This one came to me as a recommendation from a “Heinlein friend”. Several reviews compare it to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; that alone begs a read. It also won the Philip K. Dick Award in its year of publication.
The book reads very much like a YA piece, or in Heinlein-speak, a juvenile. That’s not an insult. It’s fairly short. One of my big complaints is that it gets to a certain point and stops, after having spent a good chunk of the book ‘on the holodeck’ with most of the main characters. There are some tantalizing hints of the formative Luna years that I wish Ford had explored. He passed away in 2006 and it took until 2022 for this book to come back into print. If you can find a copy, it’s a decent read.
I just had a “smack the head” moment. The author is the same one who wrote the amazingly funny Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? in 1987, which was one of the best ever written. That alone raises my esteem of the book.
I’ve had several people recommend the Lost Fleet series to me. I’m a space opera fan, and space battles/military SF is an “easy read” for me. The books have proven to read pretty quickly.
I have enjoyed seeing Ncuti Gatwa as the 15th-ish Doctor, but as an honest reviewer I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed his overall arc. He plays the Doctor as a little -too- emotional, even a bit much with vulnerability. I think the Doctor is hitting some of the same problems the Superman has encountered over his 87-year existence. How do you make the stories about a god interesting after all this time? Part of that is the Companion’s-eye-view of the adventures. This season there’s been an overarching “get her home on time” refrain, which really didn’t even pay off until the next-to-last episode. All in all, I’d call this Doctor a very uneven telling.