Reader’s Diary

James L. Nelson

In this, the final book in the “Brethren of the Coast” trilogy, former pirate Thomas Marlowe returns to his old trade. Although this career move is somewhat beyond his control, brought on by declining tobacco prices and an encounter with an old enemy, he isn’t really reluctant to embark on a piratical voyage to the Red Sea in search of Muslim gold. Along the way he has to deal with a doubtful crew and the pirate “lord” of a pirate town in Madagascar.

Like the first two books in the series, this is rich in action and plot, but characterization is not neglected. Nelson doesn’t hesitate to put his main characters at risk But unlike most popular fiction authors, his characters get hurt and, in fact, a major character is… But completing that sentence would spoil the reader’s fun.

Alexander Fullerton

Everard returns, this time in command of a destroyer in the 1918 raid on the German-occupied Belgian seaport of Zeebrugge. The characters are well-drawn and Fullerton makes the reader care about them, but the emphasis is on action; in fact, there’s even more action and Great War navel technology in this one than in “The Blooding of the Guns“.

Alexander Fullerton

Nicholas Everard is a young British naval officer who, as the book opens, is transferred to a destroyer. His brother is an officer in a cruiser, and his uncle the captain of a battleship. It is May, 1916 and the three relatives are about to experience the Battle of Jutland. This is “Hornblower in the Great War” with a strong flavoring of techno-thriller. Nicholas Everard is in the Hornblower role and the “techno” is steam, big guns, and torpedoes. Only the first two books in this series have recently entered print in the United States, but I don’t want to wait for the rest - I may have to order the British editions via the Web.

Doron Swade

This is a fascinating book. The first half tells the story of Babbage and his “engines”, the second half is about the attempt by the Science Museum (of London) to build a “difference engine” to Babbage’s pattern.

Charles Babbage designed two “engines”, the “difference engine”, which computed - and printed - tables, and the “analytical engine”, which was a true computer (as we define the term today - in Babbage’s time a “computer” was a person). With government funding he attempted to build the difference engine, but failed, largely due to that fact the machine shops of his day were unable to build many precise identical parts. While precision was obtainable, exact duplication on the scale required by the difference engine was practically impossible. Building one would have required even more money that the British government sunk into the project. The analytical engine was never incarnated in metal, but its ingenious mechanisms would have performed many of the functions of a modern computer’s CPU, memory, and I/O devices. Despite this, Babbage’s work did not influence the development of the electronic computer, whose pioneers were largely unaware of Babbage’s work.

The story of the Science Museum’s replica - a project headed by the author of this book - is nearly as interesting as Babbage’s story. For parts of the project they had to extrapolate from what was known of Babbage’s work because, like his modern counterparts, he didn’t completely document his creation. Despite funding difficulties which echoed Babbage’s own money problems, they succeeded in proving that the difference engine would have worked, if only it could have been built.