Ravenweb Blog

Night is the recounting of Elie Wiesel's experience when he and his family were taken from their home in Transylvania in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Unbelievably powerful and painful, Night serves as a testimonial to what happened in the camps and is one of those few books I think everyone — everyone — should read.

Sin Episodes: Emergence plays like a poor man's Half-Life 2, but that's not all bad as the game offers fun, action-packed episodic SF shooter game play. The game features by-the-numbers shooter sequences and uses the Half-Life 2 engine. Released as the first episode of the new Sin Episodes game, it takes about four to five hours to complete the single player chapter. Good graphics and a reasonable budget price make it worth checking out for those who enjoy shooters.

Zodiac is a very fun eco-thriller about hazardous industrial waste and an environmental action group that exposes polluting companies. The lead character is Sangamon Taylor, an improbable anti-hero who inhales nitrous oxide for kicks and rides around Boston Harbor on a 40-horsepower Zodiac raft, scouting for toxic sludge and other evidence of pollution. Richly set in Boston, the novel is a great ride in the tradition of a fast-paced thriller. Beyond that, it is also funny, with humorous dialogue and unconventional characters. Finally, beneath the action and the humor, the text makes its point, about the all-too-conceivable dangers of unchecked industrial pollution.

The Ghost Brigades is Scalzi's fast-paced sequel to Old Man's War. The novel follows Jared Dirac, an altered Special Forces clone of a military scientist who betrayed humankind to alien aggressors, who is created to provide insight into the original scientist's mind and strategic information for the human alliance to use against the alien enemies. Like its predecessor, The Ghost Brigades is fast and fun, and combines taut military action with moral questions about eugenics and technology. Definitely recommended.

Bait and Switch is Barbara Ehrenreich's loose follow up to her celebrated Nickel and Dimed, and is about the problems faced by unemployed white-collar Americans looking for new jobs. In this volume, Ehrenreich goes through the process of building up a resume, meeting with career coaches, attending networking events, and sending out her resume, all for the purpose of landing an executive position in the corporate workplace. I hate to say it -- because I love what Ehrenreich did with Nickel and Dimed -- but Bait and Switch is very disappointing. The text offered limited insights about the struggles of unemployed white collar workers beyond what has already been reported or published. The author's process for trying to find a job also seemed more about gathering material and padding the book than in replicating the steps a real unemployed person would take. I found myself wondering at many points in the text why the author didn't just set up a meeting with a staffing ag...

The fourth Retrieval Artist novel takes the series to Mars and an investigation to examine skeletal remains recently discovered on the red planet. The investigation soon leads to the discovery of a mass grave and complications with the resident Disty aliens, who hold long-standing and rigid beliefs that death and dead bodies cause extreme contamination. Buried Deep is another well-written soft SF novel that fans of the Retrieval Artist series will likely enjoy.

Consequences is the third novel in the Retrieval Artist series and, like its predecessors, is a cross between light speculative fiction and a police procedural thriller. The plot of this novel centers around a murder investigation in the Moon colony of Armstrong and the connections between the murder and an escalating political crisis. The novel, though well-written and a fast read, is at times weak in its character and future-world believability. This is most noticeable with the Retrieval Artist character Miles Flint, who Rusch imbues with such overwhelming computer skills that he is able to bypass any security or firewall so as to advance the plot. Despite the reservations, the novel is more fun than it is contrived, so I would recommend Consequences to fans of the Retrieval Artist series and readers interested in a fast SF thriller.

Extremes is the sequel to Rusch's The Disappeared. Like the original novel, the sequel blends speculative fiction with a police procedural, detective storyline. However, unlike the first Retrieval Artist novel, there are no aliens; the events and plot are tightly contained around an all human cast and a murder investigation at the annual Moon Marathon. Overall, the novel is weaker than The Disappeared: the lack of aliens and inter-species cultural conflict bleed the speculative world of some of the verisimilitude Rusch crafted in the introductory novel, and Miles and some of the other characters seem a little too contrived. Still, as with all Rusch novels, the writing is so good that it is transparent and the experience of reading her prose is light and relaxing. So, I would recommend Extremes to dedicated Rusch fans or those readers interested in a fast, well-written but at times contrived speculative novel.

This column was inspired by true events and the NBC television show "My Name Is Earl", and is about being delayed at the airport and the powerful influence of karma.

The Disappeared is a very good speculative fiction novel that blends nicely with a traditional police procedural, detective storyline. The plot is tight and fun, and the characters are well-drawn and interesting. And while the book doesn't extend into hard SF, the science that's there supports the story enough such that the extrapolated future feels very real and believable. I definitely recommend The Disappeared .

