Troy's comments (member since Feb 22, 2008)

Troy's comments from the The Secret Library group.

I finished the book over the weekend and didn't dislike it but I was a little disappointed in it. I agree that the ending in the cave got a little weird. And the other events at the end got too predictable. You could see it coming a mile away that they were going to ride a dinosaur in to save the day, and that Marc would get together with Tessa and go native.

I would have liked to have seen more of a straight up adventure. Where the group tries to rescue the Russians and then fights their way back home. Instead of the weird alien technology taking over, I was thinking that the alien influence would be more subtle. But I guess that would be different book...

I did really like the setting and the ideas of how the US and Russia would go about creating settlements on Venus. The alternate history of space exploration seemed very realistic and made me think about where we would be if the space program had kept up the momentum it had in the early 70s.

The other interesting thing for me was how the book felt like it was written 15-20 years ago. Which I think was intentional, or it was an illusion because the copy I got from the library was so beat up :) I kept checking the copyright page to see that it was published in 2006.

I'm all for "Old Man's War". It's been on my to-read list for a while.

Kris, are you an iPhone/iTouch guy? That, or a Kindle, would probably be the best way to read a book in PDF form. I don't have personal experience with either but I know reading on a computer kind of sucks.

To give credit where credit is due, I initially discovered Shooting War when I heard an interview with the authors on the Dragon Page:Cover to Cover podcast.

Cool, this will be a good excuse to read the whole book now. I read about 5-6 chapters of the webcomic, I'll probably get the hardcover from Amazon to give the authors some love and compare it to the webcomic.

How about "Shooting War" by Anthony Lappe & Dan Goldman? You can get a taste of it at http://shootingwar.com/webcomic/.