Book review: The Neutral Stars

By Morgan and Kippax, authors of "Seed of Stars". This one is #3 (SoS was #2) and the theme of Earth-space-colonies-menaced-by-aliens continues, as does the theme of harmful mutation. The book itself is a bit disjointed, and I think doesn't work as well as SoS; to say why requires spoilers, which I'll provide, since the chances of you finding this slim tome, let alone reading it, are negligible. Goodreads isn't impressed.

The action centers around <planet>, which has been colonised and run as a great success by the mighty, and thus inevitably in this sort of book evil or at best amoral <corporation>. A fish biologist, of all people, sent out to investigate, realises that the wonderful harvests of ever-increasing salmon have been accompanied by a strong and - utterly implausibly - unnoticed dimunition in lifespace of the millions of human colonists. How they are supposed to have not noticed is beyond me, never mind, the response is that the <corporation> realises that the <bureaucrats> will order the colony abandoned. So, in order to avoid embarrassment they decide to nuke the colony and wipe out the survivors, and trust that everyone will assume it is the naughty aliens.

Meanwhile, a second plot - which doesn't get resolved in the book - has people looking for a Warp Drive, since the aliens clearly have one. Although why they don't just look for a faster FTL drive I'm not sure, since they already have one FTL drive.

In the end - which is pretty slow of them, I guessed much earlier - everyone guesses that it wasn't the naughty aliens, since last time they just used a <space ray> that turned the entire planet to slag, so why would they descend to nukes this time? And anyway one of the nukes didn't go off, and was labelled "I am a human nuke" as a clue.

In the end - and I give the book some credit, it isn't clear in advance how it was going to end, with the <corporation> evil but triumphant, or destroyed, or what - the <corporation>'s bosses daughter kills the <evil CEO> and life continues much as before. Except for the dead folk, obvs.

Side note: although the mighty Venturer Twelve and friends are nominally there to protect Earth and the colonies, it becomes clear - more in #2 than here, though here by default - that they are actually fuck all use; the only aliens they meet are so powerful that the Earth ships and weapons are useless.

Book review: Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Polish: Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie) is a science fiction stories collection by Polish author Stanisław Lem, about a spaceship pilot named Pirx, says wiki.

They are... of a type. Kinda soviet-ish; but also of the naive scifi era. When spaceships were sent out "on patrol" - why would you do that? When space had sectors. And when displays were cathode ray.

They also feel a bit tame. As though Lem wasn't really sure what he was allowed to do with the new medium, and felt obliged to not stray to far from classical ideas. The prose is often of decent quality rather than pulp rubbish, but the ideas perhaps less so.

For example the last one is something of a ghost story, transmogrified: assigned to an old refurbed ship, Pirx discovers the reactor being maintained by an old robot who is revealed to have survived the crash years ago that killed all the previous crew, slowly. For no obvious reason it starts tapping out in morse code transcripts of the crash. This unnerves Pirx who ends up rather thoughtlessly recommending scrapping the robot, thereby removing the unsettling from his life and settling for the known.

This Goodreads review is a little harsh - I would be kinder - but is substantially correct.

New Blue Montane Coat and Rab Trousers

Ellis Brigham in the Lion Yard are having a "refit sale" so I got this coat for half of its std £250; and the trousers for half their std £90. The coat weights 390 g, 110 more than my previous Rab Orange at 280 g. It is a Cetus (not the Lite); arch; officially 395 g but I see I have a "small" (accidentally; it was on a L coathanger and I failed to check. Still, it seems to fit, including over a down jacket).

What sold me on the coat was the pockets; the orange Rab only has one, and it is high. This means that when walking I can't put my hands in my pockets; or, I have to lift up the coat and put my hands in the pockets of whatever is underneath. Either is annoying, and I readily get cold hands. The new coat is slightly (but only slightly) stiffer material - which I think I only notice because the Rab is so nice and slinky. The "true mountaineering style" is high pockets so the harness doesn't get in the way, but well: I spend more time walking than with harness; and quite often put the coat over the harness anyway.

The new trousers are the same model as the previous, except they are in a women's make, which seems to mean a smaller waist. I think that's OK; for £45 it was worth an experiment. The old trous have a minor hole in one knee, as tends to happen.

Refractive lens replacement surgery

After Scotland, I finally decided that I cared enough to look at laser eye surgery. The problem is rain-on-glasses; on the summit plateau of Ben Nevis, I could barely see anything, and white snow and white cloud makes it hard to see what you can't see. This has obvious implications for safety. After some research-aka-googling, I went to talk to Optical Express, who told me I would get Refractive lens replacement surgery not lasering. This is because... natural lenses tend to start going around sixty or whenever; I forget the exact details doubtless you can find them if you care. Getting tested takes an hour and a half and involves about eight different machines, and ends with what is doubtless intended to be a reassuring video narrated by what looks like a prosperous farmer in a nice three-piece tweed suit, but is actually their CEO. Mostly, they are trying to reassure you that the chances of them miss-slicing up your eyeballs are small.

