Ramul's internet dumpster.

Machine, Elizabeth Bear

Language: English

Synopsis: During a rescue mission on an old colony ship where the technology has become obsolete, Dr. Jens notices a number of strange events: temporary loss of connection to the ship, strange mechanisms filling out the hallways which appear to have been constructed from the ship's material by a gynoid, the only active part of the ship since every passenger still alive is in cryosleep. A separate ship o a methane-breathing species is attached to it, its inhabitants unconscious and its only cargo being a walking tank. Returning to the Core General hospital, where the passengers are supposed to be unfrozen one by one and the gynoid checked for her odd behaviour, more odd things pile up, like one of the thawed passengers having brain scarring and some kind of vorus affecting the station's AIs. As it turns out, everything is a part of a plan to expose illegal actions happening in the hospital's private ward: full-body replacements are being grown there, to receive the memories of their commissioners, a foridden action since those replacements have fully-functional nerous systems and therefore would be considered people. Hence the plan of the conspirators was to take one of these replacements, which had been discarded, implant into her fake memories and put her among the colony ship's crew, as well as inserting a virus which would let the station's AI speak of the actions in the private ward, but that virus had evolved out of control, starting to physically consume the station through the mechanisms from the colony ship, until the gynoid brought the mechanisms under her control.

Review: Mostly read it because of recommendations in regards to its Sector General homage. And that part was clear to the point of looking like plagiarism sometimes. Unlike Sector General, it focussed far more on AIs, which was a fairly interesting part, but unfortunately, the narration went off-track all the time to snap back without really leading back from the POV characters trailing thoughts to the situation at hand. This made the book tedious to read and unnecessarily long, it would be probably half its length if the derailing would be cut out.

Jondelle, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After saving a man and a boy from thugs and being injured for his efforts, Dumarest wakes up in the house of a physician, who owns a farm and is the mother of the boy. As usual, the woman throws herself at Dumarest, who wants to leave the planet on his search for Earth, but dies when the farm is raided where the boy Jondelle gets abducted by the raiders. With the money he had made by selling crystals he had smuggled out of a previous planet's mine, he hires a number of men for a rescue mission, which leads him into a city full of insane people that might attack them on a whim. In search for information Dumarest encounters a woman who is not a part of the settlement and wants to flee it, aiding him with his escape in return after they got information about the man who had taken Jondelle. As they flee, the floating raft is discovered and they get shot at, with several men getting killed and the woman injured. They have to patch her up in a farmer settlement where the boy's trace leads them to, from where they go to an expansive entertainment district. They find the abductor, Dumarest wants to buy Jondelle off him, but not trusting that he will receive what he paid for, he breaks into the building holding him. Returning to the city, Jondelle's grandparents had been found by the Universal Church as his caretakers.

Review: It was pretty weird how Jondelle's stepfather, who risked his life to protect him from the thugs in the beginning was blamed for selling him out just because he was anti-violence. At least the shitty romance stayed short in this one.

Zenya, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After a fruitless search of information on the location of Earth in the local archives, Dumarest gets approached by a woman to be brought to her estate, where he meets several of her relatives. After killing her brother who attacked him and being gravely injured during the fight, he gets told by her father to find a lost relative on another planet, going there under the guise of being a general, with the woman Zenya as his partner. The area he arrives at is at war with a culture that colonized the planet first, supposedly because they have massacred several villages, but the evidence for it is flimsy. Dumarest examines the case, finding more and more oddities about it, while several more massacres happen, in which it appears that people suddenly go insane and start killing each other. While the blame is still put on the other culture, now claiming they're using some kind of chemical, Dumarest actually contacts the members of the culture, further showing they are not to blame. As it turns out, the reason for the bouts of insanity is the local preferred crop, where a mutation has altered some of the plants to have that effect. The lost relative is found within a cave living among the blamed culture and retrieved, where he is almost killed by Zenya's aunt, who also had come to the planet on command of the patriarch, before Zenya takes her out. Due to this, the relative doesn't return home and Dumarest goes on with his search for Earth.

Review: This one was actually interesting, because of the mystery of the reasons behind the sudden destructions, with the original culprits being obviously not the ones who did it, although the reveal was kind of ehh when it turns out it was just a mutated strain of a common crop plant.

By the Light of the Green Star, Lin Carter

Language: German (Im Licht des grünen Sterns)

Synopsis: Just as the protagonist was about to save the princess from her prison in the tree city, a flying sleigh snatches her under his nose. Afraid that the assassins he had joined would punish him for his failure, he enters a different room, finding a number of magical artefacts which he takes. The assassin Klygon accompanying him decides to flee with him, considering his punishment would be worse. Leaving the city on their giant dragonflies, they get later attacked by a giant falcon, which curiously has a rider. The protagonist uses one of the artefacts to kill the falcon, but the attack causes them to crash into a body of water on the nearly pitch-black ground, where they wander around before being captured by a primitive people of worm riders. In their caves, they meet another captive whom Klygon doesn't trust, but who manages to prevent their execution after Klygon fails at his guard duty, which causes the caves being raided by giant ants. The tree escape, with the worm riders sending their god after them, the largest worm known. The worm catches up to them at the shore of a river and the protagonist kills the light-sensitive creature with one of the artefacts, a very strong flare which also permanently blinds him. They take a dry leaf from the giant trees to use as a boat, drifting to an inland sea and resting on an island, where their companion from the cave betrays them, leaving them to drown by the rising tide.

Interspersed is the story of the princess Niamh, who was saved by Zarqa, the last member of an immortal, telepathic species of winged humanoids, and Janchan, a prince. They also took the goddess Arjala with them, to save her from the fire that broke out in the tree city. They get captured by falcon riders, brought into a floating city where they are to be used as guinea pigs for immortality experiments; most peopel die, but it had been successful on an old philosopher who supposedly died a millennium ago. Zarqa manages to control one of the scientists to unlock his cage, frees Janchan and Arjala who had been isolated from the rest for experiments and retrieves Niamh and the philosopher as well, but all of them are too heavy for the sleigh. A solution is found by taking one of the falcons, to be steered by the mind-controlled scientist and carrying the two women. As they leave the city, they are pursued and Zarqa gets knocked out, breaking the mind control, with the scientist then steering the falcon away to have Arjala all for himself, whom he had become obsessed with, flying past the island where the protagonist and Klygon are trapped on.

