Polka Dot Banner Featured Author: Bill Shears

Bill Shears, author of Kite, is currently the featured author at Polka Dot Banner, an online  writers’ community . Here’s the interview: Bill Shears Explains Hard Science Fiction.

Quote Varsonofiev, “the Stargazer”

“Who is conceited enough to imagine that he can actually devise ideal institutions? The only people who think they can are those who believe that nothing significant was ever done before their own time, that their generation will be the first to achieve anything worthwhile, people who are convinced that only they and their current idols possess the truth, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a fool or a knave….it’s a univeral law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914

Alan Furst’s Top Five Spy Books

Alan Furst

Master World War II espionage novelist recommends his five favorites.  

Oddly enough, it was Five Best spy novels by Charles McCurry that led us to sample one of Furst’s. We believe it was Blood of Victory. And we then proceeded to read then all .

Suggestion: read them in any order, but save Night Soldiers for last.

The Spies of Warsaw

If you haven’t read any of Alan Furst’s fine works of espionage starting with his latest will not be a bad move. Or save it for later and read any of the others in any order (with one exception.) Those who have read one or more of them will know what to expect, a completely plausible, minutely researched situation where an ambivalent (that’s not to say insensitve) main character is caught up in a critical episode leading up to or during World War II. In this case the time is 1938 and the place is the doomed city of Warsaw. Your hero is a French military attaché who finds love, as Furst’s characters usually do, while risking his neck for some possibly valuable bit of information about German intentions, at a time when the world was pretty confident that Nazi ambitions could be contained.

Once you read one of these gems you’ll want to read them all. That they are structually similar should not put one off. This one differs a bit in that the hero is not quite as ambivalent as most of the others. Our only recommendeation, repeated from an earlier post, is that you either read Furst’s Night Soldiers first, or preferably save it for last. It has more of an epic quality, and gives a definitive top-to-bottom look at communist recruiting techniques during the period. It does differ from the others in its scope, and may be regarded as close kin to the recent film, The Lives of Others.

Spies of Warsaw

Speaking of Alan Furst, his latest will be out come June ‘08. Click below for a good deal on the hardback preorder.

The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel

Alan Furst

Here’s a slideshow of Alan Furst’s excellent World War II historical espionage novels. They can be read in any order, but I’d recommend saving Night Soldiers for last.