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Swallowing Darkness (Meredith Gentry, Book 7)

Laurell K. Hamilton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 91 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

I am Meredith, princess of faerie, wielder of the hands of Flesh and Blood, and at long last, I am with child–twins, fathered by my royal guard. Though my uncle, Taranis, King of Light and Illusion, claims that he is the true father since he abducted me from my home, betrayed, and defiled me. And now he has branded my guards as a threat to my unborn children.

Bearing an heir has placed me halfway to my aunt’s throne, that much closer to my reign over the Unseelie Court–and well ahead of her son, my cousin Cel, in this race. Now I must stay alive to see my children born and claim my place as queen.

But not all in faerie are pleased with the news, and conspirators from every court in the realm plot against me and mine. They seek to strip my guards, my lovers, from me by poisoned word or cold steel. But I still have supporters, and even friends, among the goblins and the sluagh, who will stand by me.

I am Meredith Nic Essus, and those who would defy and destroy me are destined to pay a terrible price–for I am truly my father’s daughter. To protect what is mine, I will sacrifice anything–even if it means waging a great battle against my darkest enemies and making the most momentous decision ever made as princess of faerie.

Paul of Dune

Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Frank Herbert's Dune ended with Paul Muad’Dib in control of the planet Dune. Herbert’s next Dune book, Dune Messiah, picked up the story several years later after Paul’s armies had conquered the galaxy. But what happened between Dune and Dune Messiah? How did Paul create his empire and become the Messiah? Following in the footsteps of Frank Herbert, New York Times bestselling authors Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson are answering these questions in Paul of Dune.

The Muad’Dib’s jihad is in full swing. His warrior legions march from victory to victory. But beneath the joy of victory there are dangerous undercurrents. Paul, like nearly every great conqueror, has enemies--those who would betray him to steal the awesome power he commands. . . .

And Paul himself begins to have doubts: Is the jihad getting out of his control? Has he created anarchy? Has he been betrayed by those he loves and trusts the most? And most of all, he wonders: Am I going mad?

Paul of Dune is a novel everyone will want to read and no one will be able to forget.

A Lick of Frost (Meredith Gentry, Book 6)

Laurell K. Hamilton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 162 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

I am Meredith Gentry, princess and heir apparent to the throne in the realm of faerie, onetime private investigator in the mortal world. To be crowned queen, I must first continue the royal bloodline and give birth to an heir of my own. If I fail, my aunt, Queen Andais, will be free to do what she most desires: install her twisted son, Cel, as monarch . . . and kill me.

My royal guards surround me, and my best loved–my Darkness and my Killing Frost–are always beside me, sworn to protect and make love to me. But still the threat grows greater. For despite all my carnal efforts, I remain childless, while the machinations of my sinister, sadistic Queen and her confederates remain tireless. So my bodyguards and I have slipped back into Los Angeles, hoping to outrun the gathering shadows of court intrigue. But even exile isn’t enough to escape the grasp of those with dark designs.

Now King Taranis, powerful and vainglorious ruler of faerie’s Seelie Court, has leveled accusations against my noble guards of a heinous crime–and has gone so far as to ask the mortal authorities to prosecute. If he succeeds, my men face extradition to faerie and the hideous penalties that await them there. But I know that Taranis’s charges are baseless, and I sense that his true target is me. He tried to kill me when I was a child. Now I fear his intentions are far more terrifying.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Accidental Time Machine

Joe Haldeman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

good not great 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The book at least stayed within the bounds of possibility. The hero finds himself the proud discoverer of a time machine with no reverse. It's a great start to a novel but the hero is more victim than take charge guy and you never know who or what the villian is.

Haldeman's Accidental... 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Time travel is a palpable fantasy for us. Joe Haldeman is one of the first masters of the post pulp generation of science fiction writers, and the generation that influenced the newer one like Neil Gaiman. Mr. Haldeman has been writing since 1970, had his first book published in `72 and his breakthrough novel The Forever War published in `75. And in his hands The Accidental Time Machine, the story of Matt Fuller an average graduate student who is destined NOT to make a great breakthough discovery that will garner him a Noble prize, until, he accidentally invents a time machine that takes us on a fast moving adventures into the future. Where, at first, the futures presented to him have a ring of familiarity but the farther he goes into the future do those futures become ever more alien to him. Haldeman gives us a rather interesting trip to the future that holds our interest with interesting set-ups of the future and some possible effects to bend our minds around.

