Books Read in May, 2022
A new month. Thus, as is my standard usage of my blog space at or near the beginning of the month, I present the listing of my May, 2022 reads.
*****
Book Reads in May, 2022
The Children of the Company by Kage Baker (r)
January/February, 2022 Reader's Digest
March, 2022 Locus
Deehabta's Song by Stephen Alder
Harpy's Flight by Megan Lindholm (r)
Bright Horizons: The Monochrome World of Emma Peel edited by Rodney Marshall
Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe
Rise of Ahrik by Nathan R. Toronto
*****
And that was my reading for May, 2022. This was a pretty good month of reading for me, both in terms of the quality of the books read and the quantity of books read. Again, it doesn't seem like I read a lot of books in May, simply because I was quite ill with allergies and some sort of bug that made my eyes hurt and rather blurry at times, not to mention the fact that I've been doing a lot of work on stuff for the Atlantis: The Second Age RPG campaigns that I'm running. The two re-reads were a lot of fun to do, as I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed both books. And while I really enjoyed Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe, it was a pretty large book to read. It was another month of getting back to reading for the joy of it, rather than reading because I was bored and had nothing better to do. Especially given how little I had read during April. Regardless, my bookcases are stacked with a pretty large To Read Queue (TRQ) still. The books I enjoyed the most were:
The Children of the Company by Kage Baker (r)
The sixth book in The Company series. Introducing Executive Facilitator General Labienus, last seen presiding over a hearing to determine the fate of tje Botanist Mendoza. Millennia of labour for his mortal masters have given him a profound contempt for humanity but failed to take away his evil sense of humour. He has become an arch-schemer, gleefully plotting the extinction of mankind and the overthrow of the Company. In a meditative mood after closing out Mendoza's file, he reviews his interesting career. He muses on his subversion in the Company black project ADONAI. He also considers Aegeus, his despised rival for power, who has discovered a useful race of mortals known as Homo sapiens umbratilis. Their unique talents may enable him to seize power instead of Labienus. So Labienus plans a double-cross that will kill two birds with one stone: He will woo away Aegeus's promising protege, the Facilitator Victor, and at the same time dispose of a ghost from his own past that has become inconvenient. Victor is an unwilling protege whose long fall from grace is the tale's second story arc. The action ranges from the dawn of time to the far future, as Labienus's shadow trails across history. The sixth novel and seventh overall in The Company series. Unlike the previous Company novels, this book is a collection of short stories rewritten and linked together with a framing device. The character that the book is framed around, Labienus, is such a despicable character that he almost makes me not like this Company book as much as I do. Fortunately, the parts with him as the main character are few, and we mostly get more glimpses into the lives of the fascinating and compelling secondary characters of the series, and glean more tidbits about what's going on with the cabals getting into place to seize power when the Silence falls in 2355. The Children of the Company sketches the characters of a variety of immortals as they go about their sometimes painful Company duties. For example, they know the 1906 earthquake is coming, and they must walk through the San Francisco of that day in full knowledge that many of the people they talk to and befriend will be dead tomorrow - and yet they cannot warn them or help them. This book really delves deeper into the moral conflicts of these immortals, their varying attitude towards the mortals they must live with and dwell among, and their attitudes towards the Company that created them. In many ways, this book is the one that sets the stage for the rest of the series, something odd to say about a sixth volume in a series, by adding depth to various characters and introducing new ones, but serves well as a stand alone "novel". The best part of this book is that author Kage Baker's got a plan here, having carefully kept track of what's come before and her story, and everything in this novel falls into place - something that could have been difficult give that it's a time travel series where both readers and authors could have gotten confused. Not the case with author Baker. That said, this book in the series is not a good starting point into The Company series, as the characters presented in the various tales are ones that the reader will have met in the earlier works in the series. That said, this book is still worth reading, as it fills in important plot elements discussed in the earlier novels. The problem is that it's not as cohesive a book as the previous novels in the series. Still, recommended.
