Showing posts with label author Spoor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label author Spoor. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Digital Knight by Ryk E. Spoor

Digital Knight
Having read another book by Spoor semi-recently,  I saw this one at the used bookstore and thought it might be interesting. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
This book appears to be a series of interconnected short stories about a technical wizard by the name of Jason Wood. In the first story, Jason is working on enhancing a group of digital photos that the police have turned over to him, and discovers something odd in one of the photos. There's a pair of footprints in the photo, where the grass is bent over as if someone is standing in that spot, but there's no one there. Upon investigating, he figures out that it may be a vampire, since if vampires don't appear in mirrors, and the type of camera used has mirrors inside of it, then the vampire wouldn't appear in the photo, either.
The vampire in question is suspected of dealing drugs to high ranking city officials, and the police detective who gave him the photos points Jason in the direction of Verne Domingo. Domingo, of course, turns out to be a vampire, but the plot twists a bit from there, and Jason ends up facing an entirely different vampiric villain, along with his friend/girlfriend Sylvie Stake.
In the end, the whole story turns out to be a shaggy dog, apparently written to use the line "Wood N' Stake, Vampire Hunters."
Things continue to go downhill from there, as Spoor introduces other legendary characters to the mix. The writing is, at best, unengaging. About halfway through, I decided I was wasting my time. Don't waste yours.

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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Boundary, by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor

BoundaryI'm not entirely certain that I can do much better with this review than the book blurb does. Gotta find out how to become a professional blurbist. Flint's been around a while, but Spoor is new to me.

This was merely some competent entertainment, basically. The story starts when an archaeologist finds some anomalous fossils in the KT boundary. A group of raptors appears to have been killed by an alien from outer space, and somehow their remains were preserved in the fossil record. Of course, the archaeologist in question, Helen Sutter, is subjected to ridicule for even suggesting that aliens might have visited Earth in the distant past, but her career survives despite it all.

Later on in the story, though, an exploratory mission to Phobos, one of Mars' moons, discovers a long abandoned alien base. In the alien base...you guessed it! The scientists find mummified remains exactly like the fossil remains discovered by Dr. Sutter. The excitement created by this discovery motivates the U S government to put together a massive manned expedition to Phobos to exploit any alien technology to be found there.

The whole story reminds me a bit of some early Heinlein, like Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Rocket Ship Galileo, Podkayne of Mars, and so forth. Nothing terribly earthshaking, in this day and age, but enough to provide a few hours of amusement. There is, however, some interesting high tech wizardry with nano-swarm imaging and nuclear space drives.