Eich, Raymund. Take the Shilling.

Np: The Author, 2012.

I’m kind of picky about military science fiction novels because so many of them are just shoot-’em-ups with plots and characters that could as easily be set in medieval Europe or the Wild West as in the future on another planet. This one is the first in a trilogy and it’s considerably better than most — a mix of quite original social worldbuilding and universal battlefield angst. Tomas Neuman is an eighteen-year-old in a rural town on Josephine, one of the Confederated Worlds, which is at war with a rival group of planets, the Progressive Republic (known as Unity). He’s convinced himself he should enlist — with multiple motivations, as has always been the case with young men going off to war — and hopefully to get into the Space Force (which gets all the headlines). But for various reasons, he ends up in the Ground Forces as an infantryman.

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Fenian, Sean. A Line in the Stars.

Np: Fenian House Publishers, 2024.

This is the concluding volume in the “Stardock” trilogy, and it’s a lulu — definitely worth the wait for it to be published. It opens where the second volume, United Fleet, left off, and the author doesn’t do data dumps to bring you up to date, so don’t even think about trying to read this one as a standalone. Having said that, I will note that the first two books cover an enormous amount of sheer story, involving the appearance in Earth’s sky of a very powerful group of aliens, who are fugitives from an even more powerful (and dangerous) group of different aliens, and who leave behind a crucial piece of extremely important technology when they flee again. And that will change Earth forever, and it’s entirely in the hands of one man.

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Parker, K. J. Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead.

NY: Orbis, 2023.

“K. J. Parker” is actually a nom de plume of Tom Holt, and the first book I read under that name was Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, which made me an immediate full-on fan. Holt uses the name to write off-the-wall fantasy adventures, usually with a military slant and often drawing heavily on his detailed knowledge of swordplay. I’ve devoured a dozen of them now, including a couple of trilogies, and they’re always strong on dry humor, with protagonists who seldom are “heroic” in the usual sense. And they’re all a tremendous amount of fun.

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Nayes, Alan. The Guest.

Np: The Author, 2020.

This is a not-bad science fiction adventure that reminds me of an updated version of the alien invasion films produced in the 1950s. I’ve never heard of the author, but he appears to have more than a dozen previous novels out. However, the fact that all of them are self-published also means that this one would have benefited from the attentions of an experienced line editor. (There are numerous instances of the sort of overwriting and narrative redundancy and jarringly weird punctuation that one would ordinarily expect in a first novel.)

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Sagas, L. M. Cascade Failure.

NY: Tor, 2024.

This is the debut work of an author of whom I have been able to learn absolutely nothing — not even his or her full name or gender. What is obvious is the level of talent displayed in this vivid and gritty space opera. A “cascade failure” is what happens when a small part in a complex, interconnected system fails, leading to the failure of other parts, which causes the failure of even larger parts, until the whole system comes crashing down like a Jenga tower. It’s a term generally used in engineering but it can refer just as well to human social systems, and that’s the case here.

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Pressfield, Steven. A Man at Arms.

NY: Norton, 2021.

When he sticks to military history, especially of the Classical period, this author has produced some of the best novels of the past quarter-century. His first such book, Gates of Fire, is used as a textbook at the military academies. And since my own first academic field was Greek and Roman history, and since I grew up in the military and have a strong interest in the evolution of Western warfare, I’ve been a Pressfield fan all that time an have read and enjoyed every one of his historical novels. (Okay, I’ve ignored his inspirational non-fiction and his one unfortunately pathetic attempt at a futuristic thriller, though The Art of War isn’t bad.)

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Pressfield, Steven. Killing Rommel.

NY: Doubleday, 2008.

I’m an admirer of Pressfield’s five earlier books dealing with war and military life in the ancient world — but that’s where my own academic background is and I understand what’s happening perhaps better than most readers. I wasn’t sure about this one, though, which was the author’s first historical set in our own time. For one thing, the technology and strategy of World War II is vastly different from those of the ancient world. But I needn’t have been concerned. Pressfield has the rare knack of dropping strange terminology and unknown place names into the story, often without explanation, and still maintaining a crystal clear narrative.

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Heinlein, Robert A. Glory Road.

NY: Putnam, 1963.

I began reading RAH’s novels as an pre-adolescent in the early ’50s, and continued as new ones appeared or as older ones were reissued. Every decade or so then, I go back and reread many of them, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my life. Even with his sometimes florid overwriting (which is part of his charm, really) and the gentle preaching and not-so-gentle opinionating, his stories are always a romp. Published when I was in college, this is one of the better ones. and Heinlein’s only true fantasy novel.

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Urrea, Luis Alberto. Good Night, Irene.

NY: Little, Brown, 2023.

I was an Army brat, living mostly overseas in the 1950s, surrounded by men in uniform, and also some Army nurses, who had gone through the war, so I tend to approach historical fiction set during that time with a skeptical and rather judgmental eye. This story is about a group of young American women, all with something to escape from, who sign up late in 1943 with the Red Cross to run Clubmobiles in the European theater — two-and-a-half-ton trucks outfitted with coffee makers and doughnut-making machines and phonographs with loudspeakers attached. They’re there as morale-builders, taught to be as cheerful as possible, and to act, as Capt. Marjorie Miller tells them, as “sister, girl next door, mom, sweetheart” to the equally young troops they met. “You will be nothing less than home.”

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Banks, Iain M. Consider Phlebas.

London: Macmillan, 1987.

When Banks, then relatively unknown, published this first volume of what became the “Culture” series more than 35 years ago, it got a lot of enthusiastic reviews, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately, it was just too . . . busy, I guess, for me to deal with and I gave up on it after a hundred pages. There have been nine more novels in the series since then (the most recent published more than a decade ago, so I suppose it’s done) and they’ve resulted in numerous awards and an avid fan base. The books are definitely space opera, with lots of action scenes, but there’s also a great deal of highly inventive worldbuilding (in which I have a strong interest myself), but no continuing characters to speak of.

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