Harpy's Flight by Megan Lindholm (r)
The first book in the Windsingers series (also called the Ki and Vandien Quartet). Harpies don't give up on blood debts. Neither do the men who serve them. A life must be given in return. Devastated by the slaughter of her family and haunted by memories of her own violent revenge, Ki rejects the comfort of her husband's gypsy people and wants only to wander in solitude as an outcast. Across mountains sheathed with ice, through the treacherous shadow of the impassable Sisters, Ki finds herself running for her life, pursued by frenzied Harpies sworn to vengeance - and by one stubborn, dark-haired man who seems intent on being part of her future. Before she started writing as Robin Hobb, Megan Lindholm wrote a good number of books under her real name, Megan Lindholm. Harpy's Flight, the first book in a four book series, was written in 1983, and while the book shows its age, it is still a remarkably good, highly enjoyable novel. I'm not going to go into details about the plot of Harpy's Flight, other than to say that the protagonist is out for revenge. Author Lindholm tells the story in this novel out of chronological order. The novel opens with the earliest part of the tale but after that, it’s mostly about Ki thinking back on events after her encounter with the Harpies while struggling to put her life back together. In the flashbacks, the story that started out about revenge and a hunt becomes a major clash of cultural differences. The origins of Ki are somewhat unexplored in this first book in the series, but Ki grew up among the Romni, a Gypsy-like people. Her husband hails from a farming community with much closer ties to the land they work and very different rituals regarding death and the loss of loved ones. The world is not as fleshed out as one would like in such a fantay novel, with the author hinting at the many sentient races that inhabit the world though only Humans and Harpies are important to this story. Revenge alone is not enough, at least for me, to carry the story, but it's Ki's arrival in the farming community and the most dubious relationship between the Humans and the Harpies that makes this novel a fascinating read and kept my attention even during this re-read. When it comes to Vandien, there's not a lot to say about him in this book. While the series is partially named after him, Ki is the main character in Harpy's Flight. He has a history of course, some of which is revealed in this novel, but his main purpose here is to make Ki think about matters she would rather avoid. He goads her several times into revealing things about herself that she'd rather not discuss, and makes her reconsider the course of her life during the length of the novel. This book marks the beginning of a somewhat complicated relationship, and starts the process in fine fashion. I highly recommend this book, but the potential reader should not go into this expecting to see the Robin Hobb style of characterisation and writing that followed starting in 1995.
Bright Horizons: The Monochrome World of Emma Peel edited by Rodney Marshall
The Avengers was a unique, genre-defying television series which blurred the traditional boundaries between "light entertainment" and disturbing drama. It was a product of the constantly evolving 1960s yet retains a timeless charm. At the crossroads between the Cathy Gale era stricture of videotape and the glossy, surreal, comic-strip world of "glorious Technicolor", the monochrome filmed Emma Peel season represents the artistic pinnacle of a show which was exported around the world and remains the only British television drama to be networked at prime time in the USA. Bright Horizons draws on the knowledge of a broad range of experts and fans of The Avengers - including scriptwriter Roger Marshall - offering critical explorations of all twenty-six "mini-films" which made up Season 4, the collective peak of an extraordinary television series. This book is the first volume in The Avengers on Film series. This book is a collection of essays and critiques that cover the twenty-six (26) episodes of the black & white fourth season of The Avengers tv series that marked the debut of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel teaming up with series' mainstay Patrick Macnee as John Steed. Most fans and critics of the series consider Season Four of The Avengers, a black-and-white season that marked the changeover from videotape to film in 1964, to be the best of the entire run, featuring stories that had a good mix of studio work as well as filming on location, but more importantly, the John Steed/Emma Peel dynamic marked a major shift in how the stories were told from this point on, and would influence the rest of the tv run of The Avengers quite drastically. There are plenty of books out there that provide episode guides to the various seasons of the tv series, but this is a book that provides a series of insightful essays, some critiques some not so much, written by a team of very knowledgeable writers. Written in a variety of styles and with varying opinions, this book is one that informs the reader, but also inspires them to look at aspects of this fascinating tv series that they might not have contemplated before. Each contributor to this book provides something unique in their essays, from Margaret J. Gordon's Freudian analysis of "Dial a Deadly Number," "Death at Bargain Prices," and "The Girl From Auntie" to James Speirs' quite risqué exploration of "A Touch of Brimstone" to character analyses of John Steed and Emma Peel by JZ Ferguson in "The Thirteenth Hole" and "Quick-Quick Slow Death" and Dan O'Shea's "The Danger Makers." My favourite essays in this book include the ones by Jaz Wiseman on "The Hour That Never Was," Rodney Marshall's "The Town of No Return," "Room Without a View," "A Surfeit of H2O," and Frank Hui's "How to Succeed at...Murder," among others. The book also includes an interesting Preface and Introduction, as well as a detailed Contributors List and a Quotations Glossary from the various episodes. Overall, this is a wonderful book for fans of The Avengers. While reading this book will spoil the enjoyment of the season's episodes if one has not seen them, it is definitely a book that I can highly recommend.
Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe
The first book in The Protectorate series. The last thing Sanda remembers is her gunship breaking up around her as her evac pod expanded, sealing her away for salvage-medics to pick up. She expected to waken in friendly hands, patched up and patched back into a new gunship. Instead, she wakes up 230 years later on an empty enemy smartship, The Light of Berossus or, as he prefers to be called, Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. But is that the full story? After all, in the vastness of space, anything is possible. The first book in The Protectorate series is a terrific space opera novel written for our modern times that, to be honest, I don't want to spoil too much for potential readers. Gunnery Sergeant Sanda Greeve wakes up on an enemy ship, alone, naked and missing a leg. The twists keep coming as she learns the ship she's on is a smartship which tells her that she's been in coldsleep for two hundred and thirty years and both her civilization of Ada Prime and the enemy civilization of Icarion have both been destroyed in the war between them. In an alternate story thread in the distant past, Sanda's brother, Biran, has just found out that Sanda has been lost in a space battle with the enemy Icarions, and he has to struggle against the Keepers of Ada Prime to mount a rescue. Finally, in the neighbouring star system of Atrux, the young criminal, Jules, stumbles across a deadly secret in the slums of the dome city that she inhabits. The story is full of plot twists, interesting characters, and a few surprises that really seem to come out of left field but are actually well set up in the book's early stages and reach fruition towards the end of the first novel. However, since this book is the first in the series, there are plenty of mysteries that have been left for the sequel(s). One element of this book that is fascinating is the the war between Ada Prime and Icarion. The war is based around the Icarion desire to get the secret of the Casimir Gates, which allow instantaneous interstellar (hyperspacial?) travel. This is one of the secrets of the Keepers of Ada Prime that Icarion wants, and they have gone to great lengths to acquire that information, as Sanda discovers on the smartship. The fact that Sanda's brother, Biran, is a relatively new Keeper adds another layer to that relationship as well. A fourth plot line, set some 3,500+ years before depicts the dawn of the Prime era, in which Alexandra Halston, the billionaire CEO of a globe-spanning corporation called Prime, creates the very first Casimir gate and starts humanity's colonization of interstellar space. These four plots are fascinating in and of themselves, but what makes the book special is the characterisation that author O'Keefe brings to her central characters. Sanda Greeve's grief and devotion to her family and that desire to find a life in the future she finds herself in is the focus of the first part of the book, while Biran's almost fanatical goal of mounting a rescue expedition to find his sister takes up the second part of the book. While Sanda, Biran, and the AI running the smartship The Light of Berossus are the three central characters, there are some other, important characters as well: Tomas Cepko, a spy who is hired by Biran to try and find Sanda and rescue her; Jules, a small-time criminal who comes across a mysterious cache of military-grade tech that puts everyone she knows in danger and connects to the other main plots whch are left mysterious and not too clear; which are mysterious and unclear; the other Keepers with whom Biran interacts, notably Lavaux, are an interesting group that present the reader with a polarised view of life among those who rule Ada Prime; and of course, Sanda and Biran's two dads, Graham and Ilan, who prove to be important in the third part of the novel. interestingly enough, the author makes a clear and consistent approach to a diverse and inclusive cast of characters. There is an explicit exposition that most of the people in both Ada Prime and Icarion can trace their heritage back to the country of Ecuador on Earth. Overall, Velocity Weapon is a terrific book with a fascinating universe, interesting history that the reader learns about piecemeal, a diverse set of characters that make the reader care about them (with two exceptions), and plots and twists that will keep the reader guessing right up to the somewhat cliffhanger of an ending. Superb space opera, but with a few elements of hard science fiction, and I highly recommend this book.
Overall, I managed to read 6 novels, 0 RPGs and RPG products, 2 magazines, 0 comics, and 0 graphic novels in May. This brings the year total in 2022 to a set of numbers that look like this: 31 books, 1 RPGs and RPG product, 6 magazines, 6 comics, and 0 graphic novels.
