What I've been reading...

Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold remains one of my favorite Libertopian SF novels. Like El Neil's North American Confederacy in The Probability Broach, you get to see Williamson's freedom-loving planet of Grainne through the eyes of an outsider, and therefore it works well as a story without getting ham-handed or requiring any chapter-long soliloquies. I've probably re-read it three times and, come to think of it, maybe I'll do so again here, shortly.

The kinda-sorta sequel, The Weapon, is a good novel that is, for me, only marred by what I've taken to referring to as "MadMike-itis": He spends two thirds to three quarters of the book engaged in world-building, setting up plot dominoes, and getting you attached to the protagonist, and then it's like he notices the back cover getting closer and so ohmigodalotofstuffhappensbigfinaledenouementTHEEND. Worse, the book leaves the protagonist, one super commando named Kenneth Chinran, badly broken and rather shabbily treated by the universe, with no real resolution for his woes.

Now comes Rogue, a sequel to The Weapon (although it is written such that it can be read as a stand-alone novel,) and when I saw that it returned to the story of Ken, I snatched it up in hardback.

I was very pleased. It suffered from none of the pacing problems I mentioned above and, even better, ties up all the loose ends for a character who had been rather roughly handled by fate in the earlier work. I read it in one marathon session and feel like it was money well-spent. Recommend.