STG's

Yet another military SF book - I really like them. In this case, it is quite deep into a series (courtesy of a Webscriptions package - it's nicely priced if you like a few of the books, and a great way to introduce readers to authors and series they don't know). The RCN universe seems nice, even when starting from the middle. It's a military space opera, which has a nicely contrived explanation to allow the author to put sails in the story - they are actually used to move the ships between bubble universes with different constants, thus getting around that pesky light speed limit. The whole theme reminds me of Honor Harrington, of course (two star alliances fighting each other, space battles with a very competent commander, etc). It was a nice, reasonably quick read, and I discovered I already had bought another of the books in the series (Some Golden Harbor), which I'm currently reading.

I've recently read Freehold by Michael Z. Williamson. I got it on one of the packages at Webscription . These packages are a great deal all around - the books are very reasonably priced for the reader, and since so many are series every time I buy a package I end getting another to cover the rest of another series. That part is great for the publisher, of course... Freehold was very nice. The Freehold of the title is a planet that has an anarchy based society, in which everything goes great - crime is non-existent (even if everyone is heavily armed), taxes are minimal to none, etc. (I can almost believe that could work - the citizens would need a completely different upbringing than any I've heard of, though) The UN-unified Earth, very incompetent, of course, enters war because they can't tolerate how well they are doing without a heavy-handed government. Now that I can sure believe in... One thing I thought was interesting were the paralels with Net Assets . Net Assets i...