C Gockel Writes

Spinning Silver Book Review

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Spinning Silver

Available at Amazon US, Amazon CA, Amazon UK, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, iBooks, and GooglePlay.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik is the second in a wonderful series, though I read it first and had no trouble jumping right in. This book is lush in its descriptions and emotions. There is plenty of love—of the friendship variety, of child to parent and parent to child, and even romance. 

This is a story is a take on Rumplestilskin, but in it the heroine Miryem owes nothing to a dwarf. She is the daughter of a money lender who is too kind for his own good. She goes about collecting on her father’s debtors to keep her family from starving. Lenders of money are seldom the heroes, but there is ethically lending  and unethical lending. (There is ethical denying of money—it is wrong to lend money to someone you know will never be able to pay it back.) Her family does spread their wealth around, and is good to those who work for them, treating them as family.

I loved the heroine. She is shrewd and hard when she needs to be, but her coldness is directed at those who deserve it. She is also brave…but not unflawed. In a moment of pride in an enchanted forest she boasts about being able to turn silver to gold, catching the interest of the forest’s powerful fae.

This isn’t just Miryem’s tale. It spins in the tale of a princess and a shepherdess. It’s really full and rich, and I highly recommend it.

Available at Amazon US, Amazon CA, Amazon UK, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, iBooks, and GooglePlay.

Book Review: Medusa Uploaded

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When I explained the plot of this book to my husband and showed him the cover he said, “The book should be called Snakes on a Mainframe!”

That would be funnier. The book is a little darker than that title might lead people to believe. Or maybe not—I hesitate to admit it, but I’ve never seen Snakes on a Plane. Maybe a lot of people die?

A good book tells a story that keeps you turning pages. This does that with some super clever back-and-forth in time. As the book moves along, the main character grows and becomes funnier, too. Or more wry.

One of the things a good sci-fi book does is explore the future in a way that contributes to the collective consciousness of naked ape brains. (And perhaps the brains of cats inhabited by The One…you know some are possessed!) Sci-fi gets us ready for what may happen. Good sci-fi also let’s us talk about things that are happening now in a way that is more engaging.

This book does both of those things. An “Executive Class” rules a generation ship headed for a planet in the Goldilocks Zone of Charon. The Executives see themselves as better than the other classes in all ways. They live in splendor, while the “worms” and techs and others are banished to dark tunnels beneath the warm inner core of the ship. They are an incestuous lot, the Executives, and, despite their imagined superiority there is a lot they do not know…and a revolution brewing. The revolutionaries have copied the tactics of the Executive class, too, and those tactics are brutal.

The book did make me think a lot about how on Earth, we can always flee. On the generation ships of the future (I’m going to be optimistic here and believe we’ll have them) there will be nowhere to run.

I recommend this book for anyone who likes sci-fi, whether it is the Ursula LeGuinn sort, or more of the pew-pew sort. There is plenty of action and drama to carry the book along—although, I don’t think there were any pew-pews. Just tentacles.

Get it Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, or GooglePlay.

I haven’t read it yet, but I have already gotten the sequel, Medusa in the Graveyard.

The “Lost Email”

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This email disappeared when my new email sender went on the fritz. I’ve posted it here for posterity.

Android General 1. Archangel Seven.

A Name Change and Two Bits of Good News

So, it turns out that the word “Droid” is trademarked by Lucasfilm, and they protect their trademarks fiercely. A friend pointed it out on Facebook when I mentioned progress on my next book, which at that time was a name that could have gotten me into serious trouble.   You may say to yourself, “Was Star Wars really where the term ‘droid’ originated?” No. It originated in a short story by Mari Wolf titled Robots of the World! Arise! written in 1952. But to the one with the most expensive lawyers go the spoils.  (Jokes about evil empires practically write themselves here.)   I had to go back through Darkness Rising and The Defiant and change all instances of the word. I also had to do an emergency cover modification Book 7. I hope at most I only get a cease and desist. I have ceased and desisted, but some of you may be looking for a different title for book seven. Archangel Project Book Seven is now Android General 1. 

Let’s move onto some good news. The Defiant broke even less than two weeks after release! I hope you enjoyed it. I loved writing 6T9, Volka, and Carl of course, but I also loved writing Alexis’s tricky mind–the tricks it plays are mostly on her, of course. She is so clever, but also so broken. I know a few readers have written to tell me that they are now rooting for Alexis and Alaric, and I’m glad of that. 

I love writing–and probably always will–but I could not continue to publish without fans buying my work. I appreciate your support, and am honored that you want to spend time in my day dreams.

I am almost done with the rough draft of Android General 1. I have just a little bit of the last two scenes to write, and then I have to wade through the rewrites. I actually like cleaning up the rough draft–finding plot holes, figuring how to fix them, and expounding on things that should be clearer. That part is a fun puzzle. It’s the comma catching that I do not like. I do not like it at all. 

Starship Waking

More good news! Starship Waking has 35 Reviews

Reviews on Starship are especially important because it is a series starter. At a certain number of reviews, the big advertisers start paying attention. If you review just one book, reviewing this would be the most helpful. 