Review: So far, my favourite planetary romance, as I like the giant tree setting and despite me picking up the middle of five books, the events of the previous two were summarized at the start and there were no unexplained terminologies thrown left and right like in the Kregen books. The two separate storylines were both interesting. The only part I didn't like much was Arjala's character development, as someone as insufferably arrogant as her wouldn't just shrug and act normally after her worldview had been shattered like that.

Eloise, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Cyclan hot on his heels, Dumarest hires a rustbucket of a spaceship to go on a random course, but it ends up in a warp field, throwing them into a random area to crash on an icy planet. With most of the crew dead save for the minstrel Arbush, they try to brave the icy wasteland, until encountering a city. Saved at the last moment from a fall off the cliffs surrounding the city, they are brought inside to be patched up. It appears like an utopia with all needs provided, supervised by robots and everything controlled by a supercomputer. There, a woman named Eliose immediately throws herself at Dumarest, much to the chagrin of a friend who had saved her life years ago. One day, they receive numbers, defining their positions in a culling queue, with Dumarest being the first. They mount an escape plan, with Dumarest damaging the main computer and the others setting up distractions for the robots through arson, collecting supplies and antigravity harnesses to flee the city. Several days after leaving the city, a squad of robots catches up with them, where Eloise's friend dies, and the antigravity harnesses are destroyed because they're being tracked. On foot, they get picked up by nomads, which then aid them to reach a city in a warmer climate, from where Dumarest embarks on his search-for-Earth travels, while Eloise stays behind with Arbush.

The Bug Wars, Robert Asprin

Language: German (Die Käferkriege)

Synopsis: The book follows Rahm, a Tzen warrior, through the titular Bug Wars. It begins with the first mission fighting the wasps, then getting abandoned with a few other survivors on the planet to fend for themselves, being picked up later and entering a mission to find a natural predator for the hoppers on their home planets and discovering the ants, a so-far unknown type of bug, and lastly leading an attack on several ant hives.

Review: The good part: The Tzen are fairly interestingly designed, being naturally colourblind (but breeding specimens with colour vision in the course of the story), having a sleep cycle tied to eating rather than tiring out or a caste system. The bad part is that the blurb looked more exciting than the story itself, which lacked any commentary or subversion the blurb had suggested, but was a straightforward tale of one warrior in a war.

State of the Art, Iain M. Banks

Language: English

Synopsis: A collection o several short stories more or less tied into the Culture setting, consisting of an assassination of a political figure by a reluctant person blackmailed into the job, a tree doing a "she loves me, she loves me not" with an astronaut's appendages, the self-destruction of the United States through a malfunctioning trash teleporter and a number of Culture people landing on Earth to research the local populace.

Review: I must say, I prefer Bank's short stories over the longer ones, especially considering my usually gripes are absent in them. And the tree story was genuinely funny.

Die Töchter des Drachen, Wolfgang Hohlbein

Language: German

Synopsis: After her town has been burnt to the ground by dragons and her being the only survivor, a stranger tells to a girl the story of Talianna, who had started out just as her: one of the few survivors of a dragon attack. She joined the mercenary band that followed the dragons, married its leader then killed him to take control, to use her position to uncover the secret of the dragons and their riders razing settlements who had discovered any form of technological progress. Her search brings her and her two turtleman bodyguards to a tower in a desert, where they uncover that the dragonriders are perfectly fine with using higher technology themselves. Later her search brings her and her surviving bodyguard to a town at the edge of the Shelf, where she wants to find Karan, a man who had been at the bottom of the Shelf and returned alive. She manages to make enemies both out of the leader of the Daughters of Dragons as well as Agella, the leader of a crime gang, before taking the latter as a hostage and gliding down the shelf on Karan's winged boat. Attacked by a dragon rider, they crash into the forest below. Talianna notices that there is something strange about Karan, with the forest's monstrous fauna avoiding him. It is revealed that he is barely more than a copy of the original man, his body having long been absorbed by the fungoid mass that inhabits the ground. As she finds the spire where the Daughters of the Dragon are supposed to have their headquarter, she lets herself be taken after letting herself be deliberately infected with the fungal mass. Inside, she is told that the reason for the Daughters of the Dragon suppressing technologcal progress is that there have been nine cataclysms brought by technology already, which had altered and decayed the world to the state it currently is, and that the real rulers of the world are the giant arthropods, with those outside everywhere being the drones controlled by the massive queen living under the spire. Talianna lets herself be devoured by the swarm, which releases the fungus and kills the spires inhabitants, with only Angella and the turtleman Hrhon surviving, while Talianna is reshaped into a fungal copy like Karan. With the tale concluded, it is revealed that the narrator was Angella all along, and the girl is offered to join her on her mission.

Review: It had an above-average number of typos, which was pretty weird for not even being a first edition. That aside, the premise of a fantasy world being kept technologically stagnant to prevent yet another environmental catastrophe was interesting, but the conclusion was frustrating: Sometimes, stories present questions which should be explored in depth and nuance, even with accepting an uncomfortable answer if necessary, but instead, it is answered with a stupid "fuck you" and killing the one who asks that question just to avoid the uncomfortable answer.

Jack of Swords, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After killing and butchering an expensive animal with a group of starving men, Dumarest is held accountable for the deed. ending up in the proximity of an older woman suffering from a disease who is part of the owner's family, he travels with a group of other people to a legendary planet within a nebula, which is impassable without the proper aid, which in this case, is a blind woman created in a laboratory who can see energy auras. Once on the planet, they find it uninhabitated with only a completely enclosed city and artificially-created vegetation being present. Once they make it inside with the help of the blind woman, they find out that the legendary treasure the city is supposed to hold is a room full of mist, which causes hallucinations of one's biggest desires. And in a way, it does what the survivors had come from- the elderly woman is lost in the mist to live her perfect life and the woman who wanted money to find her lost daughter finds out it is the blind woman, who had been abducted and altered.

