Book Log 25/2016 - Guy Haley: The Emperor’s Railroad – Dreaming Cities #1

A post apocalyptic novella of a journey through a land which suffered devastation and a zombie plague a thousand years ago. This is what remains. A boy, Abney, and his mother are trying to reach their cousin in Winfort after their own village has been overrun by zombies. When the postman they are travelling with is killed in an accident they are helped by a knight – Quinn – one of the legendary few remaining. Quinn is a knight of the city of Atlantis, one of the Dreaming Cities. Their perilous route is made worse by the retribution of the Angels in the dreaming cities of Pittsburgh and Columbus after the long-ago Emperor picked the wrong side in a fight between the two. Their travels take them through the kingdom of Virginia along the disintegrating tracks of the long abandoned Emperor’s Railroad, collateral damage in the Angels’ war.

Abney is the viewpoint character, an uneducated twelve year old boy with limited experience and (like many twelve year old boys, a reluctance to let his inexperience show). Dangers include brigands, the unfriendly inhabitant of Charleston, a dragon and, of course, zombies, not to mention the unfriendly inhabitants of Winfort, their destination. I was pretty relieved to find this story was only novella length. I’m not sure I found Abney a particularly interesting character to spend time with and his Virginia accent irked me (on the page). The tale is told in flashback by Abney as an old man, and it’s not linear, beginning in the middle and dropping the backstory in as we go along.

It’s a slow start but not lacking in tension, and builds up to considerable action towards the end, however I confess that I’m not overly fond of zombies, so I’m probably not in the target readership for this book. It did, however, pique my interest regarding Quinn, the knights and the ‘Dreaming Cities’ which were alluded to but not explained.

Received from Negalley in exchange for a review.

Book Log 26/2016 - Tim Lebbon: Pieces of Hate with Dead Man’s Hand

Two novellas paired in one offering: the first a gunslinger story, Dead Man’s Hand, and the second a pirate tale, Pieces of Hate, linked together by a vengeance plot and a character living through the centuries until he gets his revenge. Gabriel is the one-eyed assassin seeking vengeance on Temple a shape changing demon who slaughtered his family a thousand years ago. The family seems to be a plot device as they don’t get much page time.

It’s one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ scenarios; having wished to kill Temple without realising that Temple is a demon, Gabriel is condemned to live long enough to complete the deed, and that could be forever. The first story is set in Deadwood, in the American west - chronologically later than the second story which is set on board a pirate ship.

Gritty, bleak and gruesome, this couldn’t be described as a feelgood story and unsurprisingly Gabriel fails to kill Temple on both occasions, so there must be more to come.

Received from Negalley in exchange for a review.

Book Log 27/2016 - Sarah Hegger: The Bride Gift

A fairly straightforward historical romance set during the wars between Stephen Empress Maude. Helena of Lystanwold is married by proxy to Guy of Helston. They didn’t even meet until after the wedding day.. Guy’s motive is to  possess Lystanwold, (which he does once he’s married to Helena). Helena’s uncle’s motive in pushing for the proxy wedding is to give Helena protection from the grasping, cruel Ranulf, near neighbour with his beady eye on Lystanwold and the earldom.

Yeah, OK it’s not as if you haven’t read this story before in all its variants. Reluctant bride (tick) marries hunky knight (tick) against her will (tick) but they fall for each other regardless (tick) and he saves her from a fate worse than death / death / rampaging hoards (tick). She’s usually feisty (tick) and unforgiving (tick) but it all ends up happily ever after(tick). Having said that this kept me turning the pages. It’s a light read, but engaging.

The sexual tension is handled well and the pace is nicely done. There’s tension with Rosalind whom Helena sees as ‘the other woman’ and Helena takes a while to get over her jealousy. I like Rosalind and could have happily read something with her as the main character. Towards the end of the book, however, both Helena and Guy acquire a sudden dose of stupid and act completely out of character which annoyed me somewhat. I did feel as though they acted for the sake of plot rather than following their own character traits to their logical conclusions, but everything else worked well.

Book Log 28/2016 - Gaie Sebold: Babylon Steel

I’ve had this book on my to-be-read pile ever since it came out but somehow never managed to read it. It turns out that it was my bad luck because it’s brilliant and now I have to go and read Ms Sebold’s other books: Shanghai Sparrow and Dangerous Gifts (another Babylon Steel novel).