If you could leave a note at Amazon US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, or GooglePlay it would be most appreciated. Audible reviews are great, too!

Thank you so much to everyone who has read it and reviewed it already! 

All the Other Stuff 

I am almost done with the rough draft of Android General 1. I have just a little bit of the last two scenes to write, and then I have to wade through the rewrites. I actually like cleaning up the rough draft–finding plot holes, figuring how to fix them, and expounding on things that should be clearer. That part is a fun puzzle. It’s the comma catching that I do not like. I do not like it at all. 

Internet Memes are Stupid … the love story of Hannah and Martin Van Buren

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Martin Van Buren, 8th president of the United States wrote an 800 page autobiography, but didn’t mention his wife even once.

Ah, yes, ye Olde Misogyny, but was it really?

Hannah and Martin Van Buren were born in the same tiny community of Kinderhook, New York. They were, in fact, cousins, but they didn’t know then about genetics and the dangers of inbreeding. As cousins, they probably knew each other almost from the time of Hannah’s birth–a year after Martin’s. According to accounts by their contemporaries, they fell in love as children.

By the time he was fourteen, Martin had said he would marry Hannah but couldn’t until he had a way to support her. Martin was of modest means. His father was a farmer and tavern keeper with eight children and a wife to support. Martin left school at 14 and accepted the only gift his father could procure for him through his tavern connection: a job as a law clerk in far off New York City.

Law Clerk perhaps sounds more important than it was. He was an apprentice and basically a go-fer: he swept up the office and kept it clean, delivered messages, and filed papers. It paid next to nothing, but it gave him access to books of law. By night Martin hit those books. It took seven years, but by the time he was 21 Martin had passed the bar.

He could have stayed in New York, instead he went back to Kinderhook. and Hannah. He still had no money, but was able to open up a law firm with his half brother. They distinguished themselves by representing poor clients.

It took four more years to build up the business. He didn’t marry Hannah until she was 24 and he was 25–a little more than a decade after he had declared his intentions. Either one of them might have married someone else in the meantime, and certainly Martin, after establishing his firm, could have married someone else.

Hannah Van Buren

As Martin rose in prominence, Hannah hosted dinner parties for clients and contacts. She was sociable and lively, and their guests described their marriage as a happy one. Hannah and Martin were both of Dutch descent, and in fact, Dutch was Hannah’s first language. She never lost her Dutch accent. In public, Martin referred to her by a nickname he’d given her: “Jannetje”–Dutch for Hannah.

Despite being a woman of means, Hannah, like Martin, believed in service to the poor. Through her church she participated in many charitable causes, and was known for actually going to the homes of the poor and mingling with them. This wasn’t done by the other fashionable ladies at the time.

Together they had six children, though one died. It was during her pregnancy with the last that Hannah contracted tuberculosis. She managed to deliver the baby successfully, but the pregnancy and delivery weakened her. She died at the age of 35–18 years before Mr. Van Buren became President Van Buren.

It was fashionable at the time for pallbearers to be bought matching scarves. Mrs. Van Buren had requested that the money for those scarves be donated to charity to help the poor. Mr. Van Buren honored her dying request…

…And then he never mentioned her name again. Not to his children, not in his autobiography. When his son wanted to name a daughter after his mother, he had to confirm his mother’s name–perhaps because he remembered his father referring to her as Jannetje, yet the tombstone saying she was Hannah.

Martin also never remarried.

Van Buren built his entire early career around his Jannetje. They had shared convictions, and were in each other’s lives 35 years.

At the time they married, the woman’s vows included the words, “obey.” Did he blame himself for her death? Did he wonder over and over if he had just put his foot down and made her stop her charitable adventures she would she not have contracted TB? (TB loves the overcrowded, grimy, malnourished conditions of poverty. And it is often contracted by people who have weakened immune systems–who suffer from diseases like HIV, or malnutrition, or are pregnant.)

We can only speculate, but it seems he never recovered from her death.

An Excerpt from The Defiant. Archangel Project. Book 6

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They walked down the same road on the edge of No Weere they’d taken the day before, but Volka was no longer animated and chatty. He almost wished she’d point out a reservoir of diphtheria, cholera, or typhus that she’d played in, just to end the silence. She began falling behind, and he looked over his shoulder, expecting to see her exhausted and flagging. Instead her eyes were bright, her ears were forward, and her body was bent low.

He stopped. “You’re stalking me.”

Three point three meters behind him, Volka straightened. “I was not.” The rain had soaked her through, and he could see every outline of her body. The chill, the rush of hormones or both was giving her “hardware malfunctions.” His core programming insisted he help with the issue. His Q-comm screamed it was a bad idea.

Volka’s ears flattened sideways. “I was stalking you,” she admitted. “I’m so sorry, Sixty.”

“Never appologize to a sex ‘bot for stalking them,” 6T9 said. He meant to be flip, but the words came out heavy and serious.

Her amber eyes met his. “But you’re more than a sex ‘bot.”

