Full disclosure: I received a free copy of The Cross and the Cosmos Anthology: Year One, from Frank Luke, a friend of this blog who is also an editor and contributor to the volume.

The Cross and the Cosmos: Year One is a collection of Christian science fiction and fantasy stories from the Cross and the Cosmos e-zine. As you would expect from such a publication, the quality of the stories varies considerably.

I was most impressed by a couple time travel stories by Kersley Fitzgerald. The stories, both about a single family, deal in very fresh ways with the old problems of temporal transport. The first story, “Saving Grase,” in particular, combined time travel conundrums with the kinds of mundane frustrations any mother who has tried to manage small children on an airline flight must be familiar with.

I also liked a couple supernatural westerns by Cathrine Bonham, “Souls Are Wild” and “Black Hat Magic.” They were pretty effective evangelical takes, I thought, on the old “he sold his soul to the devil” theme.

Frank Luke contributed three very good fantasies, set in a universe that seems part Norse and part Tolkien, but in which the Christian religion is practiced pretty much as it is in our world (how that works isn’t explained). Frank needs to tighten up his stories a little and watch for neologisms like “quite the woman,” but I got caught up in the narrative and wanted to know what else happened to the characters.

The bulk of the stories, I have to say, aren’t quite as good. Some of them were frankly preachy and simplistic, and most were weak on wordsmithing. One story seems to have been published before the author was done with it, because she inserted “[RUSSIAN PHRASE]” in the dialogue a couple time, apparently planning to look the phrases up but never getting around to it (unless that was a glitch in my electronic version).

I must confess I found it irritating that every single fantasy that involved warriors included female warriors as a given, as if ours is the only world in the universe where men’s greater strength leads societies, in general, to reserve the role of fighter for them. I suppose egalitarianism is so ingrained in our younger generation of Christians that they can’t conceive of anything else.

There’s some good stuff in The Cross and the Cosmos: One, and some disappointing stuff. Suitable for teens and up.

Years ago, I discovered a few mystery novels set in the yacht sailing world, written by Bernard Cornwell. Kind of like Dick Francis books with salt water. I scarfed them up, because I love a good sailing tale for some reason (maybe it’s genetic; heaven knows I haven’t had much experience in the field). Cornwell stopped writing them and turned to a more lucrative career in historical novels, and I’ve found very few books of the sort since.

So I was intrigued to discover Timothy Frost’s Final Passage, which turns out to be a well-written, well-plotted story of danger and deception, which pleased me much and only irritated me here and there.

Martin Lancaster, the hero and narrator, is the hard driving, upwardly mobile owner of an advertising agency in London. He’s also a bit of an idiot, or so it appears at the beginning. Because it turns out he’s badly overextended, and the loss of his major client sends him to the verge of bankruptcy. He also has a rash habit of making heavy bets on his own races, and losing them. A timely acquisition by an American firm saves his bacon, and also permits him and his brother to continue their plans to participate in a transatlantic yacht race they’ve been planning on. Continue reading Final Passage, by Timothy Frost →