Lord of the Spiders, Michael Moorcock

Language: German (Der Herr der Spinnen)

Synopsis: Michael Kane returns to Mars of the past, finding himself in an unknown area and wondering if he had missed the time he had been taken from. He runs into the giant Hool Haji, who is unexpectedly friendly, belonging to a culture separate from the one Kane had fought previously. Brought to his village that is under the control of an evil king, they plan a revolution, but the village is attacked and massacred because of a rejected woman tattling. Kane, Hool Haji and several other survivors go through a desert on their escape, finding a ruin with advanced technology, probably left behind an extinct precursor race. The materials there allow them to build a balloon, which is caught up in a storm and blown over the ocean to a different continent. Hool Haji gets abducted there and Kane follows the trail to an odd building in the jungle, which is inhabited by spider-human hybrids and their leader, a giant spider, which wants to eat them both. They manage to escape and kill the spider, which tears her underlings to shreds while dying. Flying back to the continent of the origin, they hatch a plan to get rid of the king, using the balloon to their advantage. Kane flies out to search for remaining soldiers, but gets attacked and downed by a large flying animal. Off track, he encounters ships with humans, belonging to a nation allied with the one Kane had fought for during his previous visit, realizing he is in the right timeline after all and the woman he loves being alive. Unfortunately, the two nations are at the brink of war, engineered by the lies of a witch. To prevent it, Kane tries to abduct the witch and by chance, succeeds through accidentally uncovering an ancient artefact in the treasure chamber which paralyzes onlookers and forces them to tell only the truth. Grabbing both witch and shield, he flies to the battlefield and stops the fight at the last minute, celebrating the peace with a marriage of his love. Later, using the technology in the desert ruin, Kane builds a teleporter that allows him to move between Earth and Mars as he pleases.

Review: A pretty typical planetary romance, with the only unusual aspect being that the protagonist is nicer than average. The title is a bit strange, though - the spider episode felt pretty random and had little consequences for the story at large.

Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After hiring as a mercenary to an army that lost the battle, Dumarest is taken prisoner and roped into stealing cargo together with a woman called Dephine. The theft goes awry and as it turns out in the ship, the stolen cargo were corpses, dead from a plague which then infects the crew and passengers. Dumarest and Dephine are the only survivors, with Dephine having a natural immunity and being able to extract a vaccine from her own blood to save Dumarest's life. Arriving on Dephine's home planet, Dumarest is introduced to a tradition-valuing society and a boy with a crippled leg who claims to have found a cave with ancient artefacts, which makes Dumarest think that they are from the original settlers and might point towards the location of Earth. Travelling there, Dumarest indeed manages to find a spectrogram of the Sun, but is also attacked by one of the predators the society hunts for trophies. The boy is knocked unconscious in the fight, but Dumarest manages to kill it and suggest to the boy that he was the one who took it out, earning him the recognition he was striving for. As he was about to depart, Dephine throws herself at him and drags him off to an estate to spend time until the ship Dumarest wants to take departs, but as it turns out, she is actually working for the Cyclan and dies in the resulting altercation.

Review: On one hand, the part with the heist and the resulting plague on the ship was interesting, although Dumarest's plot armour showed too well there. On the other hand, Dephine is mind-numbingly frustrating. Being pretty smart and competent in one scene, then abysmally dumb in the next. And ending like any prominent woman who isn't just there for shitty romance, as any woman with thoughts beyond getting on Dumarest's dick is cooperating with the Cyclan and evil, apparently.

Haven of Darkness, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Sun's spectrogram now in his possession, Dumarest attempts to search a database for a match, but can't afford the fee to it, following an advice of asking a hobbyist to look into it. Before finding a match, the man is murdered and the death apparently being used to frame Dumarest as the murderer, he has to flee and ends up on a ship together with a Cyber, having walked straight into the trap. To his luck, he has yet another set of Affinity Twin syringes and manages to take control of the navigator, then kills and ejects the Cyber while hiding his own body in a crate of cargo, leaving it on the next planet the ship lands on, then commits suicide by ejecting himself and returning his consciousness to his original body. The planet he landed on has the feature of two suns causing hallucinations of deceased people when they overlap and of a second intelligent species, which rules the night and is for the most part assumed to be a myth. A woman, betrothed to a man who plans to rule the planet's society, throws herself at Dumarest, and he is roped into stopping her betrothed's plans. They visit his base with its mercenaries, but while getting back, their raft crashed because of sabotage, forcing them to stay a night outside and discovering that the second intelligent species is real, apparently creating modular bodies with one winged form attacking any human outside after dark. Making it back, Dumarest leads an attack on the base, managing to kill its leader and earning possession of his land.

Prison of Night, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After having gained the lands of Gydapen and Lavinia at his side, Dumarest is considering to sell the lands to use the money for travel on his search for Earth. As it turns out, Gydapen had an illegitimate son who claims the land and wants to conquer it by force. Fighting ensues, and Dumarest tries to end the conflict by contacting the Sungari by entering a cave. He manages to convince them to aid in return for some adjustments to the pact that would benefit them more and is shown in return how the Sungari have their eyes and ears practically everywhere, killing Roland without much issue.

Review: Interesting to see a book that directly continues the story of a previous one, which was a good decision since some of them had ended in situations the consequences of which had not been shown (like how he went back to travelling after having agreed to stay with one of the women that throw themselves at him on a regular basis or how he oriented himself after being teleported to a random location by Thormyle).

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Language: English

Synopsis: After the Firefall, an event of a number of alien probes falling through Earth's atmosphere, a ship is sent to a previously-unknown faraway gas giant to find a camouflaged construct circling it, unclear whether it is alive or a machine. As it is examined, something the living staff has to do itself since every drone sent in got disabled shortly after and under great risk due to the construct's internal radiation and magnetic fields messing with their bodies and brains, a few of its "inhabitants" could be captured alive.Attempts to communicate with the constructs as well as tests done on the captured entities leads the team to a horrifying realisation: this alien life is hyperintelligent, but completely devoid of self-awareness, apparently having evolved out of it for more efficiency and the aspects of humanity's signals that are tied to self-awareness like art could only be interpreted as a waste of bandwith in the context of an attack. In the end, it's POV character Siri Keeton is the only one who makes it out alive in a pod sent back to Earth, as the ship collides with the structure in an atttempt of mutual destruction, which outcome remains ambiguous.

