The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore

Moore has spun a captivating debut novel that takes place in parallel at both the end of the 19^th century and the early 21^rst. He takes details from history (Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were friends; Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, his greatest creation; and Conan Doyle was a diligent diarist but one of his volumes was discovered missing after his death) and the present (the Baker Street Irregulars is an active private society of dedicated Holmes aficionados) and blends them into a couple of mysteries with a single narrative. The Victorian thread follows Conan Doyle and Stoker on the trail of a serial killer, and the modern thread is an investigation into the murder of a prominent Sherlockian who had recently claimed to find Doyle's missing diary, which just so happens covers the time of the earlier adventure.

Chock full of trivia about Conan Doyle and Holmes this is a book clearly aimed at fans of the oeuvre but I don't think one needs to have read every Sherlock adventure to enjoy this; simply understanding and appreciating the caricature of Holmes is enough. There are actually several mysteries explored here: who was killing young suffragettes in 1900, who killed the scholar in 2010, what was written in the missing diary, and what happened to it? All these questions are answered more or less satisfactorily, although the conclusion in the Swiss Alps was a bit farfetched—is breaking and entering a public museum really that easy in this day and age? Overall I found some of the characterization (especially of the modern sections) was sacrificed for the plot throughout, but the plot held together well and rocketed from scene to scene so this wasn't the negative it could have been. An enjoyable read for both Holmes devotees and casual mystery fans.

First Sentence:

Arthur Conan Doyle curled his brow tightly and thought only of murder.

The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures, edited by Sean Wallace

As I've said before, steampunk isn't my favorite genre. When it is good it can be great, but often it isn't good at all. This collection is much the same, following the expected pattern. My favorite was Benedice Te by Jay Lake; it is an exciting tale of espionage set in the Texian Republic in 1961. Ticktock Girl by Cat Rambo was another good one, the tale of an android superhero told through memory logs. The rest were average to poor. If you are a huge fan of the genre then this book may be for you, but if not, I'd look elsewhere for entertainment.

First Sentence (from the Introduction):

What more can one say about steampunk that hasn't already been said?

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain

I like to take longer novels when I travel overseas as I haven't yet been sucked into the cult of the Nook and prefer a physical book. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court fits the bill (the edition I read clocked in at just shy of 500 pages) and having all the action set in the country to which I was traveling made it a perfect fit. I'd seen variations of this in other media—Bing Crosby's movie is probably my favorite quickly followed by the Looney Tunes version—but had never read the book. I knew the movie and especially the cartoon weren't exactly faithful to the source material going more for humor than satire, but I've always been interested in the original. While not as funny (hard to beat Bugs Bunny!) and surprisingly dark, I quite enjoyed it.

The basic plot has been rehashed by many writers since Twain's archetype (probably best by Leo Frankowski): a modern mechanic gets sent back in time to the Middle Ages and uses technology to attempt to change the world. Twain's hero, Hank Morgan, being a stereotypical American of the 19^th century despises hereditary classes like the monarchy and slavery. He also believes in his heart that science can be used to improve society; when he discovers himself suddenly in King Arthur's Britain he immediately uses his training and experience to both modernize and moralize the past. Advancement in technology used to bring about social change is clearly possible, but as Twain plots and history proves, the result is rarely predictable.

While society itself is the main antagonist, the Church is painted as the single biggest threat. People can learn and adapt, especially when the benefits of change are made plain, but religion is always happiest with the status quo—especially when that status quo keeps the Church in control. "I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought." Sadly, over a century after Twain wrote those words their truth is still evident in our culture. If we've learned anything since 1889 it is that our government can be just as smothering as religion when it comes to our natural evolution as a society.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a complex story and far from the simple children's classic I expected. On the surface is a sometimes funny tale about a man trapped in the past. Underneath that is a critical look at the way the world worked in ancient times, but below that lurks the inherent dichotomy of "the ends justify the means." Hank wants the common outlook of the people to rise above superstition and religious fervor and embrace the credo "all men are created equal," but then exploits this same superstition to gain power and control. I often found myself asking what I'd do in various situations, and not always liking the answers. If you want an enjoyable tale with humor and adventure or a deeper novel that challenges your beliefs, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court fits the bill.

First Sentence:

It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to to talk about.