There are two ways for time travel novels to go into the future like H.G. Wells seminal The Time Machine, or into the past because we all realize that we're all already time travelers, it's a one way trip to the future with no return ticket. So, we're looking for that time machine, back to the past, a little nostalgia for a period we consider a simpler more uncomplicated times such as Joe Finney`s Time and Again, or Back to the Future. In this fantasy we can rewrite our lives going back in time, we would know all the answers, know when the great inventions are going to be discovered, invest in Microsoft, give Henry Ford the loan to start his car company, know where to find the oil wells, the outcomes of the World Series, which stocks to buy, replace Thomas Edison or Leonardo DaVinci, or we can go back to be heroes of history, warn Lincoln about Ford's Theater. But if you're going to go back in time and start doing these things you're going to provoke a lot of paradoxes, going back to meet yourself, be your own grandfather, keep your brother and sister from being erased from the face of existence, the genre demands these paradoxes be resolved.

The greater challenge to the writer is of course to go into the future knowing your reader won't have comfortable position of a nostalgic return or knowing how events will unfold. It can also free the writer up to show worlds that might be without the reader being able to object to it, and hopefully they will be held in thrall to the visions of the future. In The Accidental Time Machine I think Haldeman greatly succeeds in presenting those ever increasingly alien futures. Where I think a couple of shortcomings of the novel come into play is a future that Haldeman obviously wanted to explore. Matt finds himself in a future where the Second Coming of Jesus has occurred, and the world is run by a strict theocracy backed by Jesus. When I was reading this I felt very much that we were into the meat of the novel, perhaps the reason Haldeman wrote it, was this really Jesus? Was it the real Second Coming? But just as Matt is about to confront "Jesus," Haldeman has Matt escape the confrontation by having Matt press the button to the future, sending Matt into ever increasing episodic futures as Matt starts pushing the button more and more often in order to find a future that will be able to send him back to where he started and sending the novel into the realm of escapist fantasy instead of something a little more hard hitting and satisfying.


One shared trait of both the nostalgic time trip and the future trip is that both generate paradoxes that need to be resolved, such as finding a way to keep your brother and sister from being erased from time, or in Haldeman's case to find a way for Matt Fuller to be able to come back in time in order to provide a million dollars in bail money for himself after he's accused of murdering someone who died after witnessing Matt disappear into the future. Matt believes that's what happened and we even see how Haldeman, in one of Matt's futures starts to build toward the resolution of this paradox by having Matt by virtue of a time jump, have in his possession antique items that he's able to sell for huge sums of money in one of the futures. But Haldeman quickly backs off this and we're sent into futures that start flying by rather quickly for no other obvious reason except to push it a rather fast and unsatisfying resolution especially after the journey we've just taken with the author. Interestingly enough the novel ends where Joe Haldeman begins.

Editorial Review:

NOW IN PAPERBACK-FROM THE AUTHOR OF MARSBOUND

Grad- school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when he inadvertently creates a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose in taking a time-machine trip himself—or so he thinks.

Blood Noir (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Book 16)

Laurell K. Hamilton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 295 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

The downward spiral continues.. breaking point? 1 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I have this to say to LKH, and about Blood Noir and the new direction of the Anita Blake series.

If you're going to write porn, learn to write it well. If you're going to continue calling these "real" novels, you might want to up the plot factor and let the sex become a delicious little treat every few chapters.

BN is too full of poorly written sexual encounters for me to consider it seriously. If you want to turn it into the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter (if you know what I mean, wink wink) series, by all means, but please, start to use words and phrases besides "breathy" and "just flat does it for me". It's like LKH has been walking the line between eroticism and being too embarrassed to write what she's really "seeing" for many books now, and it's getting old.

