“The Electro Legend Interviews” - Aphex Twin, Gary Numan, The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett, Vince Clarke, Kraftwerk’s WolfgangFlür, Moby, Hot Chip, Alec Empire and Ultravox’s Midge Ure all discuss their lives, their music and their ideas in this rather intriguing new ebook based on the archives of “Computer Music and Future Music” magazine.

This ebook consists of the various interviews that these musicians had with this magazine over the whole period of Electro Music, so we have Liam Howlett of Prodigy telling us about the Rave scene when they started and how they plan to keep on going…  As he says “When rave dies there are always going to be people who will still want to dance, so as long as we keep coming out with original songs we’ll still be around…”

Or as Midge Ure of Ultravox put it,  “In those early days, a lot of musicians saw synths as electronic guitars. We just started going bang-bang-bang. Suddenly, you got this blast of unearthly noise and it changed the musical landscape.”

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I have just finished reading a rather gripping and highly enjoyable ebook, a fantasy novel by Jeff Gunzel, called “Land Of Shadows”.  This is the first in what will obviously be a whole series of ebooks around the main characters we meet in this one.  The second volume in this saga has already been published I see, so when you have finished this volume you can go straight on to the next one..  Which I for one shall be doing.

I shan’t discuss the plot of this tale in any detail, as I do not want to spoil your fun when you read it for yourself.   Suffice it to say that it is all about a very unlikely group of individuals, whose lives have been dedicated to preparing them to meet a particular challenge to the world of this story (Not our earth by the way).

With a good mix of magic, swords, and other hand weapons (no guns here) our heroes and their various enemies and helpers  battle their totally evil and unscrupulous enemies more or less from the start of this ebook to the end.

Starts with a bang.

The ebook begins with a bang, we are thrown right into the action from literally the first page, and apart from a relatively short section near the start, the action continues unabated throughout the entire ebook.   The less exciting section near the beginning is needed to introduce us to the various characters in this story and the world they inhabit, and as such is entirely justified in my view.   Some reviewers of this ebook have complained about this section, but I found it fitted well and anyhow was essential.

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Gary Ruse, A most prolific and varied author has done it again.  This time he has ventured into the curious world of “Steam Punk” with his latest ebook.  With the wonderful title of “Perseverance Triumphant!” he takes us into a Victorian world which has developed space flight (among other technical marvels) owing to a box of papers that Nikolai Tesla sent back in time – the ins and outs of why he did that I shan’t discuss here, you will have to read the book yourself to discover that important information.

In Ruse’s world, as in the real Victorian world, steam power is the basis of everything, but he has carried it to almost lunatic levels – The mind boggles slightly at the idea of a space ship that relies on steam for all its power, but why not?

A very enjoyable and memorable book.

Anyhow, this story, which I read at one sitting as I found it both griping and totally enjoyable – if remarkably silly – is all about how our universe is about to be invaded by horrible aggressive aliens from another universe, with the help of a number of Earthlings who have been recruited to help this invasion by the promise of being given total power on earth – foolish individuals.

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Ian Miller has just published his latest ebook – a continuation of the story he started in Red Gold (which I reviewed earlier Link).  He plans to end up with a whole slew of ebooks based around this central theme, or at least four ebooks, of which this one is the second.  The title ” A Face on Cydonia” refers to the rock formation on Mars that looks remarkably like a human face (see photo), and which is central to one of his main sub-plots, the existence or not of extra-terrestrial life.

Red Gold described – among other things – the founding of the colony on Mars, and this ebook which is placed some time after the events in Red Gold, carries on the story of the ferociously power, money and control hungry corporations who effectively control the world (but not Mars, which is a corporation free area).

Actually, whilst the book is cast in the form of a science fiction book, it is actually something which could well appear in the columns of a publication such as The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, as a very large part of the plot revolves around the machinations that large corporations go through to ensure their share of the market.

So to a large degree, what we have here is a development of the ideas Ian Miller developed in Red Gold.   Unlike Red Gold though, the various villains in this ebook are not at all likeable, in fact the main villain, who will certainly play an important role in future ebooks in this series, is totally despicable, a truly loathsome character with not one redeeming quality…  Love him!

