C Gockel Writes

Book Review: The Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

by

Book Review: The Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

$1.99 as of April 10, 2026
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Australia (Full-price: Canada)
Kobo, Nook, Apple, and GooglePlay

What a lovely story of first contact! The Remnant Population is the tale of a crotchety elderly woman’s whose colony world is disbanded. The colonists are moved to a new world. She resists, remaining on her colony world preferring to die alone in her home. It turns out she is not alone. I’m not going to give too much away. It is not an action adventure story, but there is suspense, and wonderful characters.

Spinning Silver Book Review

by

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

$1.99 as of March 14, 2026
Check for current price at: Amazon US (Full-price: Amazon CA, Amazon UK, Nook, Kobo, Apple, 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: The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuinn

by

The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuinn

$1.99 in the US—as of October 4, 2025
Click for Current Price Amazon US (Full price: United Kingdom, Canada,  Germany, Australia)

Kobo, GooglePlay, Nook, Apple, or borrow at Scribd

The setup: A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist’s gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

My take: “There was a wall.” That is the first sentence of this book. I have not read it in years, but I still remember the opening line because the book is so wonderful. This was the first book I read in the loosely interconnected Hainish Cycle and it propelled me on to read all the others. Highly recommend. I’d love someone to talk about this book with. Hint, hint.

“One of the greats….Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.” – Stephen King

From the brilliant and award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin comes a classic tale of two planets torn apart by conflict and mistrust — and the man who risks everything to reunite them.

Book Review: His Majesty’s Dragon

by

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

$1.99 as of July 12, 2025
Click for current price Amazon US, Canada (Full-price: United Kingdom, Australia)

Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, GooglePlay

Well, this was delightful. Recently I read a Regency Romance that I thoroughly enjoyed. The culture of Regency era Europe is so foreign, that it might as well be fantasy. There are gazillions of Regency Romances out there and I thought I might find another I liked as much quite easily. Ha, ha, ha…No.

And then I discovered His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik. I am a huge fan of her reimagined fairy tales Uprooted and Spinning Silver, and decided to give this a shot. His Majesty’s Dragon is NOT a Romance; it is better. It has the cultural voyeurism that I so enjoy with DRAGONS! Talking dragons that take the place of airplanes and join the Napoleonic Wars. The lead human character is a good guy, but a bit on the stiff side. The author writes this stiffness in a way that makes it endearing, and shows the positive attributes of that sort of character. Too often the upright individual winds up the minor antagonist in fiction. The hero always has to be the maverick.

It is a super fun book. It is the perfect thing to take your mind off things that we shall not mention it by name here, but it rhymes with “Come on Eileen.”

UPDATE: I finished the whole series, adored it, and went into a state of withdrawal afterwards. It is traditionally published and very popular…and therefore available at libraries, though the first two ebooks are reasonably priced.

Available at Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia

Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, GooglePlay

Book Review: Nightwings the Complete Collection by Robert Silverberg

by

Book Review: Nightwings the Complete Collection by Robert Silverberg

$1.99 as of June 28, 2025
Click for current price: Amazon US, Nook, Apple, GooglePlay, or Kobo (available in KoboPlus). Or you can borrow the collection on Everand.

“Roum is a city built on seven hills. They say it was a capital of man in earlier cycles. I did not know of that for my guild was Watching, not Remembering …”

So begins Nightwings the Hugo award winning novella by Robert Silverberg, and the first of three novellas in this collection.

It may be because I’d recently read Rome A History in Seven Sackings (entertaining and recommended) and The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes (enlightening, but dry in some places), but whatever the reason, I was instantly charmed. The book was well worth a read, especially if you like sci-fi that is optimistic, as I do. Yes, history does rhyme, but I don’t think that all is hopeless. There have been improvements in the human conditions, and both non-fiction books I just mentioned will bear witness to that.

I liked it enough to even read the forward by the author. Nightwings was written in 1968, when the country was in turmoil at home, and in Vietnam aborad, and Mr. Silverberg’s own life was in chaos, as he’d lost his studio (It had burned down along with all his reference books–even with Wikipedia and Google, that would be painful. Granted, I don’t have a studio, just a corner and a bookshelf, but still, I get it.)

The hero and heroine in Nightwings experience doubt of history and science, and come face to face with alien invaders bent on domination. The solution wasn’t the typical, but it was believable, and hopeful.

The version of the story I’m linking to is the collection that contains Nightwings, Among the Rememberers, and The Road to Jorslem. You can purchase Nightwings on its own, but I couldn’t find the other two novellas. I would recommend just buying the whole collection at Amazon US, United Kingdom, Nook, Apple, GooglePlay, or Kobo (available in KoboPlus). Or you can borrow the collection on Everand.

Book Reviews: Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut

by

Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel 50th Anniversary Edition, Kindle Edition by Kurt Vonnegut (Author)

$1.99 in the US & Germany
Click for current price: Amazon US, Canada (Full-price: United Kingdom, Germany, Australia)

Apple, Nook, Kobo, GooglePlay

Slaughter House Five is one of the first science fiction books I feel in love with. Science fiction might not truly be its genre, it borders on surrealism, and yet it is incredibly readable. It’s slyly humorous, surreal, and profound. The book is partially based on the author’s lived experience: he survived the bombing of Dresden as an allied prisoner of war, three stories below ground, in a meat locker. The aliens that came to visit were probably wishful thinking.

Maybe.

Highly recommended.