(A side note about LKH follows, feel free to skip to the bottom for the rest of my Blood Noir review)
If you'd like your audience to start taking you seriously again, please give us back our strong, independent Anita. And please stop giving her new metaphysical powers every time she gets into a fight (which is happening less and less frequently).

As for sleeping beauty, aka Marmee, that's a WONDERFUL plot waiting to happen.. it could take the series back where it belongs and onto a whole new level.. please write it on par with the first few books, and whatever you do.. please don't have Anita hop into the sack with the zombie/vampire/lycanthrope/ghoul/etc combination I'm sure you'll turn Marmee into.
/rant.

In short, Blood Noir is either a poorly planned and written novel, or a poorly executed porn. Given LKH's penchant for backtracking in just about every previous book, you could certainly skip this one and not miss a thing. My advice? Wait for paperback, or ignore it all together.

(Oh, and to echo a previous review I had written.. when are Anita and the gang going to start dressing like it ISN'T 1987?) How many royal blue shells, or shells of any color, for that matter, does Anita own? Does anyone call stockings "hose" anymore? And we all know the litany of complaints about the way she dresses the men. Yikes.

Editorial Review:

Readers can’t get enough of the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

A favor for Jason, vampire hunter Anita Blake’s werewolf lover, puts her in the center of a fullblown scandal that threatens master-vampire Jean- Claude’s reign—and makes her a pawn in an ancient vampire queen’s new rise to power.

Bite

Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, Angela Knight, Vickie Taylor

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 53 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Book Review 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

GREAT book! I bought this book mainly for the short story by Charlaine Harris, and it was REALLY good. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and would reccomend it to anyone. It was great. I also started the story right after that one, and it seemed good too. Glad I bought this book.

Editorial Review:

A never-before-published Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter story from New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. A brand-new story from New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris, featuring the much-loved Sookie Stackhouse.

A hot new novella from USA Today bestselling author MaryJanice Davidson, set in the world of Undead and Unwed's Betsy Taylor, the newly, and reluctantly,crowned Vampire Queen.

Introduced in the collection Hot Blooded, and on the heels of the wildly successful Master of the Night, Angela Knight has created a fascinating universe of Arthurian Lore and erotic vampirsim. And a sexy original story from Vickie Taylor, a new addition to Berkley Sensation.

Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)

Frank Herbert

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1037 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This Hugo and Nebula Award winner tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Arrakis is the sole source of Melange, the "spice of spices." Melange is necessary for interstellar travel and grants psychic powers and longevity, so whoever controls it wields great influence.

The troubles begin when stewardship of Arrakis is transferred by the Emperor from the Harkonnen Noble House to House Atreides. The Harkonnens don't want to give up their privilege, though, and through sabotage and treachery they cast young Duke Paul Atreides out into the planet's harsh environment to die. There he falls in with the Fremen, a tribe of desert dwellers who become the basis of the army with which he will reclaim what's rightfully his. Paul Atreides, though, is far more than just a usurped duke. He might be the end product of a very long-term genetic experiment designed to breed a super human; he might be a messiah. His struggle is at the center of a nexus of powerful people and events, and the repercussions will be felt throughout the Imperium.

Dune is one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written, and deservedly so. The setting is elaborate and ornate, the plot labyrinthine, the adventures exciting. Five sequels follow. --Brooks Peck

Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 540 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Stranger in a Strange Land, winner of the 1962 Hugo Award, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention de facto owner of the planet Mars. With the irascible popular author Jubal Harshaw to protect him, Michael explores human morality and the meanings of love. He founds his own church, preaching free love and disseminating the psychic talents taught him by the Martians. Ultimately, he confronts the fate reserved for all messiahs.

