I just finished reading Michael Cassutt and David Goyer's novel HEAVEN'S SHADOW, and just love it.  It's one of the five minutes into the future books written by one of the foremost authorities on the American and Soviet space programs, and the authenticity just drips off the page.  You want to know what goes on behind the doors of the Johnson Space Center?  This is the book for you.  There is a flight to a NEO (near-Earth Object), and then things get very interesting.  The authors made a number of choices that surprised me, and that's not easy to do.  Because I write I see the tricks and set ups that signal a left turn, but they kept me guessing.  They took some hard choices with emotional consequences and I really liked that.

The other big science fiction book this summer is LEVIATHAN WAKES by James S.A. Corey.  This is a book set several hundred years in our future, but still contained in that humanity hasn't moved beyond the confines of the solar system.  I really loved this book too.  Great characters that I cared about, and a police procedural with a burned out cop at the center of that story.  Great stuff.  I also have a particular fondness for Holdon, the captain of a water hauler because he's such a basically decent guy.  I like decent guy heroes.  I tend to write them myself.

I'm hoping these two books aren't just a flash, but a new trend in publishing.  I've come to enjoy fantasy but my preferred reading is science fiction.  I cut my teeth on Heinlein and Asimov, and Anderson's Flandry series.  I adore Bujold's Miles books.  I want spaceships and aliens and distant worlds.

I admit I prefer the space opera books that are set in times not so distant from my own.  Some of the far, far future books read like fantasy to me.  The best of these, and he didn't set it too far in the future was Walter Jon Williams PRAXIS BOOKS.  If you haven't read them -- do.  They are wonderful.

So all of you who love spaceships and ray guns as I do let's show the science fiction writers some love, and buy these books.  Give us a wider variety of flavors at the smorgasbord.

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I've been reading C.J. Cherryh's amazing Foreigner series, and I just finished DEFENDER, which is the fifth or sixth book in the series.  I confess, I've lost count.  I'm just chewing through them very happily.

The books focus on language, culture and diplomacy rather than action though most of the books have had a short action sequence near the end.  In this book, however, the climactic scene was a dinner party, and Cherryh was amazing because the scene was so tense that I was quivering with anxiety as my eyes crossed each sentence.  A possible inter-species war is at stake, and by now Cherryh has brought you so deeply into the alien culture that you're just wincing every time the human captain makes these statements that you know are so provocative.

As many of you know I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect 2, and most problems are solved with a fire fight.  Now, I really enjoy that.  Enjoy playing it.  Enjoy writing an action sequence.  Enjoy reading good ones, but not everything in life is solved with a gun, and Cherryh has vividly demonstrated that words are powerful and can have consequences.

Chandler's Law states "When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."  This isn't necessarily bad advice though as my friend John Maddox Roberts pointed out -- "If you do that too often you have all these men with guns wandering around the room, and what do you do with all of them?"

Cherryh's approach to creating tension is understanding and dramatizing that human relationships are complex.  People have multiple and hidden agendas, and those can be as dangerous as a weapon.

Sometimes the reader/viewer knowing the bomb is under the table is far more tense and exciting then actually seeing the bomb actually detonate.  Something Hollywood should remember.  Think about Silence of the Lambs.  The scene where Clarice just talks with Lecter is one of the scariest, most tense scenes in a movie.  He's in a cell.  He can't possibly hurt her, but you're on the edge of your seat.

All of this has had me really thinking about endings as I pass the halfway point on the third Edge book.  What is that final confrontation between Richard and the villain going to look like?  I don't think it's going to end in gun play.

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