Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

"Cop haunted by his past pursues a murderous gang on the Martian frontier. ..."

Revisado: 11-12-24

"Delaying his departure, a cop who's struggled to toe the line between justice and vigilantism is persuaded to run a manhunt for the men who raped and killed the local administrator's teenage daughter".

Is how I'd write the blurb for this novel. I'm giving it 5 stars because honestly, I'd feel bad to rate a novel by an upstart author as anything less given the importance of reviews these days.

But for someone who gave this novel a chance due to loving the Mars Trilogy by KSR, I think the "hard science fiction" in the blurb is entirely unwarranted and inaccurate.

This novel can stand on its own merits, but aside from some small technology-specific details (e.g. an entire habitat's population being killed by depressurization) there's really nothing here sciencce-wise aside the incidental setting that could just as well be an old-school story of a manhunt on horseback on the western frontier.

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I liked the first book, this sequel's terrible

Revisado: 09-08-23

I liked the first book, but in this sequel the author's laid a trap for himself that makes for an uninteresting story:

As he's discussing a real tribe of Indians at the time of their downfall he needs to make a choice between historical accuracy, and making the life of the previous protagonist (Dunbar) obscure to history.

The result is a novel that's really just a fictionalization of Commanche downfall in general, while omitting anything which could build upon the events of the first book in a meaningful way.

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This series has lost its way

Revisado: 06-28-21

Having followed it from the beginning this series has gone from a smart "guy who learned from zombie movies surviving the apocalypse", to repetitive come and go baddies, and the plot being driven forward by the stupidity of the protagonists.

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Read this after "Skunk Works", didn't disappoint

Revisado: 02-27-20

The only low points are where the author starts covering details of his personal life that are entirely unrelated to aviation history. I don't really care to hear his justifications for remarrying a month after his wife's death.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

To detailed for a general space-loving audience

Revisado: 02-11-20

I struggled to finish this book because the author is on a mission to exhaustively described what seems like every mixture of rocket propellant ever devised, when a summary such as "and then they tried numerous other hydroxide mixtures, none of whom worked". Sometimes specific mixtures are accompanied by an interesting story, but most often they're not.

So I'm hesitant to give this book a 2 star review, but I think this'll be useful to other readers who are looking for a book closer to "Skunk Works", whereas this book mostly amounts to information budding space programs would be better off having in a giant Excel sheet of attempted propellant mixtures.

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Average, really needs a professional narrator,

Revisado: 10-07-19

It's great when certain authors narrate their own works, as you can really feel their enthusiasm for the subject, but boy is this not one of those cases. Bryson manages to sound monotone, unexcited and borderline out of breath throughout.

I've read many of Bryson's earlier books, this is the third one of his that I've read with a scientific theme read after "A Short History..." and "At Home". He's still not quite capturing what made "A Short History..." great. This book's a mixture of scientific fact, anecdotes and personal observations.

Sometimes there's a great mix of those, but more often than not the science suffers because too much time is taken on some personal observation or anecdote that that isn't all that interesting, or some other mixture of the three.

Finally, for a book that's partly trying to explain a technical subject it contains an infuriating mismatch of differing systems of units of measure. Sometimes Bryson will refer to length in feet, or meters, or weight in kilos, pounds or stones, he might provide conversions, or he might not. Unless you're comfortable in metric, imperial and the UK's various quaint units of measure you'll find yourself pausing to do the conversions yourself.

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esto le resultó útil a 15 personas

Improved audio v.s. book 1, needs better editing..

Revisado: 04-29-19

As short as this book is it feels somewhat long-winded. A lot of the narration feels tiresome and doesn't progress the story much.

I'll probably still get book #3 when it comes out just due to the sunk cost of having read #2 now and wanting to find out how it (presumably) ends.

The author is still in bad need of an editor. Maybe it's just me, but at some point I started keeping an internal count of how often character reactions or described purely by describing their physical eye movements, it gets really repetitive. Same for various phrase that get used again and again, e.g. Cole "did a double take" at least 10 times in this book.

The narration is improved. At least they have the two characters read their own lines now, but RC Bray is still the only "story" narrator, even for chapters from the other main character's perspective, seems like a production issue they should have gotten right.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Good story, repetitive prose

Revisado: 04-14-19

I'll get the next book, but the author really needs a new editor. If I'll hear the phrase "pregnant pause" one more time..., the author also overuses descriptors (adjectives etc.) in a way that gets tiresome and doesn't contribute to the story.

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A product of its time, but still great

Revisado: 03-16-19

I read the book with some trepidation after having read some negative view about Shirer's theories about German historical determinism and supposed anti-gay comments in the book expecting that this book might be drenched in its author's opinions and American prudish views of the 60s.

But while those criticisms are justified, to judge the book on that basis is losing the forest for the trees. There's maybe a grand total of 10 pages in this book that have anything of the sort. Most of it is a succinct and engaging telling of the life of Hitler & the Third Reich.

So I highly recommend it with one caveat which shouldn't be read as a critique but an explanation. This is not a good book to read for someone interested in say the wartime economic production or the details of military engagements. There's certainly some of that, but it's left at big picture things like Nazi Germany's desire for grain, oil etc., or whether an army was encircled as part of some general strategic blunder.

What this book does focus on and does well is on the people who rose to power in the Third Reich, and their motivations, quarrels and palace intrigues. Of course any book providing a general overview is never going to be able to go into too much detail, but it's still possible for it to be selective in what it covers. This work tends to cover personal motivations, political power struggles etc. at the expense of other big picture topics like military tactics and economics.

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Great book, a bit disappointed in the narration

Revisado: 01-16-19

I found the narrator too dry for what was supposed to be a more humorous book, and he mispronounced many technical terms, e.g. "sysop". I also with the chapter of the book was just narration like the rest instead of having corny background music.

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