Fragment by Warren Fahy

Sometimes what you are looking for is a story rich with literary girth, exploding with allusions and metaphors. And that is exactly what I will be looking at next, with The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume One: Threshold. However, other times what you need is a thriller that gives you monsters and explosions. Novels like Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, Meg by Steve Alten, or Arena by Matthew Reilly give you a mix of science (occasionally a very small amount, sometimes a lot), excitement, and a plot that keeps you from putting it down. Looking for something in that vein, I stumbled upon Fragment, which is new to mass market paperback.


The reality show SeaLife wants to blend science, exploration, and interpersonal conflict into a show that will capture viewers across the nation. So when the SeaLife ship Trident detects an emergency signal going off at a small and extremely isolated island, the producers think it is a dream come true. However, Henders Island is no normal island. Due to geography that keeps the entire island ecosystem contained, and its location 1400 miles from any other piece of land, Henders Island has had nearly half a billion years to explore a divergent evolutionary path, creating beasts that will test humanity’s strength, adaptability, and intelligence, if they hope to survive.

Warren Fahy’s novel was a blast. He drew in a lot of science, making the plot feel that much more possible, and explored some neat avenues and fields. Most people will likely come out of this one with a few new pieces of science trivia to wow their friends with. However, Fahy’s plot never seemed to struggle with the introduction of the science, except at the occasional lecture that was a little too convenient and long-winded to entrap realism.

The characters in the novel aren’t complex, by any means, but in this type of book, that isn’t always a terrible thing, as you can full-heartedly root for the good guys and relish the bloody deaths of the bad guys (although a very sudden romance that forms near the end seemed a little too forced and unnecessary). The plot clips along nicely, tying things together satisfyingly at the end.

This is a great pick for a summer read, and you will blow through it once you start. A very enjoyable science thriller.

9/10

Path of the Warrior by Gav Thorpe

NOTE: Path of the Warrior was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by the Black Library.


It has been a while since I last dove into the universe of Warhammer 40,000 (by my reckoning, it was on May 13th, with The Book of Blood, edited by Christian Dunn). I finally made it back, with a new novel from Gav Thorpe, Path of the Warrior, the first of his Path of the Eldar series, which is only the second novel from Black Library to be entirely from an alien perspective (the first being C.S. Goto’s The Eldar Prophecy). Intrigued, I began.

Korlandril is a sculptor of some renown on the craftworld of Alaitoc. However, when his best friend returns from a long time in space, his life takes a turn for the worse, leaving Korlandril with a rage he can’t control. Needing help, he has to turn to the one place he never wanted to go: the path of the warrior. Joining the Deadly Shadow shrine of the Striking Scorpion, Korlandril works to control his depthless rage, and to focus it on a constructive task: destroying the enemy of the elder.

This was quite easily one of the best Warhammer 40,000 novels I have read. Thorpe takes the character of Korlandril and fleshes him out fully, making him a complex character without ever turning him into an alien that is an exact mirror of humans. The aliens are alien, but complete and with their own logic that is neither better nor worse than humans, just different. His novel begins in a way that most 40k stories don’t, with a long period without war and violence, building his character as a sculptor, and while at first I was worried that this would flop, Thorpe pulled it off without a hitch, giving a deep emotional reasoning behind all of Korlandril’s actions that made the novel all the more powerful.

The exploration of the world and of the warrior system was also very well done, creating great depth without endless pontification on what each and every aspect was. The world and its culture was seamlessly woven into the plot, making it feel organic rather than stilted. The war scenes were exciting but not over the top, and they never felt thrown in simply for the sake of having a fight scene.

Thorpe’s novel has started a series of novels that I can freely say I am more excited about than anything else currently on the table in 40k. Many people bandy around Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill as the best of Black Library, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden has started to get mentioned in those circles as well, but with the publication of Path of the Warrior, it would be a travesty for Thorpe’s name to not be right up there as well.

10/10

Black Gate – Winter 2010 (Issue 14) – Part 3

NOTE: Black Gate Issue 14 was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by New Epoch Press.


After looking at the first two parts of the latest issue of Black Gate, it is time to read the final third! The novellas really took the cake for the middle section, and had me really excited about the last part of this juggernaut of a magazine. This time around, we have six short stories, two poems, the book review section, and the Knights of the Dinner Table strip.

