Where has C.J. Cherry been all my life?

Where has C.J. Cherryh been all my life? An SFWA Grandmaster since 2016, she has been producing hard science fiction and space operas since 1976, yet — unless some of her short fiction has crossed my path — I am almost certain that none of her novels have until now.

I'm going to blame that reader's omission on the fact she has been published by DAW Books, which for decades was an outfit whose covers somehow read amateurish to me. With very few exceptions, nothing published by DAW ever weighted my shelves.

Pity that, if Cherryh's Foreigner is anything at all to go by.

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More than 40 years later, this gift is still with me, and still makes me weep.

May 30, 2020 — Some gifts just keep on giving, and this omnibus hard-cover edition of The World of Pooh, which includes A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, is one I have returned to again and again.

I reviewed the book(s) back in 2010 — I see now I posted it on my 45th birthday —, and have re-read the books more than once in the intervening decade, so I can confidently state that I love Milne's masterpiece in my fifties as much as I did in my forties (and thirties, and twenties).

It's not news that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I have a soft spot for space opera; I confess, the big space base (which I initially mistook for a starship of some sort) adorning the cover of Neal Asher's novel, The Departure, helped sell me on it. As it turned out though, The Departure hardly qualifies as space-opera and only squeaks by as science fiction pretty much the way Superman does: on technicalities. Though it's set in the future and some of the action takes place in orbit and on Mars, the book is really just a narrated first-person shooter dressed up in some SF tropes — a corrupt and incompetent world government, artificial intelligence, robotic weapons and a trans-human genesis. But all that is only window-dressing. That spectacular cover is a gateway to lugubrious dialogue, sophomoric libertarian philosophy, hackneyed world-building and, especially, to one pornographic blood-bath after another. The Departure is one of the worst books I have read in a very long time. More boring than Atlas Shrugged (which I reviewed a while back), it drips with just as much contempt for ordinary human beings. Unlike Rand's John Galt though, Asher's superman does much of his killing at first-hand. Does this novel have any redeeming qualities? The short answer is "no". The long answer lives behind this link.

Photo of Kim Stanley Robinson by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Sᴜɴᴅᴀʏ, Aᴜɢᴜsᴛ 9, 2020 — Kim Stanley Robinson became one of my favourite writers with his novel, Red Mars and its sequels. His work has been uneven since then, but not to the point where I have stopped paying attention when he releases a new novel.

Galileo's Dream was released in late 2009, and I read and reviewed it shortly after. This review was originally published on Rex on January 19, 2010.

I have recovered it thanks, once again, to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Click here to read the full review.

Tᴜᴇsᴅᴀʏ, Aᴘʀɪʟ 14, 2020 — You wouldn't think it necessary to review a 75 year-old pulp novel in the 21st century, but Ayn Rand's stupid and vicious philosophy has had a profound impact on western societies for the past 40 years at least.

I am pretty proud of my review of Atlas Shrugged, which I wrote back in 2008, and I stand by everything I said then about that morally execrable novel. Read more by clicking the headline above above ...