel was published by Tor, the biggest name in SF, and they marketed the crap out of it, which is how a hardcover of it came to my possession. (Oh, and it’s “pick of the month” at those small and quiet booksellers Amazon and Barnes and Noble.) Short of tattooing the ISBN on the ass of everybody in fandom, I’m not sure how much more could be done to get this book out of the gate.

On to the book itself. The story is of one Promise Paen, late a resident of the frontier world of Montana. When her dad is killed in a pirate raid, she joins the Republic of Aligned Worlds Marine Corp, hoping to kill pirates. She takes with her mom’s antique Glock and her dead mom, who periodically visits her daughter.

Fate, in the form of the expanding Lusitanian Empire, draws Promise back to her homeworld. A homeworld in which the local Rotary clubs (!!!! – I am a Rotarian myself, I can do that) form the local military. It is, in short, a libertarian paradise. In any event, Promise ends up fighting both a starship-vs-starship action and two ground combat engagements. She is duly overmatched going into all of these fights.

As far as I can see, anybody seeking good-old-fashioned whack’em, sock’em action should love the hell out of Unbreakable. I did, and I look forward to more from Mr. Bauer.