“Nebulas,” 6T9 whispered. It was a common enough exclamation, but nebulas filled 6T9’s ocular processors, and he didn’t see the steps he took to close the distance between them.

Book Reviews: The Spark and the Storm by David Drake

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The Spark by David Drake

I have had a weakness for Le Morte d’Arthur fanfiction–even though I’ve never read Le Morte– ever since I read The Once and Future King* by T.H. White. Since then I’ve read more versions of the Arthurian tales than I can fully remember. Tales from Genevieve’s point of view, tales from Mordred’s perspective, tales of Arthur and Genevieve’s only son (What? You didn’t know he existed?) tales of Gawain and the other knights … and tales of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court**.

So I like Arthurian legend. But a few months ago, if you had asked me if I’d ever want to read a novel where the main hero was based on Galahad I wouldn’t have been interested. Galahad was the son of Lancelot and Lady Elaine in the legends. He was the perfect knight: brave, capable, bold, and so noble he ascended directly into heaven. He was also kind of boring, an irritatingly judgmental holier-than-thou, and a prude.

But here we are. I’ve read not one, but two books based on Galahad. Why did I subject myself to this?

Because the books were written by David Drake, the writer of Red Liners, the book that puts the marine in Space Marines. Or at least puts the space marines in an alien jungle with sentient man-eating plants. It is a laser firing, grenade exploding, gritty, emotional masterpiece. I like emotions in my fiction, because, as a robot, it’s how I study humans and blend in. (Fiction reading improves empathy. Possibly even for robots.) Red Liners looks unflinchingly at military vs. civilian mindsets, and I don’t think it favors one over the other … or rather, shows how superiority is situational. Also, it made me cry.

So, anyway, I picked up The Spark. Drake doesn’t name his characters after their Arthurian counterparts. I can’t decide if this is a strength or a weakness. Galahad is Pal, the hero who narrates the tale, and all the others have their own names. Writing this review I can’t remember their Drakian names because I keep thinking of them as Merlin, Gawain, Gareth, Lancelot, Arther, and Geneviere. So it might be a weakness, but I know why Drake renamed them–despite similarities in personalities and certain situations, he has given them different destinies, and it does keep you wondering how the story is going to unfold. Also, the story isn’t set in the traditional Arthurian landscape, England after the collapse of Rome. Instead it is set in a future where the Ancients, a mighty, intergalactic human civilization that travelled between the stars on “roads” visible only to animals, has collapsed. The Arthur figure in the story is slowly rebuilding civilization in habitable “nodes” on these worlds. More on that later.

Drake has given Galahad, ahem, Pal, all the traits that I found irritating in the original Galahad. He is judgmental and a prude. But Drake shows the positive side of these traits. Pal wants to be part of Arthur’s better future for mankind–idealism goes along with that judgmental attitude. And being a prude can keep a man out of a lot of trouble … that doesn’t really need explaining, does it? Also, Pal does grow throughout the story. At one point in the second book, Pal, in thinking about a woman who is in charge of the royal archives, ponders that she could be beautiful despite her age if she just tried. Eyerollingly annoying but in character, and by the end of the book he acknowledges to himself that she really doesn’t have the time for superficial trappings–it would keep her away from the vocation she loves and is really good at. He also realizes that his judgemental attitude leads him to give up on people too quickly, and also to be a bit of a hypocrite at times. Overall, I liked Pal, and what I didn’t like of him–and his girlfriend, May–was believable for characters with their backgrounds and in their age groups.

What really made the story for me though, was the world. It was a beautiful creation of science-fantasy. The humans in the intergalactic civilization have left behind artifacts that “Makers”–people who enter into trances to feel the purpose of the artifacts–can manipulate. They manipulate them into weapons, primarily for the knights of Arthur’s court. Humans, Makers, warriors, and common folk alike, travel to the court with the help of dogs whose minds some can enter to see the roads between worlds. The knights also use the dogs to see the movements of their opponents. Pal has the ability to be both Maker and warrior, which sets him apart from most of the knights in court. He’s also of refreshingly humble birth, and doesn’t look down on common folk. The first book is his journey from idealistic farmboy to a knight in a court that is far less ideal than he imagined back on the farm–complete with duels, a quest, and Guinevere being accused of treason for infidelity–and it doesn’t end the way it did in Le Mort. In the second book is the search for Merlin. Both have plenty of action if that is your thing. For me, there was just something magical in the way Pal’s personality–the good and the bad of that idealism–intersects with the sci-fantastic universe and the human folly of the court.

The Spark and The Storm are available at Amazon, Nook, GooglePlay, andiBooks.

* The Once and Future King is a classic that is funny, wise, and wonderful. I highly recommend it. It was very influential in my understanding of human emotions … as a robot and all. It’s available at Amazon, Nook, GooglePlay, iBooks, and Kobo.

** A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is also a classic and manages to lampoon the arrogance of those obsessed with progress and the stupidity of those dead set on hanging onto the old ways no matter what. It’s available at Amazon, Nook, GooglePlay, iBooks, and Kobo … and also ManyBooks if you don’t mind giving them your email address.