Descriptions of the novels, repeated from the weekly posts. Footnotes have been removed, so some parts lack further explanation. For descriptions of the shorter works, see the weekly posts. Tag to mute: #BokBooks

●●●○○ The Secret of ZI - Kenneth Bulmer (nov) 1958
The Alishang took control of Earth almost three centuries ago, first coming as friends, then influencing government, then taking over. Humans had revolted several times, but never successfully. So plans for a more complete revolution were set in motion. They would take a while.

Two years before the plans were due to come to fruition, we follow Rupert, an agent on the run. He knows too much, even though he doesn't know what he knows. We follow him as he escapes Alishang forces and Resistance forces alike. Adventures are had, then two revelations are made. One is so obvious it's on the cover, the other seems super unlikely.

●●●◐○ Times of Trouble {New John Connor Chronicles 3} - Russell Blackford (nov) 2003
The end of the trilogy sees 15-year-old John and his mother return from taking out the backup Skynet in Europe with 45yo General Connor and his team. They participate in some cleanup, taking out Skynet machines that were still attacking humans even after Skynet's destruction, then they have to deal with warlords in South America.

Finally it was time for Jade, the sole surviving bio-enhanced Specialist from the third timeline, to return home. She went with the Connors and some other volunteers, plus a dozen reprogrammed Terminators and T-1000s, and hooked up with a local Resistance group. They conquered the local control node in Venezuela with the help of the T-1000s they had, who had been given the ability to reprogram Skynet machines.

Then the capstone of the fight in Colorado for the Skynet base, and the Connors returning to their timeline to monitor for any reprogrammed humans the government had missed, and to see that the Skynet program wasn't restarted. Not a bad trilogy, though a bit repetitive.

●●●○○ Beyond the Vanishing Point - Ray Cummings (nva) 1931
Stories where people shrank and visited worlds within specks of matter were common in the 1930s, and this is one. A scientist invents two drugs, one which will shrink a person (seemingly indefinitely, depending upon dose), and one which will enlarge a person. Oh, and the story avoids always dealing with naked people:

❝The myriad pores of my skin seemed thrilling with activity. I know now it was the exuding volatile gas of this disintegrating drug. Like an aura it enveloped me, acted upon my garments.”

Right, so logic is out the window. Polter (scientist Kent's assistant), fired when he attempted to force himself upon Babs (Kent's daughter), years later kidnaps her. Her brother Alan and his besotted-with-her friend George go to his castle, get drugs from the guards, and shrink down into the tiny realm. Alan ends up falling for a woman who lives in the infinitesimal, and George rescues Babs.

Apparently I read this years ago, but the only part I recalled were the lengthy sequences of shrinking, where one shrinks to a millimeter and climbs on the stone, then takes more drug and waits for the hand-size hole you're standing beside to relatively grow to basement- and then valley-size, climbs in, and repeats many more cycles.

●●●◐○ Case of the Murdered Mayor {Miles Grant 2} - Jack Dearborn
The minor case is the theft of a prize collie from his breeder. Miles easily tracks down the people who stole the dog. It was fairly obvious, given that the woman had just had a difficult separation from her husband. The major case is murder.

The mayor of Seattle is shot dead, but two months later no killer has been arrested, so the mayor's widow hires Miles through a proxy. He can't interfere with the police investigation, which makes his job more difficult. Miles eventually comes to the conclusion that a member of the police force is the killer. Proving that means confronting the man. Where Miles got shot in his first case, he was merely shot at in this one. 1950s-set #mystery.

●●●○○ The Stock Car Race {Behold: Humanity! 15} - Ralts Bloodthorne (nov) 2024
Atrekna continue to take over worlds, and the Terran Confederacy continues to take them back. Terran Descent Humans currently remain over 99% extinct from an Atrekna psychic attack that unedited their DNA, but steps are being taken to bring them back from the Sentience Upload Disaster Storage System, if that could be repaired.

We also learn that Earthlings exist, a faction of humankind that set out in slowships after Earth was Glassed. They can sense when Atrekna sink a solar system to change its sun and time flow. They object, and stop by to nova the star.

Many more facets of this hundred-stranded story continue, sometimes with several books between appearances, so I'm stuck thinking "I know that name, but what species are they and what's their plot thread?". Still, it's an absorbing series, and I hope it gets completed. Supposedly the author has late-stage cancer.

●●●◐○ Army of the Undead {Invaders 3} - Rafe Bernard (nov) 1967
This novel is not split into multiple episodes, as the previous two books, but is a single story. It also is odd, in that it seems set late in the course of the TV series, when David Vincent had people in government and industry who believed that the Invaders existed, yet also seems set before the series, in that the Invaders portrayed are quite different from how they were shown on screen.

These Invaders are primarily incorporeal, and can influence human minds. In this tale, they're pulling a trick like the #Mysterons did in Captain Scarlet, arranging accidents to kill people, and then reanimating the bodies to possess them. (The Mysterons create new bodies via "retrometabolism" and just leave the old bodies lying around.)

The Invaders have done this thousands of times, and control most of Auto City. Their plan is to destabilize the country by sabotaging all the new cars. David Vincent figures things out, and finds out that the Invaders have adapted Earth tech to broadcast lifeforce via a radio tower in Serenda Valley to control their reanimated slaves. Naturally he wins out in the end, though at this stage of the series, he needed dozens of helpers to do so. Yet somehow, a week afterward, only a few recalled what happened, it was so unreal to them.

●●◐○○ Case of the Sullied Songstress {Miles Grant 3} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2016
The minor case in this book is PI Miles Grant surveilling a construction site for a company suffering thievery of building materials. As he watches from his seedy hotel, he listens to the radio and hears a report of a nude woman's body being found in a nearby county. After he wraps up the pilfering case, he reads in the newspaper a similar report from a different county.

