Daniel Keys MoranBesprekingen

A disjointed and confusing novel about the emergance of a new genetic line of Homo Sapiens. Telepaths, who appear to be the ancestors of time travellers. Who are popping in and out of the story and making things even more confusing. Story segments were not segued well and it felt very herky-jerky. I guess this is a series, but I won't be reading any more.

This was a good time to read, and I dreaded coming to the end because I knew that it was going to end without, well, ending. I'm hoping that three years is long enough, and that DKM will be bringing out the next book soon. I enjoyed this. It's not often, any more, that something holds my attention in this way. The best thing is that DKM has a handle on how writing code works, and how people think problems out.

If you are a fan of DKM (I am), or just curious about the book because of the title (taken from the first short essay), you should still get this book. I started reading the first essay, and was hooked until I'd read them all.

Full contents of the book below:

A collection of essays, short fiction, and screenplays by Daniel Keys Moran.

Essays

A Freeway In My Back Yard
The Road Goes Everywhere
The Vast and Endless Sea
It’s Great to Be Me
Motorcycles
Two Guys Talking about Cars
The Conduct of a Gentleman
Freedom Highway
For My Father
Queen Of the Angels
Total Information Awareness

Nonfiction

Speech to the Coalition for Networked Information (1995)
A Faster Darkness (1995)
Driving to San Antonio (1997)
Infinite Methods (2007)

Fiction

A Day in the Life of a Telephone Pole (1974)
In Cool Blood
STAR WARS: Empire Blues
STAR WARS: A Barve Like That
STAR WARS: The Last One Standing
Roughing It During the Martian Invasion
On Sequoia Time
Spiderman Kevin Stout Moran
Everywhere You Want To Go

Scripts

5-Minute Brick
Pasty D
Dream On: Another One Bites The Dust
A Moment in Time

Second of a series, it's the best written volume and stands well on its own. Mythical scope and language and unforgettable characters in mid-21st Earth and Luna.
Hard to find in print - author never made the big time. Digital versions now available however.

This was published while he was still writing Emerald Eyes. I wonder if he realized how quickly his life was about to change?

It's a remarkable first book. which I'd expected, since I was already familiar with him as an author from various short stories in the SF magazines. It has the feel and breadth of many of Hunter S. Thompson's works (unsurprising, of course), and it's still one of his best.½

The worst thing, the very WORST thing, about adding my books here, is that the list of things I need to re-read keeps getting longer and longer. The three books in this series (Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, and The Last Dancer) are in that group.

There's an upside: It's more of the Continuing Time, with Trent the Uncatchable continuing to be so. It has been a long, long wait for more of this series, and it's mighty nice to see more come.

The downside? It strikes me as too reminiscent of The Long Run, which was a previous long chase between Trent and the UN. Moran has been so good at coming up with dramatically different things. (The Last Dancer is *so* different from The Long Run, and in unexpected ways.) The Big Boost doesn't have so much of the "different."

In effect, it's a return to familiar territory, and I'm happy with that, as long as the followup gets to some keen new places.

The Big Boost gives us the return of Trent the Uncatchable, the greatest thief in the Solar System. After the events of The Last Dancer he is, in the eyes of the Unification that governs Earth, the most wanted criminal ever. And after laying low in the asteroid belt for several years, he’s decided it’s time for him to come back home.

With Trent in the spotlight, we naturally get a caper story: a good mix of drama and humor, leading up to a confrontation between Trent and his nemesis, Elite Commissioner Vance, whom Trent humiliated in The Long Run.

Moran’s pacing is excellent; the whole series keeps me up late turning pages.½

Another highly entertaining novel from Moran. This author has a real knack for fleshing out memorable and truly unique characters, and both Jalian and Georges clearly fit this bill. Moran also paces his novels well, building momentum that makes it nearly impossible to put the book down as you near the end. My only real quibble with the book was an ending that left me somewhat confused, even after reading it twice.

If you are a fan of fast paced scifi adventure stories, and you haven't tried Moran, seek out his often hard to find books. That's what abebooks.com is for, right?

A friend loaned me this many, many years ago and I've had a hankering to reread it (and the following volumes) but it and the others are out of print and very hard to find. I recently discovered that Moran has made a number of his books, including this one, available as editions on his blog. I downloaded them immediately and enjoyed my reread of what is actually quite a bleak book about the genetic engineering of a line of telepaths and what happens to them.

I thought this was a much, much better book than Emerald Eyes. The plot is big, complicated and compelling. The characters are better developed and more interesting. Sedon is particularly compelling--sociopathic villain and heroic Prometheus rolled into one. The A.I. characters play a small, but important role, that clearly leaves plenty of room for further development. Moran's ambitious, many-layered "Tales of Continuing Time" Universe begins to make sense, but still leaves many unanswered questions. After reading The Last Dancer, I can understand both why the series has attracted a fiercely loyal fan base, and why these fans continue to hope for the release of further installments.½

My brother-in-law has raved about the Tales of Continuing Time series, and after a few years of fruitless used book store searching, I finally broke down and bought two of the series at inflated prices through abebooks.com. This first book of the series is uneven. There's not much to the story, although several of the individual scenes are compelling, including a truly stunning car chase scene and a memorable final confrontation between the good guy and the bad guy. The protagonist Carl Castanaveras is an interestingly flawed superman, essentially serving a transitional role, bridging from a not-too-far-in-the-future post-war world into a farther-in-the-future world with mysterious time travelers, two surviving descendant telepaths, and a heroic hacker-thief. I assume that some combination of these characters will carry the story forward in the subsequent volumes.½

Trent, thought to be one of the Castanaveras telepaths that caused the Troubles and drove tens of thousands of people instantly crazy, is at the top of the U.N.'s most wanted list. The problem is, while genetically perfect, Trent is not a telepath, and just wants to live a quiet life as a master thief. Now that one of the U.N. Peacekeeper Elite cyborg officers is on his trail, Trent is forced to run and maybe, just maybe, pay the Peacekeepers back for the cold-blooded murder of everyone he knew and loved.
This book is fast paced, funny and occasionally thought provoking. It is a nice easy read. It is also my all time favorite. I actually own two copies, one is a limited edition hardcover. I have read this book easily over a dozen times.

This is one of the two better of DKM's books, along with "The Long Run."½

This is the third (?) book in a series that I initially hoped would go on for a good long time, but which appeares to have ended here. Which is a shame, because the books are good fun.