The impact of Stranger in a Strange Land was considerable, leading many children of the 60's to set up households based on Michael's water-brother nests. Heinlein loved to pontificate through the mouths of his characters, so modern readers must be willing to overlook the occasional sour note ("Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault."). That aside, Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the master's best entertainments, provocative as he always loved to be. Can you grok it? --Brooks Peck

A Kiss of Shadows (Meredith Gentry, Book 1)

Laurell K. Hamilton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 306 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Laurell K. Hamilton revitalized vampires, werewolves, and zombies in the popular Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter books. In this new series, she updates faeries. A Kiss of Shadows introduces Merry Gentry, a.k.a. Meredith NicEssus, a faerie princess of the Unseelie Court, where politics is a blood sport. Merry, who's part sidhe (elvish), part brownie, and part human, never really fit in. She's short, not skilled in offensive magic, and mortal because of her human blood. These are real liabilities when your family, especially aunt Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, is out to kill you. Merry has been in hiding for three years, living in Los Angeles and working for the Grey Detective Agency, which specializes in "supernatural problems, magical solutions." A new case sets her against a man who uses forbidden magic to seduce fey women and drain their power. A plan to trap him goes awry and Merry's cover is blown. Now Andais knows where she is. But things have changed in Andais's court, and Merry is changing too.

Despite the selkies, brownies, goblins, and ogres in this book, it's not for children. The fey are "creatures of the senses"--and in the Unseelie court, sex and pain go together. Merry is sexually adventurous and surrounded by gorgeous, powerful males, most of whom want her badly. She's politically savvy and no coward, though she's not the warrior Anita is. Hamilton fans and readers of adult fairy tales like Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy will want to give Merry a look. --Nona Vero

Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 687 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

All I can say is.. Wow.. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is fantastic

Keeps you absorbed

I thought I was not going to like it due to the lack of action, but no way. I loved it

Anyone can read and appreciate this book

Conclusion: Buy it, you will love it

Not what it's believed to be. 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

What many people consider to the grandfather of all military science fiction is really the grandfather of political science fiction. Is that really a bad thing? Well, yes and no. One characteristic of science fiction/speculative fiction is creating a wholly new world or civilization and Heinlein did exactly that. The problem is that it is an extremely boring read. Out of 263 pages (Ace edition) only maybe fifty pages are dedicated to actual descriptions of combat and technology. The rest is a massive essay about a pseudo-democracy, pseudo-fascist, militaristic society that seems to work.

The citizens of the Federation can only gain a political voice through government services--thus also retaining full citizenship--that service being anything, you don't have to be a front line soldier or in perfect physical condition,(crippled? Deformed? You can still applied for federal service) you serve a minimum of two years and boom, you have a vote and can run for public office. The Federation's military is also all volunteer and you can back out at any moment you wish, unless you are already sealed inside a drop capsule. The character of Sergeant Ho who is missing three limps, serves as a visual reminder that Federal Services is full of risks.

Punishment is either public flogging or hanging, once a criminal takes their punishment the matter is drop and everyone will welcome you back unless you commit a capital offence. The Federation is not here to wield power(and those who wield the power must, in practices, risk their own lives before they can have any) the federation is here to protect the human races as a whole.

The controversy surrounding the book is the political overtones and themes. For a book targeted at a juvenile audience that was born just before and during the Second World War, or for the audience of any generation, political themes are not the material for a juvie book. Also the seemly pro-fascism aspects of the book seems like a slap in the face to people who spent three years trying to destroy it. Heinlein's book says "Hey, a military fascism can work if it is done correctly and here's how."

The combat and technology are only described in vague detail with the exception of the power armor. Airtight suits that amplify a soldiers overall strength and stamina, allowing a cap soldier to fight in toxic environment while carry heavier weapons. The power armor uses some form of nuclear batteries and is equip with small jests that allow the solider to "jump" very fall distances. Weapon descriptions never go beyond "rocket launcher" "Flamer" or "bomb".

This is not the book to read if you want a real rousing military adventure with things going boom and people getting their heads split in two. "The Forever War" and "Armor" will be more your cup of tea.

Editorial Review:

Juan Rico signed up with the Federal Service on a lark, but despite the hardships and rigorous training, he finds himself determined to make it as a cap trooper. In boot camp he will learn how to become a soldier, but when he graduates and war comes (as it always does for soldiers), he will learn why he is a soldier. Many consider this Hugo Award winner to be Robert Heinlein's finest work, and with good reason. Forget the battle scenes and high-tech weapons (though this novel has them)--this is Heinlein at the top of his game talking people and politics.