Waves of Hawaii

Clark Little, a photographer in Hawaii, has some of the most incredible photographs I’ve ever seen.  He gets inside the waves – literally taking photos in the water as the waves crash over him – to shoot a perspective most people have never seen.  Check out his gallery here.  Blue Night is my favorite so far.  Sadly, I can’t copy and paste the images, else I would give you a taste to entice you.

Black Hawks From a Blue Sun

Black Hawks From a Blue Sun by Allen Farnham is the sequel to Angry Ghosts, a book I found on Authonomy ages ago.  It was published last year, and I was thrilled to get a copy.  Anyone who is motivated enough can find the review from when I first found it on Authonomy here.  Also, Angry Ghosts was renamed Wraiths of Earth when it was republished, so if you are just now discovering this very promising series make sure you look for it under the new title.

So anyway, when Allen emailed to let me know the sequel was finally ready (don’t you just hate having to wait for the next book!) I jumped on the chance to snag a copy for review.

Black Hawks picks up where Angry Ghosts left off, with a 3 man team from Cadre One dispatched to Earth using information about the planet provided by the colonists.  The team of Gun Thompson, Brick Argo, and Geek Beckert, all familiar characters from the first book, carries the hopes of both surviving groups of humans to make a permanent, sustainable home again.  Their mission:  find out if the alien attackers who wiped out humanity are still there.  No suspense on that point, we find out immediately that the blueskins have set up a colony.  We follow the team as they explore what is left of their ruined homeworld, which no human has set foot on for nearly 1000 years, and launch a guerrilla assault on the blueskins to reek as much havoc as possible in the short time available to them.  In the process we learn that there was also a Cadre Two, and that humans actually started the war with the blueskins.

Black Hawks is fast paced with a lot of action, but Farnham also takes time to explore the reactions of the individual team members as they encounter artifacts from a mostly forgotten past.  It is a good, quick read that offers a little meat to ponder while I wait for the next volume.