Leigh Kimmel’s Reviews > Fast Ships, Black Sails > Status Update

A dark and disturbing tale with a living puppet that could be Pinocchio's evil twin and a cruel woman captain who has been a slave at least twice, in a world full of cannibal tribes.

This one's looking more and more like sf. Are the whales biomechancial? References to blow hatches make them sound like machines, yet they have throats and nostrils and other structures that sound biological. Some kind of designed organism that includes features that are usually mechanical?

A story that puts me in mind of _The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle_ -- except in an alternate world where it appears Christianity never arose. The culture feels more Persian, with multiple wives and eunuch guardians, but we have recognizable English names. It may work as a short story, but probably a novel set in that world would run into trouble with fridge logic.

An anthropomorphic animal story in the tradition of Beatrix Potter, of a ship of rat pirates taking on the hamsters, and the pretty kitty bride.

Good riddance to the story of the dysfunctional ship. The next is the second sf story so far, of a Company Planet, organized crime as enforcers, and the people who are pushing back by extralegal methods. Now a historical of Drake's privateers in the Arctic.

The pirate programmers with magic rum was a rather amusing take on the Pirate Party, but I'm really bogging down on this log of an incompetent captain with an ill-run ship. I think I'll set this one aside for a while and see if I can muster some more interest in it when I come back to it.

This book has been sitting on my shelf for far too long, so I decided it's time to read it and get it back to the library. I liked the first one, which draws heavily upon the Lovecraft Mythos and is set in the Old Solar System where Venus is a swamp world (the gillies are apparently the indigenous sophonts of it). However, the following several, set in historical times with relatively light speculative content, meh.