Anyway, thoughts and comments are always welcome. :)
*****
Book Reads in May, 2022
The Children of the Company by Kage Baker (r)
January/February, 2022 Reader's Digest
March, 2022 Locus
Deehabta's Song by Stephen Alder
Harpy's Flight by Megan Lindholm (r)
Bright Horizons: The Monochrome World of Emma Peel edited by Rodney Marshall
Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe
Rise of Ahrik by Nathan R. Toronto
*****
And that was my reading for May, 2022. This was a pretty good month of reading for me, both in terms of the quality of the books read and the quantity of books read. Again, it doesn't seem like I read a lot of books in May, simply because I was quite ill with allergies and some sort of bug that made my eyes hurt and rather blurry at times, not to mention the fact that I've been doing a lot of work on stuff for the Atlantis: The Second Age RPG campaigns that I'm running. The two re-reads were a lot of fun to do, as I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed both books. And while I really enjoyed Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe, it was a pretty large book to read. It was another month of getting back to reading for the joy of it, rather than reading because I was bored and had nothing better to do. Especially given how little I had read during April. Regardless, my bookcases are stacked with a pretty large To Read Queue (TRQ) still. The books I enjoyed the most were:
The Children of the Company by Kage Baker (r)
The sixth book in The Company series. Introducing Executive Facilitator General Labienus, last seen presiding over a hearing to determine the fate of tje Botanist Mendoza. Millennia of labour for his mortal masters have given him a profound contempt for humanity but failed to take away his evil sense of humour. He has become an arch-schemer, gleefully plotting the extinction of mankind and the overthrow of the Company. In a meditative mood after closing out Mendoza's file, he reviews his interesting career. He muses on his subversion in the Company black project ADONAI. He also considers Aegeus, his despised rival for power, who has discovered a useful race of mortals known as Homo sapiens umbratilis. Their unique talents may enable him to seize power instead of Labienus. So Labienus plans a double-cross that will kill two birds with one stone: He will woo away Aegeus's promising protege, the Facilitator Victor, and at the same time dispose of a ghost from his own past that has become inconvenient. Victor is an unwilling protege whose long fall from grace is the tale's second story arc. The action ranges from the dawn of time to the far future, as Labienus's shadow trails across history. The sixth novel and seventh overall in The Company series. Unlike the previous Company novels, this book is a collection of short stories rewritten and linked together with a framing device. The character that the book is framed around, Labienus, is such a despicable character that he almost makes me not like this Company book as much as I do. Fortunately, the parts with him as the main character are few, and we mostly get more glimpses into the lives of the fascinating and compelling secondary characters of the series, and glean more tidbits about what's going on with the cabals getting into place to seize power when the Silence falls in 2355. The Children of the Company sketches the characters of a variety of immortals as they go about their sometimes painful Company duties. For example, they know the 1906 earthquake is coming, and they must walk through the San Francisco of that day in full knowledge that many of the people they talk to and befriend will be dead tomorrow - and yet they cannot warn them or help them. This book really delves deeper into the moral conflicts of these immortals, their varying attitude towards the mortals they must live with and dwell among, and their attitudes towards the Company that created them. In many ways, this book is the one that sets the stage for the rest of the series, something odd to say about a sixth volume in a series, by adding depth to various characters and introducing new ones, but serves well as a stand alone "novel". The best part of this book is that author Kage Baker's got a plan here, having carefully kept track of what's come before and her story, and everything in this novel falls into place - something that could have been difficult give that it's a time travel series where both readers and authors could have gotten confused. Not the case with author Baker. That said, this book in the series is not a good starting point into The Company series, as the characters presented in the various tales are ones that the reader will have met in the earlier works in the series. That said, this book is still worth reading, as it fills in important plot elements discussed in the earlier novels. The problem is that it's not as cohesive a book as the previous novels in the series. Still, recommended.
