Meh Doux Blarg – The Reading

Being a bit under the weather is a fine time to do some reading – between naps and old-people stuff – and so far have finished Bobbi’s  I Work On A Starship and then went on to Jim’s The Grey Man: Vignettes (Volume 1)  and after that (yesterday) finished Marko’s Terms of Enlistment before getting into Bill’s humongous tome, Lightning Fall: A Novel of Disaster – really all very well and seriously done works.
Bobbie get’s props for Space Nazis (!) and the very early years of Star-flight (had me going back to The Old Negro Space Program, almost) in such a detailed technical way that even the door-latched close with a realistic clang that even The USOS Seaview never had.  I’m glad to say I have met two out of four of the writers, and hope to meet the rest sometime in a gun-fun situation.

Jim get’s props for being and knowing Real Americans as it were – and the Heart of Texas, plus some double-good take-down scenes as his Gray Man yarn goes from the dusty back-country to the high seas to political with romance and sniper-work thrown in for good measure, “Sling UP!”

Marko‘s works takes us through two military services, and then off-planet away from a dystopian soylent-green scenario to the siege of a space-colony under duress by alien weather-makers…

And Bill is quintessentially Bill – and good at it, weaving together multiple character POV’s, both good-guys and bad-guys and greasy politicians and people in-between, in a Tale of Destruction, as the US sags and collapses under the weight of a terrorist EMP attack. Only *I* have to get over the Beretta Tomcat, but/since he’s worked it well into the plot – and also I’m only on page 139.