Babylon Steel is a high-class brothel keeper in Scalentine, a place with many portals to other planes and a mixed population of humans and other races, furred, scaled and magical.. She’s a tough cookie, revelling in sex and always ready for a fight. She’s gathered about her a family of sorts: her cook, her guards and her prostitutes, plus there’s a police chief she can rely on for a good game of chess. She prides herself on running the best brothel in town, but she’s not having a good week. Her taxes are way overdue and sher’s not sure she can pay the bill. The Vessels of Purity, a strict religious order (of men)  are protesting against brothels.

When the mysterious (and very attractive) Darask Fain offers her a job finding a missing girl, Babylon decides to take it, but there are complications.  Neither Fain nor the missing girl are quite what they seem, but neither is Babylon, and Babylon’s secret past is about to catch up with her. Babylon’s past and present are told in alternating chapters, beautifully timed so that they both come together at exactly the right time. Babylon has a thing about young girls being taken advantage of and what she’ll do to help goes beyond money.

This book has a great cast of characters and there’s never a dull moment. Babylon has the knack of making friends and her contacts across the city are introduced both as characters and as part of the world-building. From lizard men and four-breasted hermaphrodites to Police Chief Bitternut who’s a were… but a were what… this is fascinating glimpse into the world of Scalentine as Twomoon approaches – a massive conjunction that echoes across all the planes of existence.

I particularly liked Babylon’s crew. Flower, the big green troll cook, Cruel and Unusual, a pair of siblings who cater for clients with ‘special tastes’, Laney the fae and Previous, the ex-mercenary who guards the door, but doesn’t do ‘upstairs’ work.. They don’t get much page time, but they are well drawn and sympathetic, particularly Previous.

What you think is going to be the main thrust of the story isn’t actually, but it looks as though it will re-emerge in Dangerous Gifts, which I’m looking forward to reading. In the meantime I thoroughly recommend this story. Don’t leave it as long to read it as I did.

Tales of (Computer) Woe

Back up your computer. Now. Go! Do it.

Right?

Done it?

If not, why not?

Luckily something someone said a couple of weeks ago caused me to do just that because I'm generally not very good at reembering to do it. So at least (most) of my work files are pretty much backed up. Good job I did because on Friday - after being sluggish for a couple of weeks - I went to reboot my 22 month old Lenovo laptop - my main machine - and it wouldn't. Just wouldn't. Nothing I could do would persuade it to bypass the Lenovo recovery screen - and the Lenovo Recovery screen just led it in a circle back to--you guessed it--the Lenovo Recovery Screen.

So I did what any sane and sensible person does when faced with a computer problem. I yelled for Best Beloved.

BB does not claim to be a computer expert, but he's built several machines from the motherboard up, so has a lot more experience than I have when it comes to persuading misbehaving machines to toe the line, however his dire prognostication was simply: It's broken, i.e. hardware failure of some kind.

And that's when I realised that simply backing up work files isn't enough. There's a whole load of stuff on files other than in my work directories. Such as my email address book and stored emails and my passwords (heavily disguised). I have an older version of my password reminder file, but the emails and addressbook? Sadly no. I could blame Windows7 because on previous machines I've stored my email in my work directory but Win7 uses 'Libraries' and I allowed it to store my email in the default place (i.e. not in the libraries). Silly me.

So, having realised how vulnerable my whole work/work balance is with both my day jobs (the writing and the music agency) stored on one vulnerable computer with a outboard drive for backups I've been and ordered a new desktop machine. It's another Lenovo BB has one that hasn't let him down after 22 months). It runs Win7pro and it's got 16 g of memory, a 1 tb hard drive and an i7 processor - a bit of an upgrade on my laptop which has the 1 tb memory but only 8 g of memory and an i5 processor. The monster machine is available for collection on Wednesday and one we get it home, strip out all the bloatware and re-load all the essential programmes (Lotus Smart Suite, Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Scrivener) we can try loading the backup files that BB managed to drag off the horribly corrupted hard drive using an Acronis boot up disk. I'll also discover whether the large number of photographs that I scanned and sorted after the last backup need to be scanned again.

At that point I'll discover whether the email address book with twenty years' worth of contacts is viable or not amd whether I can recover my password file. Thank goodness my bank passwords are in my head not on the machine.