Tag: Book

Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer (2016)

OK, this one has been a long time coming.  It was one of the first ebooks I collected, just sitting there in my queue.  I have friends who speak very highly of Dr. Palmer’s work.  Heck, I’ve met and spoken with her several times and found her to be nice.  I’ve even met her parents! (Lovely people.)

Lightning is NOT an easy book to read.  I emailed my friend after I was done and said that I felt too stupid to read it.  It was obviously a labor of love for Palmer to put so much of what she cared about within history and thought and extrapolate that into the future.

There are some authors that I like, but I tend to gloss over some of their details.  David Weber and the majority of his space battle descriptions come to mind, but ignoring that the math and strategy of velocity and breaking speed at the right time is a lot like what I did for descriptions of philosophy in this book.  The great thing is that Palmer’s in on it! Some of her internal dialogue is with the reader and she comes out at some points and says–it’s OK to skip this!

With that reservation in mind, she’s built an interesting future and I am curious about how it will come together.  I’ve got the next book on order so we’ll take it one volume at a time.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run (2025)

This book is credited to Paul McCartney, but as an oral history the credit really goes to historian/editor Ted Widmer and the crew at Paul’s company MPL that had all the archives.  The book is seen as a companion to the documentary Man on the Run coming out in wide release in 2026 on Amazon Prime.  Many new interviews were done for the documentary and transcribed for the book.  It’s the first time we really hear from the McCartney children, particularly Mary and Stella.

I was expecting a coffee-table book, but this is standard hardcover size, which means that most of the pictures are black & white and smaller-size, although there is an insert with nice color photos.  The text is organized chronologically, and includes the time of McCartney and McCartney II which is strange for a Wings book.

As with anything blessed by Macca, there is nothing that speaks ill of him (or Linda). In particular, his spectacular hubris leading to his Japanese arrest gets off lightly.  That arrest killed the last incarnation of Wings, which was the first one I can remember experiencing as it happened.

As I was reading the book I was surprised how familiar the events seemed.  Then it hit me that earlier this year I read the well-researched McCartney Legacy II by Allan Kozinn.  If you’re only going to read one book about Wings, read Kozinn’s.

The book contains a “timeline” of contemporary events and popular music hits of each album’s era, and ends with superfluous capsule biographies of each member of Wings. The useful appendices are a detailed discography and a “gigography” with all the dates of Wings’ performances.

I am looking forward to the film documentary but I suspect I’m going to wonder about ten minutes in why it seems so familiar….

Lunar Logic by Adeena Mignogna (2024)

I met Adeena two years ago at Balticon. She gave an interesting talk on “Space Junk”.  At the end she quickly promoted her books and I took note.  I first read her “Crazy Robots” series, which had some interesting concepts in it.  Lunar Logic is a standalone story, and I just got around to reading it.

I felt that the story started slowly, and the robots all being named “Ai-something” was cumbersome to the reader, but it makes sense within the world she’s created.  The book really took off after the initial world-setting and groundwork laid, becoming more readable and with a bit more action.

It’s a very timely book with ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’ all in our news and science speculation.  This book is the best kind of “speculative fiction”.

I recommend Adeena’s work.  I have been getting her newsletter this year and she’s been writing some ‘flash fiction’ that I hope gets developed into full stories.