Review: There is a lot of concepts regarding consciousness, different mental conditions like blindsight or Cotard's delusion being discussed in the story and it is recommended to look them up alongside reading the book. The whole idea of self-awareness being actually detrimental to intelligence is an interesting core idea to base the story on (I would propose that self-awareness is necessary for the way behaviour is regulated in animals: it is not needed to remove your hand from the fire, but needed to not place the hand in the fire again). A downside is that the descriptions are employing similes to such a degree it is often hard to make out what is actually happening.

Incident on Ath, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: Saving a woman who is searching for a specific painter from some thugs, Dumarest joins in her search once seeing a painting depicting Earth's moon. The settlement that artist is on is unusual, as it is full of people engaging in different activities and the woman who hosts Dumarest can list off Earth's measurements. After an explosion damages the ship they have arrived on, investigations into the case show that there is a rebellion of the servant caste growing which one of the ship's crew is involved in. It ends up with the central computer being destroyed, which had been connected to the members of the master caste and with its destruction, the information on Earth had become lost, as well as the artist's skill.

Review: It appears like the author isn't writing like an incel, but like an alien having learned about humans from forums frequented by incels, because apparently women will regularly climax by watching knife fights in the arena. That aside, Shitty Romance (TM) galore, Dumarest could have really asked about the coordinates right away after having been told about the measurements and the reason why there were no children visible on Ath was never answered, despite that fact having been prominently pointed out. But at least, the plot is less erratic than in previous books.

Shadowkeep, Alan Dean Foster

Language: German (Shadowkeep: Das dunkle Land)

Synopsis: Practor Fime, a blacksmith's apprentice, is taking on the quest of defeating the demon king, who has taken over Shadowkeep. On his way, he picks up an anthropomorphic kangaroo, a not-elf and a lizardman and they enter the fortress, navigating past magical traps. They free Shadowkeep's original owner from his prison, who gives them an artefact to defeat the demon and tells them how to use the fortresses' transport system before fading into the afterlife. Arriving in the throne room, they fight the demon king and win, but the Roo dies in the fight. Using one of the magical artefacts they had walked past previously, they can revive him and go on to plunder the fortresses' treasuries, as their original owner is dead, anyway.

Review: A very straightforward fantasy quest story with little beyond the usual tropes. I am used to better stories by the author, but then again, it is tied to an old computer game by the same title and those weren't known for their stellar plots.

Planet of the Japes, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: After a hacking attack had emptied their bank account and unlocked a part of Mech's memory not accessible by himself, Space Team flies to the coordinates marked on the map which had become unlocked. They arrive at a planet called Funworld, a gigantic, run-down theme park, curiously discovering a man in the queue, who is apparently an acquaintance of Cal and willing to pay their entry fee. Once inside, they find out that clown-shaped biobots have taken over the theme park after having slaughtered the visitors. Navigating into the more dangerous parts of the park to reach the mark that leads into the planet's core, they encounter a clown who is not murderous, revealing that Mech had let the planet build as a prison for a mass murderer, shortly before the man reveals himself as someone who plans to free the mass murderer and used the Space Team to get past the murderclowns. They supposedly manage to take down the ship and deliver the mass murderer's prison to the new president, but the end reveals that the man survived.

Strange Love, Ann Aguirre

Language: English

Synopsis: Having arrived at his last chance to get a mate and escape the fate of becoming a drone, Zylar attempts to get a partner of a different species. The place he lands on is more than strange and assuming that something horrid had happened to the place, he grabs what's there and flies off. The two individuals he grabbed are Beryl Bowman and her dog Snaps, who both receive translators and are introduced to Zylar's home planet and the competition Beryl and him are supposed to participate in to become accepted as mates. Beryl excels in the challenges primarily by cooperating with the Greenspirit Kurr, but after rejecting the advances of Zylar's far more successful and physically attractive brother Ryzven, the challenges get significantly harder, ultimately ending in Kurr's intended partner's death. An arena fight then has Snaps interfere, which leads to repercussions decided for later and in that time, Beryl agrees to participate in Kurr's plan of revenge by pretending to agree to Ryzven's advances, while Zylar, in an attempt to play his role as the depressed reject, comes into contact with Ryzven's mate and warns her that she might be in danger. All of it converges on one of Ryzven's parties, where Kurr kills him with toxic spores and his mate sprinkles drugs on him to make it look like it was an overdose and to make sure the body is timely processed without much investigation. The punishment for Snap's interference is then decided to be a subtraction of points so they have to live in the settlement's outskirts, but their relationship is approved.

Review: I'm generally not much of a romance fan, but this one was actually good. The characters had more going on than just a relationship (Zylar having little confidence in himself and Beryl being at a dead end in her Earth life), they worked well together and the talking dog as well as the cultural differences were good sources of comedy. Also, it got pretty creative in the sex department, since the species involved are not biologically compatible.

Cycle of Fire, Hal Clement

Language: German (Der Feuerzyklus)

Synopsis: After crashing his plane and nearly dying from thirst on his quest to bring his settlement's books to their destination, Dar Lang Ahn is saved by Nils Kruger, a young man left behind by his crewafter being taken for dead. Together, they fend themselves through the wilderness until arriving at an abandoned city neither can explain. They are briefly held by a local village of natives, where Dar's books are taken away on behest of a mysterious voice, before being able to gain the attention of other planes and managing to sail to Dar's destination, a vault in a glacier. They return to the village to retrieve the books and discover the village abandoned, with the voice coming from a radio, a form of technology not used by the natives, as well as the rest of the human expedition chiming in onto the signal. It is then revealed that due to the planet's odd orbit, there is a cold and a hot phase, with two different biomes. The radio voice comes from a member of the hot phase intelligent species, sheltering inside volcanoes during the cold phase, which is born from the bodies of dead cold phase individuals and in turn, spawns cold phase individuals upon their own deaths in the onset of the cold phase, with select individuals living into the next cycle in shelters to serve as teachers. Nils wants Dar to survive and become a teacher, but fails to convince him, with the story ending with Dar flying off to his village to die with the beginning of the hot phase.

