Nevil Shute

Anthony Fokker

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This one came to me from Amazon Vine, and I requested a review copy hoping to learn more about Fokker’s career in World War One.

Review: Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation, Marc Dierikx, 2018.Anthony Fokker

The key to this book is the subtitle. It’s a business history showing how Fokker the entrepreneur, promoter, and well-connected man, helped American aviation dominate the world after his own prominence as an aircraft designer was coming to an end.

If you are an aviation buff, you are probably not going to like this book. Dierikx spends a lot more time talking about Fokker’s houses and yacht than any of the technical sides of his airplane designs. He has already written one biography of Fokker and seems interested in using more recent material he’s uncovered to write a business history based on records in the Boeing Historical Archive which eventually wound up with Fokker’s business records from America. (Most of the ones from his European holdings have been destroyed, accidentally or deliberately.)

You get a lot more talk about lease agreements, stock swaps, and loan amounts than you do climb rates, airspeed, and cargo capacity. Continue reading →

After the End

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The well-done post-apocalypse story is a literary post-mortem on civilization. At its best, it looks at the wreckage of society to examine not only the workings of its physical infrastructure but the architecture of the human mind and soul.

Once upon a time, I read a fair number of these, but I sort of drifted away from it. In the last couple of years, by accident, I’ve read more than usual in the sub-genre.

Oh there’s still a lot of these stories published. But zombies have taken over the genre. Many self-published works seem to be survivalist manuals — not that anything is wrong with that.  Some of Dean Ing’s works fit in that category as does, to some extant, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer. However, who knows how many of these are badly written political screeds or how to manuals?

And I have little interest in YA novels. Even when I was the target age, I usually didn’t care for teenaged protagonists.

So, hoping to see what had been going on with the theme recently, I requested Paula Guran’s After the End: Recent Apocalypses. Continue reading →