Ian Miller describes this ebook in the following terms:-

By the year 2100 everybody, apart from some extreme recidivists, knew the so-called Face of Cydonia was simply a battered butte, and a live TV program was to poke fun at those recidivists, except that the battered butte morphed into something like the Viking image and winked. This was considered a great joke, except that nobody knew who was responsible or how it was done. Coupled with two unexplained physical measurements associated with this butte, when signals were found emanating from Epsilon Eridani, a nearby star far too young for such advanced life to have evolved, the issue of alien life arose. As a consequence, Grigori Timoshenko, Federation Commissioner for Defence and Science, is forced to form a party and settle for once and for all whether there had been alien activity around this butte.

Photo Courtesy Of NASA

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I have just finished reading Bat Boy by Chris Barraclough, an English author whose other ebooks I have read  with enjoyment.   One of the things I like about his writing is that each book is very different to the others so one never knows what one is going to get as one starts another ebook by him.

And this one is no exception to this situation.

This book won a prize when it was first publihed in paper form in 2011 (UK AUTHORS AWARD 2011), which I can well understand having now read it.

Further, I carefully avoided reading any synopsis of this book before reading it, so I approached it with total ignorance as to what it was about – I do this on occasion in order to be able to judge a book without any preconceptions about it.

I shan’t go into details about the plot of this story, as that would give away too much, but I shall go as far as to say it is about an 11 year old blind boy (the Bat Boy of the title), his 15 year old brother, a seriously dysfunctional mother, and absentee father and a series of misunderstandings which lead our two young “heroes” into a whole series of increasingly desperate and dangerous situations, or as it is described on Amazon:-

Two brothers are forced to tear across the UK in search of their long-lost father after a shocking family tragedy, with a mysterious stranger and the police right on their tails. Both heart-warming and heart-wrenching, Bat Boy’s funny and masterfully suspenseful tale is told by the youngest brother, Joel, who is shy, hopelessly optimistic, and has been blind since birth.

As I started to read this ebook I started to wonder if it was actually an ebook intended for children to read, as it is is narrated in the first person by the 11 year old blind boy, but I soon realised that it is actually aimed at adults, not kids at all.

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An enthralling Sci-Fi thriller, The Furnace by Timothy Johnston is a Space Opera with a difference. It is a case of Agatha Christie meets Issac Asimov with added Crichton for flavouring.

Before saying anything else I will quote from the author’s blurb on Amazon, which gives a broad idea of the actual story line, without giving away too much:-
As a Homicide Investigator working the solar system’s most remote outposts, Lieutenant Kyle Tanner has been involved in more criminal investigations and captures than any other in Security Division. He hunts his prey stealthily, tracking them through the trail of victims cast behind, and makes difficult captures when no one else can. He has seen the twisted remains, things that used to be human but are now barely meat. And he’s executed those who have done such horrible deeds.

His most recent case takes him to SOLEX One, a power-generating station that orbits precariously near the Sun. Among the fifteen inhabitants is a killer, a disturbed crewman who for some reason has mutilated his victim. But when Tanner arrives and begins the investigation, he’s shocked to learn that this is no ordinary murder. There appears to be no motive for the crime, and no reason for the mutilation after death. But what Tanner doesn’t realize is that something terrifying is amplifying among the station’s personnel … and if he doesn’t solve the mystery, the result could be the extinction of the human race.

THE FURNACE is a locked-room murder mystery, part techno-thriller, part horror, part detective story.

So, that is the basic framework of this book, but there is much more to it than the description above would lead you to think.   Timothy has taken the well known theme of a locked room detective novel, and carried it to a total extreme, the actors in this story are in a physical situation that allows absolutely no escape, so near to the sun that they can’t even go outside their space station for more than about 90 minutes without risking death from radiation, nor can they simply leap into a space shuttle and return to the relative safety of the main base on Mercury…  They are really stuck and it is in this claustrophobic atmosphere that the tale unfolds to its – to me at least – unexpected finale.

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