Review: A creative setting that would have been better off if explored properly rather than most information being dumped near the end; for example, animals of this world have a high regenerative potential which was only mentioned near the end with both predators and the intelligent natives leaving a part of their prey behind for it to regenerate, but never brought up during the travel through the forests where Nils could have asked why Dar insists on not eating everything.

The Quillian Sector, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: The Cyclan hire a manhunter to capture Dumarest, whom he meets by chance while travelling on a ship. Because the ship's mechanic, a tall woman, immediately throws herself at Dumarest and rejects her previous partner from the crew, the rejected man commits suicide by destroying the drive along with himself, forcing the ship to crashland in an ocean. Surviving on a raft made from emergency capsules, they reach land and manage to send a signal from the top of a mountain, with help coming oddly fast - it's a cyber's raft, where the cyber gets injured in the resulting fight and left behind together with the manhunter, while the rest of the survivors take the raft off towards civilisation.

Review: Shitty romance was extra shitty and the ending was kind of silly.

Web of Sand, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After having been surprisingly thrown out of their ship on a planet ravaged by sandstorms, Dumarest and the other travelers try to scratch together the money necessary to leave. Dumarest ends up in an arena to fight a sannak, a native species of armoured sandworm, and loses. To his surprise, he wakes up in a hospital, with his bill paid by an unknown benefactor. Later, when working as a knife thrower at a circus, he is approached by a woman (who immediately throws herself at him), who brings up a friend who might have heard of Earth. He turns out to be a fluke, but has knowledge of a way of getting the money necessary to leave: sannak droppings. Going on an expedition with the expenses paid by the woman, Dumarest and several others go out into a cave system where sannaks feed, finding a large deposit of droppings, but lose a man during their escape and find their radio destroyed, forcing them to go to the city on foot, being caught up in one of the murderous sandstorms in the city's vicinity. They barely make it through one of the air vents. Meanwhile, a cyber, sent there to collect Dumarest after having caused the passenger drop on the planet, comes to the conclusion that Dumarest has died in the storm and leaves, but not before killing the man responible for paying Dumarest's treatment and who keeps the woman in debt. The sannak droppings are sold for a fortune, freeing the woman from debt and earning both her and Dumarest a passage on the next ship.

Machine, Elizabeth Bear

Language: English

Synopsis: During a rescue mission on an old colony ship where the technology has become obsolete, Dr. Jens notices a number of strange events: temporary loss of connection to the ship, strange mechanisms filling out the hallways which appear to have been constructed from the ship's material by a gynoid, the only active part of the ship since every passenger still alive is in cryosleep. A separate ship o a methane-breathing species is attached to it, its inhabitants unconscious and its only cargo being a walking tank. Returning to the Core General hospital, where the passengers are supposed to be unfrozen one by one and the gynoid checked for her odd behaviour, more odd things pile up, like one of the thawed passengers having brain scarring and some kind of vorus affecting the station's AIs. As it turns out, everything is a part of a plan to expose illegal actions happening in the hospital's private ward: full-body replacements are being grown there, to receive the memories of their commissioners, a foridden action since those replacements have fully-functional nerous systems and therefore would be considered people. Hence the plan of the conspirators was to take one of these replacements, which had been discarded, implant into her fake memories and put her among the colony ship's crew, as well as inserting a virus which would let the station's AI speak of the actions in the private ward, but that virus had evolved out of control, starting to physically consume the station through the mechanisms from the colony ship, until the gynoid brought the mechanisms under her control.

Review: Mostly read it because of recommendations in regards to its Sector General homage. And that part was clear to the point of looking like plagiarism sometimes. Unlike Sector General, it focussed far more on AIs, which was a fairly interesting part, but unfortunately, the narration went off-track all the time to snap back without really leading back from the POV characters trailing thoughts to the situation at hand. This made the book tedious to read and unnecessarily long, it would be probably half its length if the derailing would be cut out.

Jondelle, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After saving a man and a boy from thugs and being injured for his efforts, Dumarest wakes up in the house of a physician, who owns a farm and is the mother of the boy. As usual, the woman throws herself at Dumarest, who wants to leave the planet on his search for Earth, but dies when the farm is raided where the boy Jondelle gets abducted by the raiders. With the money he had made by selling crystals he had smuggled out of a previous planet's mine, he hires a number of men for a rescue mission, which leads him into a city full of insane people that might attack them on a whim. In search for information Dumarest encounters a woman who is not a part of the settlement and wants to flee it, aiding him with his escape in return after they got information about the man who had taken Jondelle. As they flee, the floating raft is discovered and they get shot at, with several men getting killed and the woman injured. They have to patch her up in a farmer settlement where the boy's trace leads them to, from where they go to an expansive entertainment district. They find the abductor, Dumarest wants to buy Jondelle off him, but not trusting that he will receive what he paid for, he breaks into the building holding him. Returning to the city, Jondelle's grandparents had been found by the Universal Church as his caretakers.

Review: It was pretty weird how Jondelle's stepfather, who risked his life to protect him from the thugs in the beginning was blamed for selling him out just because he was anti-violence. At least the shitty romance stayed short in this one.

Zenya, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After a fruitless search of information on the location of Earth in the local archives, Dumarest gets approached by a woman to be brought to her estate, where he meets several of her relatives. After killing her brother who attacked him and being gravely injured during the fight, he gets told by her father to find a lost relative on another planet, going there under the guise of being a general, with the woman Zenya as his partner. The area he arrives at is at war with a culture that colonized the planet first, supposedly because they have massacred several villages, but the evidence for it is flimsy. Dumarest examines the case, finding more and more oddities about it, while several more massacres happen, in which it appears that people suddenly go insane and start killing each other. While the blame is still put on the other culture, now claiming they're using some kind of chemical, Dumarest actually contacts the members of the culture, further showing they are not to blame. As it turns out, the reason for the bouts of insanity is the local preferred crop, where a mutation has altered some of the plants to have that effect. The lost relative is found within a cave living among the blamed culture and retrieved, where he is almost killed by Zenya's aunt, who also had come to the planet on command of the patriarch, before Zenya takes her out. Due to this, the relative doesn't return home and Dumarest goes on with his search for Earth.

