Dr. Charles E Gannon was the Director of the Graduate English Department at St. Bonaventure University in New York until 2007 when he left to focus full-time on writing. He is part of a group of SF writers who provide guidance and advice to various US intelligence and defense agencies. His fiction includes THE TALES OF THE TERRAN REPUBLIC as well as work with Eric Flint on the 1632 universe, STARFIRE, and David Weber’s HONORVERSE. The two previous TERRAN REPUBLIC books were each short-listed for the Nebula award, and Gannon just saw the release of the third book, Raising Caine.  (You can read my review of it here.) He took some time to talk to me about the series. Read More

Beginnings by David Weber

Beginnings is the sixth book in the WORLDS OF HONOR series, edited by David Weber. WORLDS OF HONOR collects stories about Honor Harrington and other Honorverse character, often written by other writers. As Beginnings implies, these five stories mostly take place before Honor’s service in the Royal Manticoran Navy. One takes place late in Honor’s career, and explores changes to the navy of Grayson, a world with a rigid, patriarchal political system.

In “By the Book,” Charles E. Gannon provides some rollicking action, a cerebral mystery and a political coming-of-age of a young Lieutenant. Earth-sider — or “dirt-sider” as the in-syst... Read More

Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon

I don’t read a lot of military science fiction, and Fire With Fire is definitely military SF. It’s also an intelligence thriller and a first-contact story, at least part of the time. Charles E. Gannon’s book was good fun, but could have been forty pages shorter (limiting the verbiage of the talking heads) without losing anything, and the main character was a problem.

Caine Riordan, the hero of Fire with Fire, is a little like Jack Ryan from the old Tom Clancy books. Riordan is not a military guy; he’s an analyst, and a writer, or both. He likes to roll up his sleeves and get hands-on, though, so he has a lot of varied experiences. He’s a polymath; educated in a number of areas. Riordan is uniquely without attachments; thirteen years earlier, Riordan uncovered a top secret military operation on Earth’s moon, and was cryogenically suspended. His parents died during that... Read More

Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon

There’s no sophomore slump with Trial by Fire, the second book in Charles E. Gannon’s TALES OF THE TERRAN REPUBLIC series. Trial by Fire is a white-knuckle adventure, with revelations that lay the groundwork for conflicts in future books.

In Fire with Fire, Caine Riordan and the team from Earth met exo-sapients (we used to call them space aliens) and attended a Convocation. Sabotage, both technical and political, caused the Convocation to fail. Along the way, several attempts were made on Caine’s life, mostly authored by a mysterious man who likes to eat olives.

Trial by Fire opens with another attempt on Caine’s life at the base orbiting Barnard’s Star. Caine survives, but as he and Trevor Corcoran are preparing to head back to Earth, ... Read More

Raising Caine by Charles E. Gannon

Neapolitan ice cream with its three stripes of flavor, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, was a favorite in my house when I was growing up. Charles E. Gannon’s latest novel Raising Caine reminds me of that. Do you like rollicking high-tech military SF? Get yourself a bowl. You want multi-planetary space opera with unusual environments and nonhuman exo-sapients? Dish up. You want a book that makes you think about the nexus of biological evolution and social evolution? Grab a spoon, because this one’s for you.

Raising Caine is the third book in Gannon’s TALES OF THE TERRAN REPUBLIC, and to get the maximum enjoyment out of it, you should first read Fire with Fire and Trial by Fire. I�... Read More