11.22.63, by Stephen King

It has been a long while since I've read a Stephen King novel; I loved his early works, but after a string of disappointments with It, Needful Things, and The Dark Half I'd largely stopped reading him. I came across this just before one of my trips to the UK, and the tag on the cover caught my imagination: "The day that changed the world—11.22.63—what if you could change it back?" With the date of JFK's assassination as the title there isn't much surprise as to what the topic of the book is, and this event is one of the hotspots of alternate history so many authors have taken a run at this before. King takes a very fresh look at the time though, both in what the effects of changing the past would be and in how time travel itself might work. I quite liked the idea that the timeline would push back, resisting changes to the "natural" timeline. As readers we know how the assassination came about, so having history itself as the antagonist made for a more suspenseful read than a traditional villain.

King has his normal nods to his other books here, most visibly the town of Derry (where It took place) paying a large role and a cameo by a certain white-over-red Plymouth Fury. While he clearly deeply researched Kennedy and Dallas in the early 1960's, one notable error was the appearance of bumper stickers reading "Don't Mess With Texas" in that era; as far as I know that phrase was made famous in the mid 1980's. Overall, though, this is a very entertaining read and a welcome return to greatness for King.

First Sentence:

I have never been what you'd call a crying man.

A Matter of Time, by Glen Cook

This is a strange book, but enjoyable. Part Manchurian Candidate, part The 6th Day, and part Quantum Leap, Cook starts his novel in the 1970s but flips the point-of-view between chapters as far back as 1866 and as far forward as 2058. The pace is fairly slow, but as the pages turn and the seeming disparate events start to gel the plot becomes more and more compelling. I found the cops of 1975 a bit too willing to accept time travel as a viable solution to their murder, but otherwise the characters seemed to fit their time periods fairly well. Overall a solid if not memorable novel.

First Sentence:

Total darkness.

Directive 51, by John Barnes

The most interesting part about this book is that Directive 51 is real. Directive 51 states that in a catastrophic federal emergency the existing government can be suspended and replaced by “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President.” Barnes takes this and spins a tale around a deed heinous enough to activate the directive, and then explores the aftermath, including a venal President and a civil war. The end-of-the-world scenario is original if ridiculously far-fetched—a nanotech plague that destroys electrical conductors and rubber, fusion bombs, and moon-based weapons—but the characters are largely cartoonish, falling into broad “good” or “evil” categories. An interesting story but not compelling; Stirling handles this sort of topic much better.

First Sentence:

All the days of the modern world begin at the International Date Line, in the middle of the Pacific.

Gilligan’s Wake: A Novel, by Tom Carson

This is an amazing book, a true pop-culture smorgasbord. Seven vignettes make up this novel, one for each castaway from Gilligan’s Island. However, the characters aren’t as we remember or expect. We find Gilligan committed to the Cleaver Ward (across the hall from the Burt Ward) of a psychiatric hospital, insisting that he is Maynard G. Krebs and attended to by Dr. Kildare F. Troop. The Skipper describes his time serving in the U.S. Navy with McHale, JFK, and Nixon. Thurston Howell is a naive millionaire that gets mixed up with Alger Hiss and Communist spies; his wife Lovey a morphine-addicted lesbian paired with Daisy Buchanan. That’s when things start to get weird!

Ginger’s story (fittingly titled Hello Nurse) tells how she got into bondage porn with Bettie Page before getting thrown out of Sinatra’s house after a post-coital insult to Sammy Davis, Jr. The Professor is a narcissistic pedophile that was a part of the Manhattan Project, founded a secret society with Roy Cohn and Henry Kissinger that purposefully instigated schemes such as the Suez Canal crisis and the homeless problem, and briefly turns into Godzilla. Mary-Ann dates Jean-Luc Goddard in Paris and discovers she is not only doomed to be a perpetual virgin, but a fictional character to boot.

Subtle and not-so-subtle nods to the television series abound, such as each tale having a character or artifact named with an anagram of Gilligan, or working the word “castaway” and “minnow” into several passages. A man named John Gilbert Egan also figures into each story; at the close of the novel Mary-Ann’s imaginary roommate explains that Egan is actually the author and causes a breach in the fourth wall explaining to us, the readers, how the individual tales all knit together.

Surreal, clever, and inventive, this book was utterly fantastic.

First Sentence:

Skippertoo and get me home, I mean if you really want to hear about it.

