Nancy E. Shaffer's Blog, page 3

Find yourself in it

I am still thinking about the season six episode of The Americans where the artist died.

One of the last things she did with her remaining strength was to scold Elizabeth about the artwork she had Elizabeth doing. I think in her final days, she was desperate to pass on her knowledge to someone, and her “nurse” was the only someone available. Elizabeth went along with it because her spying duties demanded she not rock the boat with that couple, but Elizabeth probably never saw herself as an artist before. Or ma...

Comfort food books

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

10/20/19: I’ve been in a weird mood lately with my reading. A lot of my recent choices have left me cold, and when those have been purchases instead of library books, that makes me gun-shy about buying new books. Also, I often buy books only to see them in the library offerings a month later.

So I’ve been going back to the books already in my personal collection, re-reading. With audiobooks, you don’t have to put a book down to walk across a room, or do...

172 Hours on the Moon

by Johan Harstad

Drivel. Horror fiction masquerading as science fiction, capitalizing on the fear of the unknown in space to eek out yet one more story of the human fear of the unknown in general. But this juxtaposition of the supernatural, teen scream movies, and the classic space exploration story just ends up being awkward and confused, never really figuring out what sort of story it is and what sort of message it wants to deliver. Other than “avoid any challenges or new horizons. Best to...

Erebus

By Ralph Kern

Disappointing. In the first book, Endeavor, Kern had exploration, new worlds, and mysterious ancient alien intelligences whose stories I was eager to learn about. In this book, we see a solar-system spanning society of our future, and an exciting, mysterious chase across varied star systems.

And it all ends with evil, genocidal aliens with the usual lack of motive? Yawn.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Aftermath/Starfire

by Charles Sheffield

What would happen to the Earth if Alpha Centauri went supernova? These books are good with the science, but don’t look to them for insights about human nature. Or writing.

Aftermath: So bad. Stiff prose, idiotic characters, and histrionic soap operatics that detracted from the story lines. If you still plan to read this, avoid the audio book version at all costs. I’m pretty sure a good fraction of my impressions come from that atrocious performance.

 

Starfire: One wonde...

Arrival

by Ryk Brown

This is a very slow-paced novel, with long descriptive chapters of ordinary settler activities broken up by heavy action scenes that contribute to the slow pace by being dragged out for chapters and chapters.

Great chunks of the planet description—the animals, plants, and challenges the characters face—sound so ordinarily Earth-like you wonder why it is classified as science fiction at all. Besides the obviously science fiction elements of the space crafts and space travel, the a...

Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

I enjoyed this more than the first book, Fluency. That book seemed mostly like an alien monster movie: Earth astronauts see a spacecraft floating in the Belt, fly out to investigate, and get attacked by giant slugs.

This book gives all of that context. We see the backdrop of the galactic power struggle that it is part of, visit different alien worlds and meet different kinds of aliens. It has a great twist.

The only parts that were less fun were parts that dragged ou...

OSIRIS_REx

Space is hard. Sometimes, the Old School folks–NASA, JPL–make it look so easy we forget that. We all “Ooohed” and “Aaahed” at the mammoth achievement that was the Juno craft’sclose shaveof Jupiter on July 4th, which put it in position for its regular orbits.

Then we cringed last week when new kid on the block, SpaceX, had the second disaster in their hit-and-miss history.

So I was pretty nervous this week when OSIRIS-REx,NASA’s long-awaited asteroid sample-return mission vehicle, saton a la...

Odyssey One: Into the Black

Odyssey One by Evan C. Currie

Evan Currie, Into the Black: Odyssey I

Normally, I’d say it’s bad form to criticize a book because it’s not the kind of book you want to read. The obvious answer to that is, “Go read something you like better.” It’s just that, I do read books I like better, but all Amazon ever suggests to me, based on what I’ve already read, is military sci-fi, which is a frustrating puzzlement, since I don’t read military science fiction, and don’t care for it, as a rule.

But b...

The Medusa Chronicles

Arthur C. Clarke brought us many worlds of wonder. One of his most glorious rides is the novella, A Meeting With Medusa. It not only turned one of the planets we can see with the naked eye into a place that is alive and complex, but the journey down into the crushing depths of Jupiter’s atmosphere felt real, because Clarke’s prose and his central character, Howard Falcon made it that way.

Falcon, half-man, half-machine after a horrific accident, is the first man who can descend into Jupiter’s...