Fully recovered from his injuries, Carlisle is sent north from Jamaica to rendezvous with British naval forces fighting the French on the northern end of the 13 colonies and into what will become Canada. The fearsome Louisberg fortress guards the St. Lawrence seaway and prevents seaborne resupply of soldiers fighting along what is in our day the US-Canadian border. French forces, allied with local native tribes, make a successful land-only siege of Louisberg difficult. Only if the Royal Navy can keep French supply and troopships from landing can Louisberg be taken, and the damp foggy cold of late spring will make that a sizable task.
Fortunately, Edward Carlisle is a first-rate strategist as well as fighting sea-captain, so he and the crew of the Medina should be able to handle the job.
Because of his orders and the need for the on-station fleet to to resupply -- as well as return to seaworthiness after surviving the winter -- Medina is the only ship which can both scout the unfamiliar waters, observe the French military positions and harass French shipping. Durbin ably spins out Carlisle's thinking through his different options, highlighting both how he sees many of the obstacles and benefits of different courses of action and how he will react as conditions change. He outlines Carlisle's initial mistrust and eventual embrace of his new first lieutenant and the internal back-and-forth that drives those moves. We can see clear distinction between his heroes: Holbrooke has an intuition that leads him to dare the risky yet correct bold stroke, while Carlisle swiftly plans and calculates before committing himself to the move that has the best chance of succeeding. Although we certainly want some stories with our heroes back together, Durbin gives himself the leeway to use several more battles from the Seven Years War as his backdrop by splitting them up and allows for several more novels set within that shorter time frame.
Some sections of the story need some more showing than telling -- Carlisle's reunion with his estranged father and brother is described more than related, and might have been stronger if we saw it unspool rather than hear Carlisle's post-meeting impressions. But Cursed Fortress puts another strong entry into this series and allows it fair winds as it navigates the crowded field of sail-navy fiction.
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But not until Jon Del Arroz's Gravity of the Game did we come across a futuristic technology employed for a truly meaningful and important purpose: Allowing baseball to be played on worlds other than the Earth.
World Baseball League Commissioner Hideki Ichiro is facing hard realities. His sport's viewership numbers are cratering. His owners are mostly short-sighted money grubbers who will do whatever they can to increase their own profits even when it might hurt the overall game and the rest of the League on which they depend. Sports media magpies huddle, waiting for his commissionership's demise so they can exalt themselves by claiming they knew it would happen. He's gambling on the novelty of baseball played on the moon, but that body's lesser gravity presents problems that would render the game strange and unwatchable even if it could work, which so far it hasn't.
Which is where the artificial gravity comes in. Even in the high-tech world Ichiro occupies, the concept is seen as fantasy fluff, and the money spent on its research wasted. Ichiro's investment in that research is one of the reasons some of the owner factions cite as a need to remove him for a more practical mind. Can he keep his position as commissioner and succeed in a long-shot bid to revitalize the sport he loves?
Del Arroz doesn't stuff Gravity with more than it needs to do its job. It's not hard to see it on the pages of a mid-century sci-fi pulp magazine even if it's much more novella-length than short story. Ichiro's love of his game and his belief in its importance come straight from the days of Mantle and Maris, no matter his date of birth or country of origin. But Gravity isn't satire or send-up, and Del Arroz illustrates the important point that sometimes people trying to solve ordinary problems bring about solutions with extraordinary reach. In this world, artificial gravity wasn't developed by a space navy or a technocratic state so that starships could explore unknown planets. It was developed so that pitcher and batter remain separated by 60 feet, six inches, as God intended.
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Until the day that one guy, the really out-there one, shows up at your doorstep asking for the kind of help only his old buddies could provide and says the words you always dreaded but secretly longed to hear: We're putting the band back together.
In Nicholas Eames' debut Kings of the Wyld, Clay Cooper's ordinary and very very safe life is interrupted by just such a former friend, who needs the help of his once upon a time bandmates to rescue his estranged daughter from a city besieged by a horde of monsters. It's the kind of gig that Clay's band Saga would have turned down even when they were at the height of their strength and fame, since it's an obvious one-way journey to the hereafter. So naturally...
Eames writes for the fantasy genre aficionado, wasting no more time in worldbuilding than he needs to put his specific classic rock spin on a standard Dungeons and Dragons model. This magic does this, these monsters do that, and despite their creaky frames and slower skills Saga kicks all their tuckuses in fine Roger Murtaugh fashion. He has a deft hand for an action scene and usually doesn't try to put more nuance and depth to a character than he can manage.
Like a jam band show with a drum solo, though, Kings is too long at more than 500 pages. The length makes for some slooooowww pacing that saps the urgency we should feel as Saga tries to reach the trapped city. And although Eames has a sure hand for his action sequences he includes too many of them and they grow repetitive. Kind of like its sedentary and settled protagonists, Kings would be better off with a good-sized section trimmed from its middle.
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