Review: This one was actually interesting, because of the mystery of the reasons behind the sudden destructions, with the original culprits being obviously not the ones who did it, although the reveal was kind of ehh when it turns out it was just a mutated strain of a common crop plant.

By the Light of the Green Star, Lin Carter

Language: German (Im Licht des grünen Sterns)

Synopsis: Just as the protagonist was about to save the princess from her prison in the tree city, a flying sleigh snatches her under his nose. Afraid that the assassins he had joined would punish him for his failure, he enters a different room, finding a number of magical artefacts which he takes. The assassin Klygon accompanying him decides to flee with him, considering his punishment would be worse. Leaving the city on their giant dragonflies, they get later attacked by a giant falcon, which curiously has a rider. The protagonist uses one of the artefacts to kill the falcon, but the attack causes them to crash into a body of water on the nearly pitch-black ground, where they wander around before being captured by a primitive people of worm riders. In their caves, they meet another captive whom Klygon doesn't trust, but who manages to prevent their execution after Klygon fails at his guard duty, which causes the caves being raided by giant ants. The tree escape, with the worm riders sending their god after them, the largest worm known. The worm catches up to them at the shore of a river and the protagonist kills the light-sensitive creature with one of the artefacts, a very strong flare which also permanently blinds him. They take a dry leaf from the giant trees to use as a boat, drifting to an inland sea and resting on an island, where their companion from the cave betrays them, leaving them to drown by the rising tide.

Interspersed is the story of the princess Niamh, who was saved by Zarqa, the last member of an immortal, telepathic species of winged humanoids, and Janchan, a prince. They also took the goddess Arjala with them, to save her from the fire that broke out in the tree city. They get captured by falcon riders, brought into a floating city where they are to be used as guinea pigs for immortality experiments; most peopel die, but it had been successful on an old philosopher who supposedly died a millennium ago. Zarqa manages to control one of the scientists to unlock his cage, frees Janchan and Arjala who had been isolated from the rest for experiments and retrieves Niamh and the philosopher as well, but all of them are too heavy for the sleigh. A solution is found by taking one of the falcons, to be steered by the mind-controlled scientist and carrying the two women. As they leave the city, they are pursued and Zarqa gets knocked out, breaking the mind control, with the scientist then steering the falcon away to have Arjala all for himself, whom he had become obsessed with, flying past the island where the protagonist and Klygon are trapped on.

Review: So far, my favourite planetary romance, as I like the giant tree setting and despite me picking up the middle of five books, the events of the previous two were summarized at the start and there were no unexplained terminologies thrown left and right like in the Kregen books. The two separate storylines were both interesting. The only part I didn't like much was Arjala's character development, as someone as insufferably arrogant as her wouldn't just shrug and act normally after her worldview had been shattered like that.

Eloise, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Cyclan hot on his heels, Dumarest hires a rustbucket of a spaceship to go on a random course, but it ends up in a warp field, throwing them into a random area to crash on an icy planet. With most of the crew dead save for the minstrel Arbush, they try to brave the icy wasteland, until encountering a city. Saved at the last moment from a fall off the cliffs surrounding the city, they are brought inside to be patched up. It appears like an utopia with all needs provided, supervised by robots and everything controlled by a supercomputer. There, a woman named Eliose immediately throws herself at Dumarest, much to the chagrin of a friend who had saved her life years ago. One day, they receive numbers, defining their positions in a culling queue, with Dumarest being the first. They mount an escape plan, with Dumarest damaging the main computer and the others setting up distractions for the robots through arson, collecting supplies and antigravity harnesses to flee the city. Several days after leaving the city, a squad of robots catches up with them, where Eloise's friend dies, and the antigravity harnesses are destroyed because they're being tracked. On foot, they get picked up by nomads, which then aid them to reach a city in a warmer climate, from where Dumarest embarks on his search-for-Earth travels, while Eloise stays behind with Arbush.

The Bug Wars, Robert Asprin

Language: German (Die Käferkriege)

Synopsis: The book follows Rahm, a Tzen warrior, through the titular Bug Wars. It begins with the first mission fighting the wasps, then getting abandoned with a few other survivors on the planet to fend for themselves, being picked up later and entering a mission to find a natural predator for the hoppers on their home planets and discovering the ants, a so-far unknown type of bug, and lastly leading an attack on several ant hives.

Review: The good part: The Tzen are fairly interestingly designed, being naturally colourblind (but breeding specimens with colour vision in the course of the story), having a sleep cycle tied to eating rather than tiring out or a caste system. The bad part is that the blurb looked more exciting than the story itself, which lacked any commentary or subversion the blurb had suggested, but was a straightforward tale of one warrior in a war.

State of the Art, Iain M. Banks

Language: English

Synopsis: A collection o several short stories more or less tied into the Culture setting, consisting of an assassination of a political figure by a reluctant person blackmailed into the job, a tree doing a "she loves me, she loves me not" with an astronaut's appendages, the self-destruction of the United States through a malfunctioning trash teleporter and a number of Culture people landing on Earth to research the local populace.

Review: I must say, I prefer Bank's short stories over the longer ones, especially considering my usually gripes are absent in them. And the tree story was genuinely funny.

