Well, it’s not nearly that type of capability–we’re still a long way from that, but we’re moving down the path.  Today in my gizmag e-mail I got an article on the Third Space FPS gaming vest that lets you feel the gaming action.

Time marches on … sometimes faster than we want it to.

Everything should be working in the meantime, except that a few sidebar items may be missing.

David Drake has, as expected, written another enjoyable far future action story with lots of military detail featuring Lt. Daniel Leary and Officer Adele Mundy along with a cast of varying characters.

As this book begins, Daniel is promoted to Captain and sent on what should be a fairly simple mission as a sort of shakedown cruise. But things are not as they appear, which is quite usual, and Daniel is not willing to leave them as they are, and thus begins an adventure. There’s an annoying Senator, who nonetheless ends up being quite helpful. Adele and Tovera get more personality development in this one as well.

Daniel’s scope is much greater as a Captain with a cruiser as his command, but as you might expect, this just means the enemies are bigger and nastier. He still must deal with situations that are proportionally as much greater as his resources have increased.

Many series deteriorate over time. I think David Drake has nicely avoided the problem of escalation. This is another Daniel Leary story, not something even more ridiculously difficult than the last one. One can generally predict what Daniel will do, at least in outline, but that’s the nature of this sort of series. If he ceased to be Daniel Leary, what good would the series be?

I continue to strongly recommend this entire series.

The only possible adjective for this commentary is “incredible.” It is not just long (2,468 pages of text), but it is packed with useful information, well organized, with the details of the process used in coming to understand the text laid out for examination. A book can be long but not informative. This one uses its space effectively to contain useful information.

All three of these commentaries have been useful to me. Check them out!

In this mystery, Nero Wolfe finds himself under attack through one of his dearest things–his orchids. He also finds himself working outside his home, another unusual situation for him. Since much of the action takes place outside of New York City, we don’t have staples such as Detective Cramer, but we do hear about him and some of his police colleagues in the city.

My wife’s comment on reading this book was simply that this was “a good one.” Since we both like Nero Wolfe, that elevates it about the average of really good books to a place that’s much more fun. Archie Goodwin gets into quite a bit of (potential) trouble. When doesn’t he? But the ending remained somewhat of a surprise, even though in retrospect I thought I should have suspected much, much sooner than I did.

This is another good book in the Nero Wolfe series of stories.

Storm from the Shadows is a sequel to The Shadow of Saganami, and as such advances the general history in the Honorverse only a little bit beyond the end of At All Costs.

I had read some reviews that said that this book ended on a cliffhanger, but I had generally dismissed those. David Weber always leaves lots of interesting things to wonder about, which makes one wait eagerly for the next book. But I was wrong. This is, even compared to a normal Weber ending, a cliffhanger.

Many times as I read a series I get less and less enchanted with the books as I go along. It seems that authors are so anxious to keep things exciting that later books often look like science fiction as it might have been written in their science fiction universe.

In the David Weber’s case, and particularly in the Honorverse, while I think the situation has been escalating, it is not out of hand. I like the characterization, but even more importantly the development of cultures and backgrounds. If I were to have my choice in details, I probably would have had less conversations amongst the Manpower folks (or their even more secret higher-ups), but even that is well done provided one wants to really get involved in the universe as opposed to simply following a few characters for a story.

This book remains five out of five starts for me. There were a couple of earlier books in the series that weren’t quite fives in my book, but they were still very good books, and there is no doubt that I will read every book in this series, some more than once.

Storm from the Shadows follows Michelle Henke for the most part, and she is an interesting character herself. We do see some additional pieces of Aivars Terekhov, who is definitely a character worth watching, and Admiral Khumalo has a substantial role to play. We get passing glances at Abigail Hearns and several other interesting folks we have met in previous books.

There is somewhat less fleet action and a bit more politics, but in my view, that balance can shift quite a bit through the series and I’ll still be happy. I disagree with reviewers I have read who don’t like the way Weber does politics. I do think he follows some improbable tracks, given his characters and background, but he doesn’t go out of the realm of possibility and do things that look ridiculous within the universe he has created.

All in all, I think this is an exceptionally good continuation of an exceptionally good series.

The first of these is that it is not consistent with other books in the series.  Peters admits this and says she doesn’t care, which is obviously her right.  I find inconsistencies in the background of stories fairly annoying.  I like all the stories with the same character(s) to hang together.

The second is that it attempts to tie two series together, and I don’t think the series were intended to match.  For some reasons those tie-ins don’t seem to work all that well.  In this particular case, I caught on to it fairly early, and the connections are pretty obvious, but to me they don’t add anything to the story.

On the other hand, it’s written by Elizabeth Peters, after all, so it has to have something going for it.  Even though I have never liked the Vicky Bliss stories as well as the Amelia Peabody mysteries, I have always found them entertaining and fun light reading, which is obviously what they were written for.  It’s quite unfair to criticize an author for accomplishing precisely what she set out to do.

Vicky Bliss is still in love with John, and when a major artifact goes missing, he’s obviously going to be blamed somehow, especially if the crime seems particularly brilliant.  Who else could have done it?

We meet many of the old characters again and I must say I especially enjoy reading about Schmidt and his various antics.  Everything comes out OK, of course, but only at the very last minute.

So despite the two strikes, I call the book a hit, just not a home run–for me.  Others, who don’t have pet peeves about such little things, may find it a home run in entertainment.

OK, enough with the baseball metaphors already!