Collisions by Alec Nevala-Lee (2025)

Since I have a passing acquaintance with Alec, I look at his new projects with interest.  Collisions is a thorough biography of Luis Alvarez, a physicist who was involved with several interesting discoveries and applications of work.  He’s probably best-known as one of the scientists in the Manhattan Project.

The work covers a lot of ground while clocking in around three hundred pages.  I read the NY Times review of the book which thought it needed to go into more details about Alvarez’ character and personal actions, but the key thing I realized in reading the acknowledgements is that the first people to be thanked are his children.  That kind of access probably comes with a natural inclination to temper the view of the subject (if the children liked/respected their parent).  Since I knew nothing of his accomplishments, I found it to be an even retelling of his life and achievements.  I especially appreciated the Afterward that served as a summary/commentary of the man and his approach to science.

Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer (1997)

I have been reading Sawyer’s books for a long time on-and-off.  This one I acquired recently and got inscribed to me when I met Rob at Balticon this year.  I just got to the book this week and finished it in a couple of days.

Like all of Sawyer’s books, it takes an interesting premise and creates an engaging story around it.  I will say that while I figured out one minor plot point in advance, I missed a couple of biggies, which makes for wonderful reading!

The only “negative” point I’d have about this story in particular is that some of the details hinge around the O.J. Simpson case from 1995.  This is a case of “in 1997” this stuff was fresh with everyone; however, I never watched a moment of the trial and to this day still don’t know a lot about most of those involved.  It’s a minor quibble as I remembered enough, but not as much.  I had a similar feeling about the WWW trilogy because of the tech involved, some of which I never used, but it was cutting edge when written.

One of these days I’m going to have to print off a list of Sawyer’s novels and figure out which ones I have missed reading.  If you didn’t know, Sawyer now controls most (if not all) of his backlist and it’s easy to find his stuff at sfwriter.com

Lunar Descent by Allen Steele (1991)

This is apparently the third in Steele’s “Near Space” series.  I am very late to the party in reading it, as I’ve only read one other Steele book.  It read well not knowing about the other books.  An interesting premise, following workers on the Moon.  Lots of interesting extrapolation, although it did throw me a bit to be reading a book set in 2024 that has so little bearing on our present use of the Moon’s resources. 🙁

I liked this one well-enough that I will be continuing to search out more from Steele’s backlist.