Die Töchter des Drachen, Wolfgang Hohlbein

Language: German

Synopsis: After her town has been burnt to the ground by dragons and her being the only survivor, a stranger tells to a girl the story of Talianna, who had started out just as her: one of the few survivors of a dragon attack. She joined the mercenary band that followed the dragons, married its leader then killed him to take control, to use her position to uncover the secret of the dragons and their riders razing settlements who had discovered any form of technological progress. Her search brings her and her two turtleman bodyguards to a tower in a desert, where they uncover that the dragonriders are perfectly fine with using higher technology themselves. Later her search brings her and her surviving bodyguard to a town at the edge of the Shelf, where she wants to find Karan, a man who had been at the bottom of the Shelf and returned alive. She manages to make enemies both out of the leader of the Daughters of Dragons as well as Agella, the leader of a crime gang, before taking the latter as a hostage and gliding down the shelf on Karan's winged boat. Attacked by a dragon rider, they crash into the forest below. Talianna notices that there is something strange about Karan, with the forest's monstrous fauna avoiding him. It is revealed that he is barely more than a copy of the original man, his body having long been absorbed by the fungoid mass that inhabits the ground. As she finds the spire where the Daughters of the Dragon are supposed to have their headquarter, she lets herself be taken after letting herself be deliberately infected with the fungal mass. Inside, she is told that the reason for the Daughters of the Dragon suppressing technologcal progress is that there have been nine cataclysms brought by technology already, which had altered and decayed the world to the state it currently is, and that the real rulers of the world are the giant arthropods, with those outside everywhere being the drones controlled by the massive queen living under the spire. Talianna lets herself be devoured by the swarm, which releases the fungus and kills the spires inhabitants, with only Angella and the turtleman Hrhon surviving, while Talianna is reshaped into a fungal copy like Karan. With the tale concluded, it is revealed that the narrator was Angella all along, and the girl is offered to join her on her mission.

Review: It had an above-average number of typos, which was pretty weird for not even being a first edition. That aside, the premise of a fantasy world being kept technologically stagnant to prevent yet another environmental catastrophe was interesting, but the conclusion was frustrating: Sometimes, stories present questions which should be explored in depth and nuance, even with accepting an uncomfortable answer if necessary, but instead, it is answered with a stupid "fuck you" and killing the one who asks that question just to avoid the uncomfortable answer.

Jack of Swords, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After killing and butchering an expensive animal with a group of starving men, Dumarest is held accountable for the deed. ending up in the proximity of an older woman suffering from a disease who is part of the owner's family, he travels with a group of other people to a legendary planet within a nebula, which is impassable without the proper aid, which in this case, is a blind woman created in a laboratory who can see energy auras. Once on the planet, they find it uninhabitated with only a completely enclosed city and artificially-created vegetation being present. Once they make it inside with the help of the blind woman, they find out that the legendary treasure the city is supposed to hold is a room full of mist, which causes hallucinations of one's biggest desires. And in a way, it does what the survivors had come from- the elderly woman is lost in the mist to live her perfect life and the woman who wanted money to find her lost daughter finds out it is the blind woman, who had been abducted and altered.

Lord of the Spiders, Michael Moorcock

Language: German (Der Herr der Spinnen)

Synopsis: Michael Kane returns to Mars of the past, finding himself in an unknown area and wondering if he had missed the time he had been taken from. He runs into the giant Hool Haji, who is unexpectedly friendly, belonging to a culture separate from the one Kane had fought previously. Brought to his village that is under the control of an evil king, they plan a revolution, but the village is attacked and massacred because of a rejected woman tattling. Kane, Hool Haji and several other survivors go through a desert on their escape, finding a ruin with advanced technology, probably left behind an extinct precursor race. The materials there allow them to build a balloon, which is caught up in a storm and blown over the ocean to a different continent. Hool Haji gets abducted there and Kane follows the trail to an odd building in the jungle, which is inhabited by spider-human hybrids and their leader, a giant spider, which wants to eat them both. They manage to escape and kill the spider, which tears her underlings to shreds while dying. Flying back to the continent of the origin, they hatch a plan to get rid of the king, using the balloon to their advantage. Kane flies out to search for remaining soldiers, but gets attacked and downed by a large flying animal. Off track, he encounters ships with humans, belonging to a nation allied with the one Kane had fought for during his previous visit, realizing he is in the right timeline after all and the woman he loves being alive. Unfortunately, the two nations are at the brink of war, engineered by the lies of a witch. To prevent it, Kane tries to abduct the witch and by chance, succeeds through accidentally uncovering an ancient artefact in the treasure chamber which paralyzes onlookers and forces them to tell only the truth. Grabbing both witch and shield, he flies to the battlefield and stops the fight at the last minute, celebrating the peace with a marriage of his love. Later, using the technology in the desert ruin, Kane builds a teleporter that allows him to move between Earth and Mars as he pleases.

Review: A pretty typical planetary romance, with the only unusual aspect being that the protagonist is nicer than average. The title is a bit strange, though - the spider episode felt pretty random and had little consequences for the story at large.

Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After hiring as a mercenary to an army that lost the battle, Dumarest is taken prisoner and roped into stealing cargo together with a woman called Dephine. The theft goes awry and as it turns out in the ship, the stolen cargo were corpses, dead from a plague which then infects the crew and passengers. Dumarest and Dephine are the only survivors, with Dephine having a natural immunity and being able to extract a vaccine from her own blood to save Dumarest's life. Arriving on Dephine's home planet, Dumarest is introduced to a tradition-valuing society and a boy with a crippled leg who claims to have found a cave with ancient artefacts, which makes Dumarest think that they are from the original settlers and might point towards the location of Earth. Travelling there, Dumarest indeed manages to find a spectrogram of the Sun, but is also attacked by one of the predators the society hunts for trophies. The boy is knocked unconscious in the fight, but Dumarest manages to kill it and suggest to the boy that he was the one who took it out, earning him the recognition he was striving for. As he was about to depart, Dephine throws herself at him and drags him off to an estate to spend time until the ship Dumarest wants to take departs, but as it turns out, she is actually working for the Cyclan and dies in the resulting altercation.

Review: On one hand, the part with the heist and the resulting plague on the ship was interesting, although Dumarest's plot armour showed too well there. On the other hand, Dephine is mind-numbingly frustrating. Being pretty smart and competent in one scene, then abysmally dumb in the next. And ending like any prominent woman who isn't just there for shitty romance, as any woman with thoughts beyond getting on Dumarest's dick is cooperating with the Cyclan and evil, apparently.

