On the eve of the whole 2020 – ah – issues, I read and blogged about the first four, core books in John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series of zombie novels. Fun stuff, and if the CDC fumbled the outbreak of the responsible virus in fiction, in reality their handling a much less deadly virus turned out to be much less entertaining. But that's another story for another web site, not now and not here.
Onward with Ringo's series, after reading some reviews I opted to skip the Mike Massa sequels Valley of Shadows and River of Night, and went straight on to the short story compilations Voices of the Fall and We Shall Rise. Those last two I can recommend. The great thing about a short story collection is that you can skip a few if they're not to your taste.
Back to the present, I just finished the two latest follow-ons, At The End of the World and At the End of the Journey, both by Charles Gannon, and those were fun. They follow the adventures of an Outward Bound-type sailing ship summer program for wayward teenagers... who as you might expect get swept up in dealing with the zombie virus outbreak. In the first, it's just a struggle to get through the first couple of months and get everyone trained up, culminating in a call to adventure, in the Joseph Campbell sense. No spoilers here, but trust me, it's a quest of big enough proportions for another book. If you've gotten this far, either in the series or this blog post, you'll probably enjoy these too.
It was all a lot of fun, and now it's summer again and I'm back starting a re-read of the original four books. It's like eating potato chips. Now that we've been through a couple of years of what seems like an engineered virus, does the "scifi" label really apply to this series anymore?
Ugh, the formatting under blogger is horrible now, what a mess; it's a real distraction from writing a post. Anyway, here's a link to the entire book listing in the series at wikipedia.
No comments:
Post a Comment