The Execution Channel, by Ken Macleod

In a world right around the corner from ours, our leaders have seemingly stopped the pretense of serving for the greater good and use lies and torture as a matter of course. The Internet is even more prevalent than today, with many WikiLeaks-style sites, some real and some designed for misinformation. There is a cable station on every network broadcasting executions 24 hours a day, both legitimizing and making normal death as an accepted form of governing. When Scotland experiences a nuclear bombing, who can you trust?

Part Nineteen Eighty-Four and part V for Vendetta, MacLeod tells of a dark future, but not an impossible one. While clearly anti-conservative, the author neatly sidesteps being pigeonholed as a leftist by having Gore win the 2000 election and launch a pre-emptive strike on Afghanistan (partly due to bad intelligence, but possibly also as a way of driving up oil prices to stave off global warming) causing Bin Laden to become a martyr and 9/11 becomes a response to Gore’s warfare rather than coming out of the clear blue sky. Regardless of the instigating actions, people cede more and more authority to government resulting in the beginnings of a police state—clearly an allegory for what is happening in our world today. This is an angry book warning of the dangers of our current course, but also tells an entertaining story along the way.

First Sentence:

The day it happened Travis drove north.

Ghost Country, by Patrick Lee

I picked this up because the cover led me to believe this was an alternate history novel. It was in a way, but really was more of a time travel adventure pitting two factions against each other, one trying to create a particular future and one opposed. The President of the United States is of course one of the villains, and has the power to order up secret hit squads that will attack armored motorcades in the streets of Washington D.C. without any repercussion. The brains behind the operation (because of course the President will take orders from a former Peace Corps worker) doesn’t want the heroes killed because he abhors violence, but of course wipes out the population of the earth according to plan. The evil minions are equally inconsistent, noticing a few flakes of paint on the ground in once scene and then missing the fact they were walking for miles over gasoline-soaked rubber chips. I’ll admit the MacGuffin that allowed travel into the future was clever, but not much else was. Disappointing.

First Sentence:

Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Paige Campbell was thinking about the fall of Rome.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

With my political leanings tilting more towards libertarianism (or more specifically minarchism) than either of the morally bankrupt controlling political parties, it isn’t surprising that several of my friends and mentors have recommended Atlas Shrugged to me. What is surprising that it took me so long to get around to reading it! I’ve been familiar with the overarching themes of the novel for years, but didn’t understand the venom directed towards it until reading it myself. Gore Vidal described the philosophy of Atlas Shrugged as “nearly perfect in its immorality.” Whittaker Chambers called it “preposterous” and “remarkably silly,” going on to write that it “can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” My favorite quote about the book, however, comes from a blogger named John Rogers: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Atlas Shrugged explores a frighteningly plausible United States where the most original businessmen, inventors, and artists refuse to be exploited by the government and vanish from society. The political bureaucracy responds by nationalizing more and more industries, leading to a world in complete decline with its citizens growing lazy on entitlement programs. Rand argues that when people are forced to place the wants and needs of their neighbors above their own at all costs, rewards for hard work vanish and apathy becomes inevitable. “[Robin Hood] died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in. ... He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor.” In Rand’s view of socialism, the thieving poor suck the lifeblood from the productive rich, thus Robin Hood is the archetypal villain. Interestingly, Rand’s protagonists don’t try to fight the system, but instead entirely withdraw from it in a hidden community and actively attempt to speed the fall of society—the theory being that after the collapse, the concealed intelligentsia will emerge and rebuild the world.

As interesting as the subject matter of the novel is and the longevity it has enjoyed, I found the writing surprisingly juvenile and sophomoric. Rand’s characterizations are shallow and one-dimensional; the heroes are all beautiful geniuses with an unbreakable resolve while the villains are weak-willed, unhappy, and irrational. Single paragraphs often run two or three pages and individual sentences last for hundreds of words. At the climax, when the world gets the answer to the persistent question “Who is John Galt?” a single soliloquy prattles on for over 55 dense pages. Often I found myself skimming rather than reading, but don’t feel like I really missed out on anything. A more aggressive editor could easily have made the novel more accessible without compromising the message.