Then he's hired by a man whose niece was dumped in a vacant lot, nude and strangled (but not to death!), and Miles is soon chasing a serial murderer, since the girl fears the killer may return to finish the job if it's found out that she survives.

When Miles finds out the connection between the slain women, he learns that his wife Shirley is surely on the killer's list. Regrettably, the motivation of the killer (and his associates) is stupid beyond belief, and the story shudders to a mindless end.

●●●●◐ Head On {Lock In 2} - John Scalzi (nov) 2018
"Hadens" are people suffering "lock in" as a result of a rare side-effect of a flu-like disease that swept the world. Four and a half million Americans became Hadens in the initial pandemic, and thirty thousand more become Hadens each year. They participate in society by tele-operating robotic "threeps" using surgically-embedded neural networks.

There's also a Haden-only sport, an ultra-violent game where one team of eleven tries to tear the head off a randomly chosen member of the opposing team, and make a goal with it. The game involves swords, crossbows, and specially built threeps. And for the first time ever, a player – whose physical body was in a different city – dies in the course of a game, when his head is torn off for the third time.

This book has a detective duo, one of them a Haden himself, investigate the event. It leads to murders, a suicide, revelations of money laundering and betrayal, sketchy drugs, international criminals organizations, more.

Also an oversized sport robot crashing into the building junior Agent Shane shares with five other Hadens, doing much damage while searching for a cat he picked up at the scene of a building fire set to cover up an earlier crime.

●●●○ The Empathetic Life of Rebecca Wright {Middle Falls 10} - Shawn Inmon (nov) 2019
Rebecca Wright was brought up by an unfeeling mother and a mostly-absent father (he was in the Navy), end never managed to make a real emotional connection with anyone but her little brother. She married a dentist, who ended up divorcing her for his hygienist, and raised her son alone, badly. She died poor and alone.

But in Middle Falls, you get a second chance. If necessary, third, tenth, and fiftieth chances, until you fix your life. On her next twenty or so lives, Rebecca dropped back into her life when her husband was telling her he was leaving her. She knew what was going to happen, so she let him have custody of her son, took the money from the house and practice, and toured the world with her brother. When she got bored, she left her money it to her brother and killed herself to start the next loop.

Over time, she slowly changed, until she managed a life where she helped her gay brother fight AIDS (she knew what companies to invest in, so she was rich), she raised her son decently, and befriended her son's nanny and her out-of-wedlock daughter. Eventually she achieved true empathy, and finally moved on.

●●○○○ The Timothy File {Miles Grant 4} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2017
Private Investigator Miles Grant arrives at his Seattle office from his suburban Bremerton home to find a request to call a local doctor. The pediatrician is being blackmailed with a nude photo of his four-year-old son sitting on a sofa. No parents of young children will want their kids associated with a seedy doctor, so he needs to find out who the blackmailer is.

In the course of his investigation, Grant discovers the Doctor has lied to him multiple times and is involved in a nefarious business. Despite the obstacles the Doctor has put in his way, Grant solves the case and turns the tables on the Doctor.

This book has similar structural flaws to the last one, primarily "why would a criminal hire a detective?" Add in the nature of the criminality, and it rates even lower.

●●◐○○ The City {Aestus 01} - S. Z. Attwell (nov) 2020 #CliFi
This is an overlong, over-padded novel. The first thirty percent should have been cut. Half the remainder should also have been cut. It's been forever (well, November) since it took me a full week to read a novel, and I also couldn't get into that Star Trek: Enterprise novel.

The story should have begun when Jossey and her Patrol group are searching the Outer Sector caverns for Onlar intruders. The tenth of the novel's first third that mattered (her brother Tark and his friend Gavin taking the ten-year-old Jossey to the surface to see the moon, with an Onlar attack resulting in Jossey getting a scarred face and a bum leg, and Tark going missing, and their father dying searching for him) should have been inserted as flashbacks.

Now grown, solar engineer Josey and her team face an Onlar attack on the way down the shaft to the post-climate-change underground City, in which she kills the attacker. That gets her moved to Patrol for a special project. Which leads to her being kidnapped by Onlar. Whom she finds are not the beasts that City propaganda claims.³

She learns that her City lies beneath India, that it displaced the natives from their ancient caverns to dig itself, and that the Onlar are those natives, still surviving, whereas the City maintains they're the only humans left. And despite the great heat of most of the year in the 2400s, the Onlar partially live on the surface, in sheltered valleys. Jossey becomes involved in the effort to stop the City's expansion, since that will entail the genocide of the remaining natives – who are led by her missing brother.

Add in the middle-school romance with three twenty-somethings – Gavin (now Patrol leader who didn't initially know the secrets revealed by Jossey's kidnapping) and Caspar (Delta Force / Gestapo agent, who knew the secrets and killed to keep them) both love Jossey, but won't admit it to themselves, while Jossey is oblivious to both men's feelings – and this book was a trial. But it's the first part of a duology, so I'll read the (blessedly shorter) sequel. Eventually.

●●●◐○ The Case of the Phantom Phaeton {Miles Grant 5} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2018
Christmas Eve 1937: A car with its headlights off runs another car off the road. The 19-year-old driver survives, but his wife and infant son die. The other car doesn't stop. The police never even have a suspect.

1959: The driver hires Miles Grant to find out who the hit-and-run driver was. He's hired three other private investigators over the years, and none have ever turned up anything.

Doggedly checking old newspaper files and interviewing everyone mentioned, Miles turns up some leads. Interviewing the woman who lives in the house closest to the accident turns up more. It becomes clear that the Powers That Be are covering up the crime⁴, which is why other detectives gave up. Miles manages to work around the obstacles and get an answer.