Harpy's Flight by Megan Lindholm (r)
The first book in the Windsingers series (also called the Ki and Vandien Quartet). Harpies don't give up on blood debts. Neither do the men who serve them. A life must be given in return. Devastated by the slaughter of her family and haunted by memories of her own violent revenge, Ki rejects the comfort of her husband's gypsy people and wants only to wander in solitude as an outcast. Across mountains sheathed with ice, through the treacherous shadow of the impassable Sisters, Ki finds herself running for her life, pursued by frenzied Harpies sworn to vengeance - and by one stubborn, dark-haired man who seems intent on being part of her future. Before she started writing as Robin Hobb, Megan Lindholm wrote a good number of books under her real name, Megan Lindholm. Harpy's Flight, the first book in a four book series, was written in 1983, and while the book shows its age, it is still a remarkably good, highly enjoyable novel. I'm not going to go into details about the plot of Harpy's Flight, other than to say that the protagonist is out for revenge. Author Lindholm tells the story in this novel out of chronological order. The novel opens with the earliest part of the tale but after that, it’s mostly about Ki thinking back on events after her encounter with the Harpies while struggling to put her life back together. In the flashbacks, the story that started out about revenge and a hunt becomes a major clash of cultural differences. The origins of Ki are somewhat unexplored in this first book in the series, but Ki grew up among the Romni, a Gypsy-like people. Her husband hails from a farming community with much closer ties to the land they work and very different rituals regarding death and the loss of loved ones. The world is not as fleshed out as one would like in such a fantay novel, with the author hinting at the many sentient races that inhabit the world though only Humans and Harpies are important to this story. Revenge alone is not enough, at least for me, to carry the story, but it's Ki's arrival in the farming community and the most dubious relationship between the Humans and the Harpies that makes this novel a fascinating read and kept my attention even during this re-read. When it comes to Vandien, there's not a lot to say about him in this book. While the series is partially named after him, Ki is the main character in Harpy's Flight. He has a history of course, some of which is revealed in this novel, but his main purpose here is to make Ki think about matters she would rather avoid. He goads her several times into revealing things about herself that she'd rather not discuss, and makes her reconsider the course of her life during the length of the novel. This book marks the beginning of a somewhat complicated relationship, and starts the process in fine fashion. I highly recommend this book, but the potential reader should not go into this expecting to see the Robin Hobb style of characterisation and writing that followed starting in 1995.
Bright Horizons: The Monochrome World of Emma Peel edited by Rodney Marshall
The Avengers was a unique, genre-defying television series which blurred the traditional boundaries between "light entertainment" and disturbing drama. It was a product of the constantly evolving 1960s yet retains a timeless charm. At the crossroads between the Cathy Gale era stricture of videotape and the glossy, surreal, comic-strip world of "glorious Technicolor", the monochrome filmed Emma Peel season represents the artistic pinnacle of a show which was exported around the world and remains the only British television drama to be networked at prime time in the USA. Bright Horizons draws on the knowledge of a broad range of experts and fans of The Avengers - including scriptwriter Roger Marshall - offering critical explorations of all twenty-six "mini-films" which made up Season 4, the collective peak of an extraordinary television series. This book is the first volume in The Avengers on Film series. This book is a collection of essays and critiques that cover the twenty-six (26) episodes of the black & white fourth season of The Avengers tv series that marked the debut of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel teaming up with series' mainstay Patrick Macnee as John Steed. Most fans and critics of the series consider Season Four of The Avengers, a black-and-white season that marked the changeover from videotape to film in 1964, to be the best of the entire run, featuring stories that had a good mix of studio work as well as filming on location, but more importantly, the John Steed/Emma Peel dynamic marked a major shift in how the stories were told from this point on, and would influence the rest of the tv run of The Avengers quite drastically. There are plenty of books out there that provide episode guides to the various seasons of the tv series, but this is a book that provides a series of insightful essays, some critiques some not so much, written by a team of very knowledgeable writers. Written in a variety of styles and with varying opinions, this book is one that informs the reader, but also inspires them to look at aspects of this fascinating tv series that they might not have contemplated before. Each contributor to this book provides something unique in their essays, from Margaret J. Gordon's Freudian analysis of "Dial a Deadly Number," "Death at Bargain Prices," and "The Girl From Auntie" to James Speirs' quite risqué exploration of "A Touch of Brimstone" to character analyses of John Steed and Emma Peel by JZ Ferguson in "The Thirteenth Hole" and "Quick-Quick Slow Death" and Dan O'Shea's "The Danger Makers." My favourite essays in this book include the ones by Jaz Wiseman on "The Hour That Never Was," Rodney Marshall's "The Town of No Return," "Room Without a View," "A Surfeit of H2O," and Frank Hui's "How to Succeed at...Murder," among others. The book also includes an interesting Preface and Introduction, as well as a detailed Contributors List and a Quotations Glossary from the various episodes. Overall, this is a wonderful book for fans of The Avengers. While reading this book will spoil the enjoyment of the season's episodes if one has not seen them, it is definitely a book that I can highly recommend.
Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe
The first book in The Protectorate series. The last thing Sanda remembers is her gunship breaking up around her as her evac pod expanded, sealing her away for salvage-medics to pick up. She expected to waken in friendly hands, patched up and patched back into a new gunship. Instead, she wakes up 230 years later on an empty enemy smartship, The Light of Berossus or, as he prefers to be called, Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. But is that the full story? After all, in the vastness of space, anything is possible. The first book in The Protectorate series is a terrific space opera novel written for our modern times that, to be honest, I don't want to spoil too much for potential readers. Gunnery Sergeant Sanda Greeve wakes up on an enemy ship, alone, naked and missing a leg. The twists keep coming as she learns the ship she's on is a smartship which tells her that she's been in coldsleep for two hundred and thirty years and both her civilization of Ada Prime and the enemy civilization of Icarion have both been destroyed in the war between them. In an alternate story thread in the distant past, Sanda's brother, Biran, has just found out that Sanda has been lost in a space battle with the enemy Icarions, and he has to struggle against the Keepers of Ada Prime to mount a rescue. Finally, in the neighbouring star system of Atrux, the young criminal, Jules, stumbles across a deadly secret in the slums of the dome city that she inhabits. The story is full of plot twists, interesting characters, and a few surprises that really seem to come out of left field but are actually well set up in the book's early stages and reach fruition towards the end of the first novel. However, since this book is the first in the series, there are plenty of mysteries that have been left for the sequel(s). One element of this book that is fascinating is the the war between Ada Prime and Icarion. The war is based around the Icarion desire to get the secret of the Casimir Gates, which allow instantaneous interstellar (hyperspacial?) travel. This is one of the secrets of the Keepers of Ada Prime that Icarion wants, and they have gone to great lengths to acquire that information, as Sanda discovers on the smartship. The fact that Sanda's brother, Biran, is a relatively new Keeper adds another layer to that relationship as well. A fourth plot line, set some 3,500+ years before depicts the dawn of the Prime era, in which Alexandra Halston, the billionaire CEO of a globe-spanning corporation called Prime, creates the very first Casimir gate and starts humanity's colonization of interstellar space. These four plots are fascinating in and of themselves, but what makes the book special is the characterisation that author O'Keefe brings to her central characters. Sanda Greeve's grief and devotion to her family and that desire to find a life in the future she finds herself in is the focus of the first part of the book, while Biran's almost fanatical goal of mounting a rescue expedition to find his sister takes up the second part of the book. While Sanda, Biran, and the AI running the smartship The Light of Berossus are the three central characters, there are some other, important characters as well: Tomas Cepko, a spy who is hired by Biran to try and find Sanda and rescue her; Jules, a small-time criminal who comes across a mysterious cache of military-grade tech that puts everyone she knows in danger and connects to the other main plots whch are left mysterious and not too clear; which are mysterious and unclear; the other Keepers with whom Biran interacts, notably Lavaux, are an interesting group that present the reader with a polarised view of life among those who rule Ada Prime; and of course, Sanda and Biran's two dads, Graham and Ilan, who prove to be important in the third part of the novel. interestingly enough, the author makes a clear and consistent approach to a diverse and inclusive cast of characters. There is an explicit exposition that most of the people in both Ada Prime and Icarion can trace their heritage back to the country of Ecuador on Earth. Overall, Velocity Weapon is a terrific book with a fascinating universe, interesting history that the reader learns about piecemeal, a diverse set of characters that make the reader care about them (with two exceptions), and plots and twists that will keep the reader guessing right up to the somewhat cliffhanger of an ending. Superb space opera, but with a few elements of hard science fiction, and I highly recommend this book.
Overall, I managed to read 6 novels, 0 RPGs and RPG products, 2 magazines, 0 comics, and 0 graphic novels in May. This brings the year total in 2022 to a set of numbers that look like this: 31 books, 1 RPGs and RPG product, 6 magazines, 6 comics, and 0 graphic novels.
Anyway, thoughts and comments are always welcome. :)