That said, I quite enjoyed the book. Rand’s jingoist anti-welfare, pro-entrepreneurship message sits well with me, and I often found myself cheering and booing at the appropriate times. She does an excellent job of demonstrating how socialism taken to an extreme inexorably leads to corruption, although she ignores the converse thought, that uncompromising capitalism has the same result which I also believe is true. Rand clearly favors material achievement over compassion, and if forced to pick only one I’d have to agree; I’m not a fan of every kid getting a trophy in T-ball, social promotions in school, or affirmative action in any form. However, sentiment does have its place in society—It’s a Wonderful Life remains one of my favorite movies and is a surprisingly effective counterpoint to Atlas Shrugged. In summary, while I’m not going to begin donating my time and money to the Ayn Rand Institute or evangelizing anarchy and rebellion, I do think Rand clearly gets more right than wrong here. Regardless of where your beliefs fall on the political spectrum, Atlas Shrugged asks some interesting questions you should consider.

First Sentence:

“Who is John Galt?”

Julian Comstock, by Robert Charles Wilson

One of the things I enjoy about future history is seeing how our current society changes over the years. Set in 2172, America has become a largely oligarchical theodemocratic society, with elections to confirm a hereditary President closely coupled with a strong fundamentalist religious organization named the Dominion based in Colorado Springs. While very different from what we know today, there are enough recognizable elements that the feel is more like looking through a funhouse mirror than viewing a totally alien society. “In America we’re entitled by the Constitution to worship at any church we please, as long as it’s a genuine Christian congregation and not some fraudulent or satanistic sect.” Reasons for the various transformations aren’t detailed, but climate change, depletion of the world’s oil reserve, and a few wars and revolutions are hinted to be contributing factors. The fact that there isn’t a detailed history is both maddening and tantalizing; I’d love to know more about how we got here, but have to be satisfied with scattered hints.

The story tells of the rise to public prominence of Julian “the Reformer” Comstock and the resulting fall at the hands of the Dominion for daring to make a film about the life of Charles Darwin. The book is written as an actual biography (complete with footnotes) from the point-of-view of one of the main characters, and amusingly he is portrayed as not being too bright. This allows for a lot of humor to sneak in, which of course I loved. For instance, “Waiters circulated with carts of drink and plates of small food items. Some of these^* were impaled on toothpicks. ... ^*The food items, not the waiters.” One of my favorite bits was Julian Comstock’s definition of a sport: “Any outdoor game or sport, to be a sport, ought to have three essential qualities. It should be difficult, it should be impractical, and it should be slightly silly.” Considering I’ve been debating this issue off-and-on since 1997 I found this absolutely hilarious!

The plot is mildly interesting, but to me learning about the way the world works through the characters is the fascinating part. Well written, Wilson manages to capture a wide variety of situations from politics and military maneuvers to romance and bar fights in a believable fashion with a heavy dose of humor thrown in. The ending is fairly conclusive so I don’t expect a direct sequel, but if other volumes set during earlier events mentioned in passing such as the end of the Efflorescence of Oil, the Fall of the Cities, the False Tribulation, the days of the Pious Presidents, or even how the rest of the world fared through the ages, I’d read those in a flash.

First Sentence:

In October of 2172—the year the Election show came to town—Julian Comstock and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to the Tip east of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one of his heresies.

Opening Atlantis. by Harry Turtledove

Alternate history is one of my favorite genres, and Harry Turtledove is undeniably one of the masters of this oeuvre. Sadly, Opening Atlantis didn't meet my considerable expectations. The idea is interesting: millions of years ago the eastern coast of North America from Florida to Nova Scotia broke away from the mainland and is located much further east than in our world, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Being closer to Europe this eighth continent is discovered earlier, although the British and the French still both manage to become dominant. A rich milieu in which to tell stories, but I had a difficult time staying interested here. There is a brief exploration of the island during the initial colonization, but Turtledove jumps altogether too quickly into war; he has a wealth of experience with this topic, but with such a rich backdrop it feels almost like a cop-out to devolve into a pastiche of the French and Indian War. Not a terrible book, but far below Turtledove's usual effort.

First Sentence:

Edward Radcliffe steered the St. George toward Le Croisic.

The Scourge of God, by S.M. Stirling

The second book of the series is another 500+ page brick which takes our intrepid heroes only as far as Des Moines in their trek to Nantucket. The action and adventure are still there, and I’ll pick up the third volume when it is out, but at the rate things are moving the last entry of the trilogy will either be a whirlwind or require yet another book (or trilogy!) to wrap things up. Stirling takes an unfortunate turn from science-fiction into fantasy here: the “big bad” is able to send psychic messages and mentally control others. The original appeal of this series was seeing how normal people react to massive change, but this development of magic hurts the premise. I’m definitely losing my enthrallment with this particular universe.