“The Lady’s Apprentice” by Jan Stirling: This story of a once powerful lady who is now old and poor was slow paced, with a conclusion that seemed like it could have been a little more developed, but it was well-written, which helped make it more readable.

“The Wine-Dark Sea” by Isabel Pelech: An assassin hidden behind a full body mask sets out to return a woman’s son to her. Not a bad tale, it had some intriguing images, but seemed to miss a bit of the zest of “Adventures in Fantasy Literature” that I was looking for in a magazine with that line on its cover.

“On a Pale Horse” by Sylvia Volk: This story of a girl who seeks to tame a unicorn is one that just didn’t grab me, and I ended up not finishing it. I suppose horse stories aren’t quite my thing, and this one just didn’t pull off the rest of the aspects to make me keep reading.

“La Señora de Oro” by R.L. Roth: This epistolary tale of a man out seeking gold to buy his farm from the bank is very engaging, playing with some nice horror themes, and really drawing out the protagonists character. The story races to a conclusion that was plenty rewarding. A nice piece after a couple of disappointments.

“Building Character” by Tom Sneem: An entertaining tale of a character being run through a novice writer’s series of stories, this one manages to be both engaging and funny. A nice piece to build towards the end.

“Broadcaster” by Arthur Porges: This poem builds a neat image, and flows quite nicely.

“Folie and Null” by Douglas Empringham: Another tale that just seemed to flop for me. In this case, a man on the run finds a hideout that is more than it seems, but the story didn’t do much for me at all.

“Spanish Dance” by Arthur Porges: Another nice piece by Porges. He certainly captures images nicely, and is a good fit for this magazine.

The book review section is hefty, which is a nice treat. Black Gate always has a wide variety of reviews, and this issue is no disappointment, giving reviews of a large number of books from all over the genre. The reviews are well-written, and certainly are nice to get a grasp on before setting out to buy new books, as well as introducing some volumes from smaller publishers that the average reader may not have heard about.

The volume wraps up, as usual, with a Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint comic strip, in which one of the characters plans on confronting Neil Gaiman for stealing his ideas. The extra-long strip was a fun way to close such a large issue, and manages to be plenty funny.

All-in-all, the tail end of this issue was a bit of a disappointment, not giving me as many winners as I had hoped after reading the first two-thirds. However, the overall issue (please see reviews of Part 1 and Part 2 also) is a winner, giving you a lot of content, most quite good, for a decent price. Fans of fantasy are highly encouraged to grab a copy, or get a subscription, and support a magazine that is putting out some solid stories.

A Matter of Matter by L. Ron Hubbard

NOTE: A Matter of Matter was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by Galaxy Press.


I have enjoyed Galaxy Press’ rerelease of L. Ron Hubbard’s early stories in their Stories from the Golden Age series, particularly the short stories over the novellas, and so I was excited to receive another collection, this time the latest science fiction release in the series, A Matter of Matter, which contains four stories.

“A Matter of Matter”: Chuck Lambert is a little too given to flights of fancy, so when he sees an offer to buy his own planet, he goes for it without seeing the warning signs. After years of labor, Chuck is in for a surprise when he lands on Planet 19453X, his very own world, where things don’t seem to follow quite the same physical rules. Oddly, the title story for this volume is the weakest. Its playful nature didn’t work for me, the characters were flat, and the story felt more like an outline. Not bad, but not too memorable.

“The Conroy Diary”: The story of a man who set up humanity’s future in the stars by mocking it, this one gets a little too ridiculous at times, but is a fun tale with a twist that, while not a surprise like it wanted to be, is still satisfying.

“The Planet Makers”: In a future where planets can be designed according to blueprints, it is the job of people like “Sleepy” McGee to do the engineering. However, between someone set out to make the project fail, and Sleepy’s laidback nature, it doesn’t seem like the project will ever succeed. This story is quite a bit of fun. Sleepy is a fun character, and while he doesn’t show a lot of depth, you root for him to pull through, in part because you know he isn’t as out of the loop as he seems.