Old Man's War is an engaging, fun military SF novel, in the tradition of Heinlein and Haldeman. With moments of great action, believable characters, well-reasoned physics, and moral complexity, the text provides an excellent and fresh perspective of a classic SF sub-genre.

Half-Life 2: Episode One advances the Half-Life story and launches the first in a new, three-part series that leads far beyond City 17. Episode One offers a new single player experience, and is designed to be four to six hours in length. Stepping into the hazard suit of Dr. Gordon Freeman, you face the immediate repercussions of your actions in City 17 and the Citadel. Alyx Vance and her robot, Dog, will accompany you in your efforts to aid in the human resistance's desperate battle against the totalitarian alien menace of the Combine.

DeLillo's Underworld is a long, dense novel that is not for everyone but rewards those who enjoy the author's dry humor and signature vignettes. The text begins on October 4, 1951, the date when Bobby Thompson hit the home run in the ninth inning, thereby winning the pennant for the Giants against the Dodgers. This was on the same date, by coincidence, when the Russians exploded their first nuclear bomb. These two themes, baseball and the Cold War, run throughout the book as dozens of characters and hundreds of incidents intersect and nearly connect but never quite fit together. Ultimately, for me, the book didn't work. There were quite simply too many characters and too many shifts in narrative time to process for one novel. I ended up lost in the pages - in the cacophony of historical events, human emotions, and snippets of dialogs.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a sparsely beautiful novel that tells the story of two Catholic priests in New Mexico. The novel's impact is in how it is as much a story about the priests spreading their faith as it is a living marker of the historical American Southwest, that vast territory of red hills, arroyos, and unforgiving desert.

Condemned: Criminal Origins is a survival horror first-person action game that casts you in the role of a detective tracking a serial killer who is killing other serial killers. The game boasts astounding, creepy presentation, and it plays like a gritty police procedural that is more like "Seven" than "CSI". The game departs from the traditional action shooter in that more often than not you do not use firearms but instead whatever instruments you can find to engage in close quarters melee combat. Weapons include pipes, axes, crowbars, two-by-fours, and the occasional pistol or shotgun. This results in a visceral, even unsettling, game experience where the combat feels as desperate as the condemned buildings through which the story leads you. The story is well-plotted but doesn't quite deliver the revelatory moment or satisfying climax to which it builds. There's also a fair bit of repetition in the game's uniform dark and dreary levels. Overall, though,...

The Big U is an early Stephenon novel and is definitely not his best, but the text does provide an energetic and inventive satire of 80s university life. What's most interesting about the book is coming across the many rough ideas in their incipient states that Stephenson would go on to flush out in some of his later, more polished works.

The End of Oil provides a compelling analysis of the current oil and coal dominated energy industry and a stark preview of the looming energy revolution. Roberts examines all aspects of energy, from the peaking of oil reserves, to the relationship of energy resources and geopolitics, to the effect of current energy consumption on global climate, and to the political and economic challenges in transitioning from oil and coal to alternate energy sources.

Use of Weapons is set around the edges of Banks' utopian star-civilization the Culture and focuses on Cheradenine Zakalwe, an elite agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances division and a tortured soul, haunted and scarred by his past. The novel explores the layers of Zakalwe by shifting between a traditional forward timeline narrative in which Zakalwe undertakes a political stabilization mission for the Culture, and a second timeline that moves steadily backward in time, following Zakalwe's career as an agent for Special Circumstances, back to his recruitment by Special Circumstances and early war experiences, and, finally, back to his formative years. The net effect is a stellar, literate SF novel. Definitely recommended.

Go Ask Alice is a classic diary by an anonymous teen about the pressures of adolescence, drugs, and sex. The text, presented entirely as a series of diary entries, chronicles the unnamed diarist's experimentation with drugs and sex, her eventual drug addiction, and the consequent exalting highs and excruciating lows she experiences. Go Ask Alice was first published in 1971, and though there is still some question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, the continued popularity of the text indicates that it has made a profound impact on millions of readers during the more than 25 years it has been in print.

Four suicidal depressives, meaning to do themselves in, meet on the roof of Topper's House — a traditional London suicide haunt — and instead form a pact in author Nick Hornby's comic fourth novel. What follows is a narrative of the next ninety days in which the four would-be suicidals become friends (sort of) and stay involved in one another's lives. At its heart, this novel is not about suicide but what happens when you don't kill yourself, and the well-executed and thoughtful tale Hornby tells never digs too deep and simultaneously doesn't denigrate the seriousness of its characters' dilemmas.