First Sentence:

“We’d be a lot farther east if we’d gone the southern route,” Edain Aylward Mackenzie grumbled quietly.

The Sunrise Lands, by S.M. Stirling

This novel starts a new trilogy, following the children of the leads in Dies the Fire. In the near-future all electricity and combustion has been rendered impossible forcing a devolution to near feudal times. The center of the event that caused this drastic physical change is located in Nantucket, and the younger heroes embark on a journey there starting from Oregon. The plot is a well-worn quest across a savage country, being pursued by minions of an over-arching evil. For an action-filled ~500 pages, the travel is quite slow; the team only gets as far as Idaho in this volume. I didn’t enjoy this as much as the earlier series of books, but getting to see more of the post-Armageddon world keeps me interested.

First Sentence:

Ingolf Vogeler slapped his horse affectionately on the neck; he felt a little better now that the rain had stopped, even though it was the tag end of a chilly October day with a ragged sky the color of damp raw wool rolling in from the west.

The Valley-Westside War, by Harry Turtledove

Another book in the Crosstime Traffic series, and better than either of the other two I’ve read. The alternate earth here differs in there was a nuclear war in 1967, and now 130 years later California is split into city-states around former neighborhoods. 1967 was recent enough so technology is known in an historical sense, although virtually none of it exists in the present day; this knowledge makes for a dicey time when the time travel chamber is discovered by the locals.

The reason this book is ahead of the others is nobody is really portrayed as stupid just because they are uneducated. Instead of being labeled as “magic” or “witchcraft” when discovered, the electric lights, refrigerator, and voice-activated locks are recognized for what they are. Grasping the concept of time-travel as a reality not only happens but is seen as a reasonable explanation for the existence of tech that can’t possibly exist anymore. There is even a small bit of philosophy thrown in: “What was the difference between superstition and religion generally? ... So far, most of what they said boiled down to What I believe is religion, and what those foolish people over there believe is superstition.” Sadly this examination isn’t advanced any further, because it was the most interesting section of the book. A young adult target audience is made evident with the linear plot and one-dimensional characters, but alternate history always fascinates me and I don’t regret picking this up.

First Sentence:

As Dan neared the top of the Sepulveda Pass, he saw the barricade the Westside had built across the 405.

Farthing, by Jo Walton

Imagine a world where England made peace with Nazi Germany after the Battle of Dunkirk and World War II never really happened. Hilter overtook all of continental Europe and got into a prolonged war with Stalin, still going strong in the 1949 of the book. Against this setting we find a murder of a senior Parliment official in the opening pages. There are two voices telling the story, with each chapter flipping between them. Lucy Khan, a member of the Peerage disgraced by marrying a Jew, and Inspector Carmichael, a lowborn detective at Scotland Yard. While ostensibly only one story, each character is actually telling a slightly different one: Carmichael goes about solving the mystery, but Khan is really describing the slide of England into fascism. The characterization was weak, with most people falling into one of three categories: good, evil, or stupid. This made the whodunnit aspect fairly straightforward; I thought it was obvious what happened only a few chapters in. The politics are what makes the book interesting, however, and are presented in such a fashion that a fascist Britain becomes a very believable thing.

One throw-away line that made me smile was when it was mentioned that Guy Philby became junior minister at the Foreign Office. The name Guy Philby is a mashup of Guy Burgess and Kim Philby of the Cambridge Five, the most successful espionage ring ever uncovered. Walton also refers to the famous “scientifiction” book Nineteen Seventy-Four; ironically it was purchased as a gift for the framed suspect to take his mind off the situation. If the content was similar to our Nineteen Eighty-Four then I suspect it won’t be much of a distraction!

Overall I enjoyed the book, although it was a bit heavy-handed in places. The ending was really good, however, with the author not taking the easy way out by granting the protagonists happy endings and having the villains exposed. Instead, we get a more realistic yet disturbing finish, setting up the next book in the series.

First Sentence:

It started when David came in from the lawn absolutely furious.

Myths for the Modern Age, edited by Win Scott Eckert

Philip José Farmer believes that the meteor which landed near a small village in England in 1795 irradiated roughly eighteen people and changed their genetic makeup. These mutated genes were passed on to their descendants, many of whom became extraordinary individuals. These amazing people have been the real-world models for some of the most popular fictional characters through the years, such as Sherlock Holmes, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Allan Quatermain, and James Bond. Myths for the Modern Age is a collection of faux-scholarly essays exploring this concept.

