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.

The McCartney Legacy vol. 2 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair (2024)

The McCartney Legacy vols. 1 and 2

Finally was able to get this book, which covers 1974-1980, out of an interlibrary loan request.  it follows the same format as vol. 1 except they added captions to the photos. 😉

I have been a McCartney fan since I could listen to music and with this book I was playing the albums as I was reading the section that dealt with them.  The first new McCartney music I was contemporaneously aware of was the London Town album, and I am one of the few people that really likes Back to the Egg.  It really was fascinating to finally read the detail behind both of them, as it’s been an era that gets glossed over. In much the same way I am looking forward to what I figure will be one more volume.

I realized in this book that all of the reviews quoted are taken from British music trade papers. Since Sinclair is from the UK I guess that makes sense but I was left wondering this time around what American critics were thinking.  A small quibble for an exhaustively researched book.

Originally Published on Facebook, August 10, 2023:

Long Take: Finished 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑴𝒄𝑪𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒏𝒆𝒚 𝑳𝒆𝒈𝒂𝒄𝒚 𝒗𝒐𝒍. 1 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. This book covers post-Beatles breakup to the release of ‘Band on the Run’. In the afterward they note that it was supposed to be a sessionography that morphed into a biography as well as they found it hard to separate the stories. They were trying to mimic the excellent Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn. I think they did a good job. They talked to everyone except McCartney himself (he declined) and the prose is OK. My two faults with the book were the sans serif font that was very hard to read and that pictures for the book had no captions. The hard part about these amazing detailed books is that it takes so long to write them. We have been waiting a long time for Lewisohn’s vol. 2 for the Beatles and I hope it’s not as long for vol. 2 in this series.