Examining the life of a father, husband, and geek via the media he consumes. Coffee essential, but not mandatory
...but I'll be interviewed along with Adele, who is the CEO/head honcho of Un:Bound, this Sunday (10/4) over at Temple Library Reviews. Harry Markov is the gracious proprietor who was either drugged or simply crazy enough to decide to conduct the interview, and if you head over to this link you can contribute some questions of your own, which Adele and I will answer, either in the interview proper or over the course of the week.
Squee!
Hi. I'm back from Texas and have a review up over at Un:Bound for Joe Halderman's award winning novel The Forever War. Halderman himself is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and his novel presents an honest, frank look at the life of an ordinary soldier, complete with the sense of loss and dislocation upon their return to a home that is as a foreign as the locales they fought in.
Exceprt below, link to the full review at the bottom:
Is it possible for a book to be both timely and timeless? The Forever War by Joe Halderman makes a great case for it. Halderman, a Vietnam veteran and recipient of a Purple Heart, wrote The Forever War back in 1975, fashioning a hardcore military tale from a grunt's point of view that swept all the major awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novel that year, and served as a foundation and template for what would become a growing sub-genre within science fiction.
The story focuses on William Mandela, a physicist recruited for a military task force being set up to wage war against the Taurens, a hostile alien race that due to the immense distances between stars and the quirks of relativity, no one has ever seen. The novel walks through training and deployment on distance star gates that allow for instantaneous travel for the soldiers, even as the rest of the planet goes on for years. Halderman has a gifted imagination, going into a lot of detail on the ways and means of interstellar warfare, and the new technologies he conjures up have a hard basis in science. As William trains and learns to use the equipment that will save his life, the novel talks about the real implications of fighting in a war - the acceptable losses, the importance of training above all else, and the abject fear of fighting an enemy you can't see or even identify if you could.
Read the full review over at Un:Bound here.
The story focuses on William Mandela, a physicist recruited for a military task force being set up to wage war against the Taurens, a hostile alien race that due to the immense distances between stars and the quirks of relativity, no one has ever seen. The novel walks through training and deployment on distance star gates that allow for instantaneous travel for the soldiers, even as the rest of the planet goes on for years. Halderman has a gifted imagination, going into a lot of detail on the ways and means of interstellar warfare, and the new technologies he conjures up have a hard basis in science. As William trains and learns to use the equipment that will save his life, the novel talks about the real implications of fighting in a war - the acceptable losses, the importance of training above all else, and the abject fear of fighting an enemy you can't see or even identify if you could.
If The Forever War were simply that - a war novel - it would be good, maybe even award-worthy good. But what makes it stand out among others is the use of time and relativity, and how it changes everything for both the soldiers in the field and the people at home. During the course of Mandela's first two military exercises, lasting approximately a few months for him, decades have gone by on earth, and his return home to a world he no longer knows echoes the sense of despair and alienation felt by many war veterans coming home from the front, whether it be Saigon back in the 70s or Baghdad today.
And that's what makes The Forever War special. Yes it's wrapped in the guise of a science fiction novel, and a damn good one at that, sporting the imagination, dialog, and action that mirrors efforts by some of the best writers working in similar fields today (John Scalzi springs to mind, who also wrote the introduction the the definitive version recently released), but it also eloquently speaks of the dislocation felt by many who have traveled to foreign lands, engaging in acts that may not be able to understand, only to come home to a place even more foreign than what they left. As it says on the cover, Joe Halderman has crafted an excellent and moving war novel that stands above and beyond the genre his story takes place in.
I'm away in Texas all week training for an upcoming system conversion I'll be assisting in rolling out for the "job".
I miss my family.
So enjoy this awesome collection of kisses courtesy of Boston.com's fantastic Big Picture feature.
Be back next week.
Vin and her love Elend, the new ruler of Luthadel, are trying to make the city work, but being the largest city in the Empire, coupled with the rumor of a vast treasure of atium makes it an attractive target for the greedy and evil. Soon two vast armies are camped outside their doorstep, and a third, comprised of the hideous Lord Ruler-created Koloss, are an unpredictable factor.
Sanderson spends most of The Well of Ascension fleshing out the motivations and drives of his main characters as Luthadel tries to play each side of against the other. A pervading sense of dread hangs over everything, and instead of making his heroine more heroic, he takes the smarter, harder road - he plays Vin like the unsure young girl she is. Filled with more power that anyone has ever seen, and labeled as the Heir of a new religion founded on the martyrdom of her mentor Kelsier and her own role in the destruction of the Lord Ruler, Vin is many things to many people, yet all she desires is to love Elend, and not be the tool of destruction she is forced to play if the city is to survive.
The intricate magic of Allomancy, the ability of those gifted to "burn" various metals in their body for superhuman powers, is again at the forefront of a vast imagination at play. The prophecies from the first book come back full force as well, and the ending of the book makes a complete reversal of everything we thought we knew about the nature of the mist, the mysterious Deepness that almost killed the world, and the true role the Hero of Ages plays in all of this.
Sanderson weaves all this together in a mesmerizing story that is devastating to its characters, never cheating what needs to happen, and making you leap for the next book in the series even as you're turning the last few pages of the book you're still reading.
And if THAT's not a hearty recommendation for The Well of Ascension and Brandon Sanderson in general, then I don't know what is.
Examining the life of a Father, Husband, and Geek - whatever that means in 2014. Coffee essential, but not mandatory...
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