As with many anthologies, the various authors here are hit and miss with their efforts. The Arms of Tarzan by Farmer goes into excruciating detail about the coat of arms of Lord Greystoke, better known as Tarzan; this is easily the least interesting essay in the collection. Brad Mengel’s Watching the Detectives was my favorite, where we learn that Simon Templar, Lara Croft, Ellery Queen, Barnaby Jones, Archie Goodwin, and Robert Goren are all descendants of Sherlock Holmes. He also postulates that Holmes nemesis Moriarty had well-known offspring, such as “Howling Mad” Murdock, better known as the helicopter pilot for the commando unit known as the A-Team. “Intriguingly, the leader of the A-Team, John ‘Hannibal’ Smith, is the great-nephew of Sherlock Holmes making this perhaps the first time that a member of the Holmes family and a member of the Moriarty family worked together.” Connections like this make this concept a lot of fun!

At nearly 400 pages, this can be a long read—especially for the less interesting chapters. There is an excellent set of endnotes throughout the essays that give sources and hints as to who some of the more obscure characters are (Lew Archer, anyone?) but somewhere in the 200’s the numbers get out of sync, with the text and the reference mismatched; this led to quite a bit of confusion for me until I realized what had happened. All in all, I was disappointed by this book. The idea of a shared genealogy crossing fictional boundaries I love, but feel it fell short of its potential here. If you are a die-hard lover of conspiracy and literary humor then pick this up, but otherwise just go spend some time on Thom Holbrook’s crossover site.

First Sentence (from the introduction):

The Wold Newton Family is a group of heroic and villainous literary figures that science fiction author Philip José Farmer postulated belonged to the same genetic family.

The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks

Written with a deadly serious tone, this parody of a survival guide tells us both the history of zombies and how to protect ourselves against them. Zombie myths, attack and defense strategies, and how to make a life in a world overrun by the undead are all covered in humorous detail: “Unfortunately for our society but fortunately for a zombie siege, inner-city schools have taken on a fortress-like atmosphere.” Good stuff. The first two-thirds are a bit plodding at times, but it closes with a bang, giving a list of recorded zombie attacks through history; from 60,000 B.C. to current times, over 50 different incidents are detailed. A couple of my favorites show Hadrian’s Wall was created to prevent the spread of zombies from Scotland and Sir Walter Raleigh’s missing Roanoke Colony was actually eradicated by the living dead. Clearly this is a 250+ page advertisement for Brooks’ novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War but I still found it enjoyable.

First Sentence:

What is a zombie?

Alternate Tyrants, edited by Mike Resnick

This collection of short stories took an alternate history look at prominent figures and paths they might have taken. Mandela establishing white homelands, MacArthur as Emperor of Japan, Pierre Elliott Trudeau restricting Canadian civil rights instead of advancing them, and in separate stories both Capone and Elvis as tyrannical presidents. A Stable Relationship by Lawrence Schimel was the strangest of the bunch, depicting Mike Resnick (the editor) as a despotic father-in-law. My favorite was The Sword in the Stone by Michelle Sagara; it is set in the near future where Prince William takes the throne and restores power to the monarchy in England. Good stuff.

First Sentence (From the introduction):

Welcome to the fifth book in our Alternate anthology series.

1635: The Cannon Law, by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

A direct sequel to 1634: The Galileo Affair this book is more of the same recipe. The introduction of 20th century beliefs to the Catholic Church of the 17th century is causing wide discord, to the point of Spanish cardinals trying to impeach the Pope and causing a religious civil war. The action was quick and the characters were likable (especially Don Vincente and Ruy Sanchez) if a bit one-note in their behavior. The biggest drawback was that the book just stops; clearly another book (something like 1636: The Barberini Strike Back I’m sure) will be issued, but there aren’t enough loose ends wrapped up to have a satisfying conclusion to this volume. Flint sharing authorship of the Assiti Shards books have led to an amazingly rich universe of stories, but this one felt like the last third was missing. What is there is enjoyable, though; I’ll continue to read these as they appear.

First Sentence:

Don Vincente Jose-Maria Castro y Papas, Captain in His Most Catholic Majesty’s Army in the Two Sicilies, tried sneering at the stack of paperwork and the book and ledgers of the company he commanded.