Battleship is not a good film. It is, on the other hand, a ridiculously awesome one.
I realise this is something of a contradiction in terms. Bear with me.
It doesn’t open promisingly. To be honest, one could skip the first ten or twenty minutes of the film and lose very little by it. In the first scenes, we learn that our protagonist, Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), is a dudebro screwup with an ego who’ll do anything to impress a girl, whose brother (Alexander Skarsgård) inveigles him into joining the U.S. Navy — at which point, we learn that Mr. Hopper also has a temper and some impulse control issues. Meanwhile, scientists are sending out signals to a newly-discovered planet in the Goldilocks zone, far, far away. If someone chooses to stop by Earth in answer to such signals, says one scientist — who seems to have a greater sense of self-preservation than the others — it’ll be “like Columbus and the Indians. And we’re the Indians.”
[That sound you hear in the background is the Ominous Foreshadowing Drumbeat of Doom.]
Banner of the Damned is a damned good book.
The Road of Danger is the ninth novel in Drake’s Republic of Cinnabar Navy series, after 2010’s What Distant Deeps. The series as a whole is an excellent example of space operatic military SF, and The Road of Danger proves no exception. Dispatched on a piece of impossible make-work by a jealous admiral, Captain Daniel Leary, his good friend Signals Officer Adele Mundy — librarian, crack shot, and spy — and the crew of the fighting corvette Princess Cecile enter once more into the way of danger.
I expected the third book in the Paladin’s Legacy series (after Oath of Fealty and Kings of the North) to prove the last. Blame childhood trilogy conditioning; I certainly do.
Kingdoms of Dust
Sometimes, you want to read pure fluff. The Kris Longknife books stand in the same relation to the military SF subgenre as a whole as candyfloss does to steak and potatoes, or as — to take a recent example in a different subgenre — Dante Valentine does to War for the Oaks.
Or strides in boldly, as the case may be.
You must and will understand, fair or foul reader (but where’s the difference?), that I bring sad tidings. The Demi-Monde: Winter, the first book in a projected quadrilogy by British debut author Rod Rees, ends in a cliffhanger. A proper cliffhanger it is, too, none of your wishy-washy measly cliffs. No, Winter ends with a cocked gun — two cocked guns, in fact — and a doppelganger-swapping in progress. And I, dear reader, am miffed.
Mastiff is the highly-anticipated third, and final, instalment of Tamora Pierce’s Beka Cooper novels, after 2006’s Terrier and 2009’s Bloodhound.* Three years have passed since the events of Bloodhound. Beka is still partnered with Tunstall, and still assigned as a Dog in the Lower City, where she has quite a reputation for hunting criminals, both in her own right and as the handler of the scent hound Achoo. The night after she buries her fiancé, the Lord Provost himself arrives on her doorstep, with secret orders: dress and pack in haste
Are you feeling old today? How about young? 