“The Obsolete Weapon”: The longest story of the volume, this tale follows an American soldier who slips back in time and fights in the gladiatorial arena of Rome. This one packs in the action and is a fun romp. The time travel angle is glossed over, so it may not be for those who need every plot point justified, but it is great for those who want a fun, fast, action-packed story.

This volume also contains the usual features of the series: the foreword, “Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age,” by Kevin J. Anderson, a preview of the next volume, Greed, a glossary of potentially archaic terms, the biographical “L. Ron Hubbard and American Pulp Fiction,” and a list of all of the stories to be released in the Stories from the Golden Age series.

This volume isn’t without its issues. Beyond those mentioned in the story comments above, there are two that spring immediately to mind. First, the racism found in the stories. “The Obsolete Weapon” can’t get over “the shiny black skin” of the African gladiators, and reiterates their skin color over and over. “The Planet Makers” has Barteber, the black cook, who also happens to be the only character in the story who speaks grammatically incorrect English, along with the usual phonetically-spelled mispronunciations, and who is the only character who has to call everyone “Mister [insert name]” instead of being on a first name basis.

“A Matter of Matter” sees the natives of Planet 19453X as simple savages who are only too happy to submit to Chuck Lambert’s self-proclaimed rule. He buys a planet that is already occupied and owned by the people who live there, asserts his own authority, strips the planet of its resources, takes the credit and the reward, and still claims to be the leader of his “subjects,” in what amounts to a rather despicable glamorization of a repeat of what happened in the American west between the native tribes and the European-American settlers. This in part crushed the story for me. As a fan of early pulp era work, the occasional derogatory racial remarks do come up, even among the greats of the era (e.g. H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc.), and you can try to rationalize some as being the feelings of the time, and the works as products of the time, but that works in cases with Lovecraft and Howard because they don’t frequently dominate the entirety of the story. In cases like “A Matter of Matter,” when that does happen, it just loses some of its appeal.

The second issue I would cite is the value for your money. For ten dollars, you get four stories that take up only 98 pages, and that is with separate title pages for each story, occasional illustrations (which are a nice touch, but also take up extra pages), and VERY large font size. This one won’t take long to read at all. The stories in here are fun, but for a few bucks less, you could pick up copies of The Year’s Best SF 15, The New Space Opera, Legends of the Space Marines, etc., and get far more content. If you aren’t interested in the best science fiction of 2009, space opera, or Warhammer 40,000, then obviously those volumes won’t be of interest, although there are a number of other volumes out there for the same mass market cover charge. If you are a huge fan of pulp era fiction, then you may be willing to pay the high entrance fee.

Judging solely on content, not price, the volume is fun, if short. It stars on a lower note, but picks up at the end, with “The Planet Makers” and “The Obsolete Weapon” being some of my favorite works by Hubbard that I have read so far. Fans of Stories from the Golden Age will find a lot to like in this volume, and it would be a good entry point for those just wanting to get a taste.

8/10

Flights of Eagles by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


I’ve been exploring James Blish recently, with the volume Flights of Eagles, and found a lot to my liking. Before I dive into thoughts on the four short stories contained within, I just want to remind you all that the reviews of the three novels in this collection can be found at the links below:

Welcome to Mars

Jack of Eagles

Get Out of My Sky

At the beginning of this volume, we are given an introduction by Tom Shippey that does a very nice job of placing the contents of this volume in the context of the genre as it was being produced, although it also gave a few minor plot points away, so it may be worth exploring after reading the rest of the volume, depending on personal preference. As to the stories:

“The Thing in the Attic”: Part of the same cycle of stories that includes Blish’s famed “Surface Tension,” this story features a group of people who live in the “attic,” a canopy above the forest floor. Honath is labeled a heretic, and sent to “Hell”: the forest floor. Tehre he must learn to survive if he is ever to return from his sentence. This is a solid story that is very engaging. A fun read.

“The Writing of the Rat”: A tale of interplanetary war unlike any other, this short story pulls off both a bit of action and some interesting thought, wrapped around a cryptographic clue that (while not at all integral to enjoying the story) is an intriguing puzzle in its own right.

“The Genius Heap”: A social experiment is set up with means that may not be as simple as they first seem in this tale that isn’t the strongest of the bunch, but is still fun. The ending thoughts on creativity and art as a necessity for society were surprisingly noncommittal.

