Brett Cottrell

  Fair. I expected more from my first Heinlein book, Starship Troopers . The story gets bogged down in military minutia and I found myself thinking, "get on with it..."   As for the characters' philosophy of morals, it was oversimplified, hyper-masculinized (based on contemporary stereotypes) dogma attempting to justify what, in the history of the civilized world, has always failed - rule by the military. It must fail either because by its very nature it will get conquered from without or toppled from within due to the oppression necessary to sustain it.   I don't know if Heinlein believes all this, but his characters did. For example, the idea of no moral instincts. Sounds good, that we're born with a tabula rasa , but it isn't true, nor is it provable, and even if it were, it wouldn't prove what he thinks it does.   There is no moral tabula rasa . The ability to think morally presupposes a capacity to do so. You can preach morals at sea...

Spoiler Alert: This book does not Contain a self-important memoir. Equal parts Tom Robbins, Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde, Tom Holt’s Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages , is an insanely imaginative and hilarious read. There’s no point telling you what this book’s about, it wouldn’t make any sense. But, I’ve got to give you something.   There’s a pig who figures out the secret to transdimensional travel, a guitarist who gets turned into a rooster, a flock of chickens who learn that they’re really human lawyers, and a real estate boss who has no personal history but a knack for getting rich by eliminating the inefficiency of operating in only one dimension.   All this happens because somebody tries to cheat in a 700 year-old game of “chicken or the egg.” Cheaters never prosper, especially when they forget that lawyer-chickens revolt.   Don't mistake the humor for hollowness, there's a point behind the absurdity. A little Vonnegut seasoning. Th...