Lens replacement is more expensive; I was quoted and accepted £9590 for both. Trying to scout around for comparison is tricky, since people are shy about revealing prices. I decided to wing it and not go for two or three quotes.

The promise is that I won't need glasses afterwards. They are a touch vague about exactly how much I won't need them, but I'm reasonably confident they'll do as well as anyone, so I'm just going to suck it and see.

I thought about it for a week and could see no reason not to proceed so I did, booking my appoinment for early-April and handing over my £1k deposit. Naturally there is financing available, but I avoided that. Now I wait, having paid my £8590 balance (actually £8690, because they mistakenly added in a £100 price increase, but they have promised me the £100 back).

2026/3/31: I had my I had my videophone (Teams) chat with my eye surgeon today. All well, he answered my questions (mostly: what is the delay post-op about? Ans: mostly, letting a non-symmetrical lens settle in, so that any shocks won’t cause it to rotate). He did say they weren’t certain of getting my lenses in on time, but we’ll see (geddit?).

Book review: Blitzkrieg

By Len "Funeral in Berlin" Deighton. Newly deceased, which was the reason for me ordering and reading this tome. This one is purely historical; but anyone reading his spy novels will have noticed his interest in military history. I think the book gains somewhat by him being an amateur: he doesn't stand on academic ceremony, and has no rivals to knife. Against that there's a certain pop-y feel to some of this. Nowadays, it is nice to just be able to look up various elements, like say the battle of Sedan, if you want more details or a second opinion.

Deighton traces, well, as it says: from the rise of Hitler to the fall of Dunkirk, with the intention of studying the Blitzkrieg, by which he means the rapid German advance. He asserts - quite possibly correctly - that this is the only instance of such; for example, the fall of Poland wasn't. And so it is a uniquiely interesting event to study.

His main conclusion is, I think, that the success was a mixture of, on the German side, luck and rewards-for-preparation-and-daring; and on the Allied side a mixture of bad luck, and failure-due-to-incompetence.

The entire thing is pretty readable, especially the second half about the campaign itself, so if you're interested I recommend just reading it; I'll try to pull out some factoids here.

LD goes through Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and so on, and from a German point of view these are great successes, driven by Hitler's daring, contempt for the old order, or recklessness, depending on your viewpoint. The campaign against Belgium, Holland and France follows in the same light, so although the tactics were down to the generals, inevitably Hitler gets credit for being bold enough to go with the flow. Likely, any other leadership would not have taken the risk; perhaps better said, likely other leadership would have more correctly assessed the risk and declined it.

But none of this would have worked without the gross incompetence from the Allies; most notably the French. LD points out that they had more tanks, and more aircraft, than the Germans. On the aircraft, there's a little section: why did the Germans have air superiority? Answer, because in the very first attack, airfields were attacked. In response, the French flew planes to safety in dispersed sites, and their comms and org structure was so schlerotic that they didn't bring them back into use.

From WWI, the winners had deduced that defensive warfare was how it was going to go, having won. The losers had concluded that was a really bad way to fight and something better needed to be found. At least in this instance, they turned out to be right. As to going through the Ardennes: "everyone" knew this was impossible, and yet - says LD - in fact some low-ranking Frogs had war-gamed / tested actually doing so, and it worked; naturally this kind of upsetting fact found no favour. It was all like that.

Goodreads. Wiki.

Book review: Derai

Derai, by E.C. Tubb. #2 in the Dumarest saga, of which Toyman is #3. I love the covers of these editions. See how manly Dumarest is, with his bulging thighs.

The story... well, things happen. They make some kind of sense, perhaps, but not really. Folgone, towards the end, offers some kind of life-extension - if you look at it sideways - but bizarrely rations access to that not by money but by fighting; that's weird, obvs, but also it doesn't make the fighting public, which would be the only point of doing this stuff. Hive makes money by selling its mutated-bee products, which appear also to extend life, but only at the cost of turning you into a bloated incommunicado semi-corpse, so that isn't obviously a win.

The point of all the series is that Earl keeps wandering because he is desperate to find Earth. In this one, he is sort-of offered a kingdom, perhaps even a planet, and he still prefers the search for Earth. This is taken as a given, and is merely the answer whenever he is presented with a choice, but nonetheless it is odd: the book, and the series, never really answers why he cares so much.

Book review: Marune: Alastor 993

A "minor" Vance I think I should say; part of the Alastor "series" whose main element is Trullion: Alastor 2262. This one... is somewhat paler. We have a memory-lost protagonist who in his usual resourceful way discovers himself heir to a principality and acts to secure it; but I find the action and plot thin. Only the traditional Vance language saves it. Goodreads thinks better of it.