Haven of Darkness, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: With the Sun's spectrogram now in his possession, Dumarest attempts to search a database for a match, but can't afford the fee to it, following an advice of asking a hobbyist to look into it. Before finding a match, the man is murdered and the death apparently being used to frame Dumarest as the murderer, he has to flee and ends up on a ship together with a Cyber, having walked straight into the trap. To his luck, he has yet another set of Affinity Twin syringes and manages to take control of the navigator, then kills and ejects the Cyber while hiding his own body in a crate of cargo, leaving it on the next planet the ship lands on, then commits suicide by ejecting himself and returning his consciousness to his original body. The planet he landed on has the feature of two suns causing hallucinations of deceased people when they overlap and of a second intelligent species, which rules the night and is for the most part assumed to be a myth. A woman, betrothed to a man who plans to rule the planet's society, throws herself at Dumarest, and he is roped into stopping her betrothed's plans. They visit his base with its mercenaries, but while getting back, their raft crashed because of sabotage, forcing them to stay a night outside and discovering that the second intelligent species is real, apparently creating modular bodies with one winged form attacking any human outside after dark. Making it back, Dumarest leads an attack on the base, managing to kill its leader and earning possession of his land.

Prison of Night, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: After having gained the lands of Gydapen and Lavinia at his side, Dumarest is considering to sell the lands to use the money for travel on his search for Earth. As it turns out, Gydapen had an illegitimate son who claims the land and wants to conquer it by force. Fighting ensues, and Dumarest tries to end the conflict by contacting the Sungari by entering a cave. He manages to convince them to aid in return for some adjustments to the pact that would benefit them more and is shown in return how the Sungari have their eyes and ears practically everywhere, killing Roland without much issue.

Review: Interesting to see a book that directly continues the story of a previous one, which was a good decision since some of them had ended in situations the consequences of which had not been shown (like how he went back to travelling after having agreed to stay with one of the women that throw themselves at him on a regular basis or how he oriented himself after being teleported to a random location by Thormyle).

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Language: English

Synopsis: After the Firefall, an event of a number of alien probes falling through Earth's atmosphere, a ship is sent to a previously-unknown faraway gas giant to find a camouflaged construct circling it, unclear whether it is alive or a machine. As it is examined, something the living staff has to do itself since every drone sent in got disabled shortly after and under great risk due to the construct's internal radiation and magnetic fields messing with their bodies and brains, a few of its "inhabitants" could be captured alive.Attempts to communicate with the constructs as well as tests done on the captured entities leads the team to a horrifying realisation: this alien life is hyperintelligent, but completely devoid of self-awareness, apparently having evolved out of it for more efficiency and the aspects of humanity's signals that are tied to self-awareness like art could only be interpreted as a waste of bandwith in the context of an attack. In the end, it's POV character Siri Keeton is the only one who makes it out alive in a pod sent back to Earth, as the ship collides with the structure in an atttempt of mutual destruction, which outcome remains ambiguous.

Review: There is a lot of concepts regarding consciousness, different mental conditions like blindsight or Cotard's delusion being discussed in the story and it is recommended to look them up alongside reading the book. The whole idea of self-awareness being actually detrimental to intelligence is an interesting core idea to base the story on (I would propose that self-awareness is necessary for the way behaviour is regulated in animals: it is not needed to remove your hand from the fire, but needed to not place the hand in the fire again). A downside is that the descriptions are employing similes to such a degree it is often hard to make out what is actually happening.

Incident on Ath, E. C. Tubb

Language: English

Synopsis: Saving a woman who is searching for a specific painter from some thugs, Dumarest joins in her search once seeing a painting depicting Earth's moon. The settlement that artist is on is unusual, as it is full of people engaging in different activities and the woman who hosts Dumarest can list off Earth's measurements. After an explosion damages the ship they have arrived on, investigations into the case show that there is a rebellion of the servant caste growing which one of the ship's crew is involved in. It ends up with the central computer being destroyed, which had been connected to the members of the master caste and with its destruction, the information on Earth had become lost, as well as the artist's skill.

Review: It appears like the author isn't writing like an incel, but like an alien having learned about humans from forums frequented by incels, because apparently women will regularly climax by watching knife fights in the arena. That aside, Shitty Romance (TM) galore, Dumarest could have really asked about the coordinates right away after having been told about the measurements and the reason why there were no children visible on Ath was never answered, despite that fact having been prominently pointed out. But at least, the plot is less erratic than in previous books.

Shadowkeep, Alan Dean Foster

Language: German (Shadowkeep: Das dunkle Land)

Synopsis: Practor Fime, a blacksmith's apprentice, is taking on the quest of defeating the demon king, who has taken over Shadowkeep. On his way, he picks up an anthropomorphic kangaroo, a not-elf and a lizardman and they enter the fortress, navigating past magical traps. They free Shadowkeep's original owner from his prison, who gives them an artefact to defeat the demon and tells them how to use the fortresses' transport system before fading into the afterlife. Arriving in the throne room, they fight the demon king and win, but the Roo dies in the fight. Using one of the magical artefacts they had walked past previously, they can revive him and go on to plunder the fortresses' treasuries, as their original owner is dead, anyway.

Review: A very straightforward fantasy quest story with little beyond the usual tropes. I am used to better stories by the author, but then again, it is tied to an old computer game by the same title and those weren't known for their stellar plots.

Planet of the Japes, Barry J. Hutchison

Language: English

Synopsis: After a hacking attack had emptied their bank account and unlocked a part of Mech's memory not accessible by himself, Space Team flies to the coordinates marked on the map which had become unlocked. They arrive at a planet called Funworld, a gigantic, run-down theme park, curiously discovering a man in the queue, who is apparently an acquaintance of Cal and willing to pay their entry fee. Once inside, they find out that clown-shaped biobots have taken over the theme park after having slaughtered the visitors. Navigating into the more dangerous parts of the park to reach the mark that leads into the planet's core, they encounter a clown who is not murderous, revealing that Mech had let the planet build as a prison for a mass murderer, shortly before the man reveals himself as someone who plans to free the mass murderer and used the Space Team to get past the murderclowns. They supposedly manage to take down the ship and deliver the mass murderer's prison to the new president, but the end reveals that the man survived.