“Tiger Ride” (with Damon Knight): Can too much protecting of humanity be a bad thing for them? The answer, especially to fans of science fiction, won’t be a surprise (John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular addressed this one quite well, making it the focus rather than the gimmick). The tale isn’t bad, but a little over-trodden, using a gimmick ending that didn’t add anything to the plot.

Taken as a whole, this volume was a wonderful trip through the work of an author far too important to the genre to be as close to forgotten as he now is. If you have read the classics of Blish, dig a bit deeper with this volume. If you are new to his work, this is a great place to start. Either way, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

8/10

Get Out of My Sky by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


After really liking the first two novels in Flights of Eagles, I was really looking forward to the third. As it turned out, despite being labeled a novel on the dust jacket description, it is more a novella than anything else, not clocking in at a very high word count. Regardless, I delved into Get Out of My Sky.

The planet Home has its problems: the two continents don’t get along, the rival political parties are quite truly at each others’ throats, and their world is almost completely water, not leaving much room for everyone. However, when they realize their twin planet, Rathe, which orbits with them in a binary planet orbit, is populated with another sentient race, war isn’t far off. Each feels threatened by the other, and they wind up in a stalemate of mutually assured destruction. So, when a chance for peace with Rathe offers itself, Aidregh, the First Minister of Thennen on Home, must risk the trip to the other planet if he hopes to save the future.

Blish manages to pile a lot of different story types all into one with this tale: two alien races with no humans, ESP, interplanetary struggle, mysticism. He meshes them all together quite well. What he turns out isn’t the best story in this volume (I would argue that it is “rare,” as the description states, in part because it isn’t Blish’s best work), it still is interesting. The pace is slow, and it felt like it could have taken off more than it did. This one might have worked better cut down into a short story, or fleshed out into a novel, but it just didn’t feel like it was right at this length.

However, it certainly wasn’t all bad. There were characters with plenty of potential, and an intriguing plot concept. Even the mystery brought up in the story had potential, although it went unresolved. The key problem, in my mind, was that it just tried to do too much with too little space. Cut back on some of the threads, or flesh them out. Explore them, and let them reach a conclusion. A longer novel could have been really good.

6/10

Jack of Eagles by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


One sub-genre that seemed to rise during the fifties was that of ESP and psi. While we frequently hear anything involving psychics and scream “Pseudoscience!” now, at the time it was a burgeoning area of exploration. John W. Campbell, Jr. was still a force, and his interest in just this sort of thing (he was an early backer of Dianetics, another attempt for a science of the mind, this time by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard; agree with it or disagree with it as you will, it is a historical occurrence, and very much a part of that time period’s trends and goals) meant that it popped up more and more. Classics of the genre include Slan by A. E. van Vogt (another Hubbard backer with Scientology, the continuation of Dianetics), Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man, and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. Those novels all went on to become science fiction classics. James Blish entered the fray near the forefront of the wave, with his first novel, Jack of Eagles.

Danny Caiden is about as average as you can get, working as a journalist who writes up articles about food, living by himself in a rather simple apartment. But he has a rather uncanny knack for finding things, even when there is no possible way for him to know they are there. And now he has started hearing things that haven’t happened yet, but when they finally do, he knows something is up. He approaches parapsychologists, psychic research groups, even a fraud of a medium, and embroils himself in a plot that involves the FBI, the mob, and the end of the world.

Jack of Eagles proved to be another fun adventure found in Flights of Eagles, the new James Blish collection out from NESFA Press. Like in the previous novel from this collection, Blish has the hard task of trying to overcome what may seem to be completely asinine and logic-free moments. When encountered with a bit of telekinesis, most people don’t immediately think, “By golly there must be a scientific explanation for this, and I bet it involves using a visualization of the electron cloud of every single particle that makes up the object I just moved, and then altering each ones’ subatomic structure in such a way that it causes it to lose any influence by gravity whatsoever.” Sounds ridiculous, but Blish somehow pulls it off. The novel reads very much like an action-thriller with a solid science background, rather than a pseudoscience meltdown. Blish builds Danny into a solid character (although some, like Marla, don’t get much depth). The plot twists abound, and no one is as they seem. A lark of a novel, but a fun one nevertheless.

7/10