Tony’s Comments (group member since Dec 19, 2018)

Tony’s comments from the Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy group.

I have finished The Follies of Sir Harald, which I enjoyed. It will fill the Arthurian slot in my Bingo. Strangely, I seem to be the first person to write a review, despite the book being written in 2001.

I have started The Marvellous Land of Oz, the second story in Complete Stories of Oz.

Georgann wrote: "I also do try to look for books that are standalones,"

Standalone fantasy - that's very nearly an extinct species. There are a few more in the science fiction genre, but I can't think of the last time I saw a new standalone fantasy novel.

Andrea wrote: "Well, I had thought I read them all, but Frank Herbert's son put out another one so grabbed it from the library. Starting on Princess of Dune by Brian Herbert"

And I don't think he's likely to stop anytime soon

I have started reading The Follies of Sir Harald, a humorous novel that will fill my Arthurian Bingo slot.

Yes, I noticed that there were several differences. Some of which may have been due to the limits on SFX.

We have now passed the halfway point of the year.

I have finished The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is the first story in Complete Stories of Oz

I watched a few of the Cumberbatch episodes when they were on TV, but I do have the whole series on Blu-Ray, so I will get around to bingeing it one weekend.

I have finished Once Dead which has a plot that could have been a James Bond film and reads like a spy thriller, although it does have one major SF element. One issue with reading a prequel series is that some of the suspense is lost - you know the hero will survive and that the villain's world domination plot will fail - but that's a fair bet for most novels in that genre anyway.

I have started reading Complete Stories of Oz which is only the Oz stories by Baum, not any of the others. It will fill the 1000+ pages Bingo slot.

I finished Childhood's End, which I quite enjoyed. It feels less dated than many of its contemporaries.

I have started Once Dead, which is a spin-off from The Second Ship and the novels that follow it.

They are older books, but both the Elric and Prince Corum series by Michael Moorcock feature elven-style non-humans as the protagonists, and Moorcock is pretty good at making his non-humans different from humans.

I have started reading Childhood's End, which will fill my pre-1960 Bingo slot.

Barbara wrote: "Are you going to read The Redemption of Time by Baoshu....the (sort of) fan fiction continuation?"

I'm aware of it, but it's not high on my reading list at the moment. Apart from anything else, I'm way behind on my Bingo reading, and I don't think that will fill any of the slots I need 😄

I have finally finished Death's End. It took about 5 weeks due to work. Overall I enjoyed it, although I thought it could have been shorter - it did have a tendency to wander sometimes. It was a lot more speculative than the first two books, but that's not really surprising as the timeline advanced, and the author did generally keep the science within the bounds of what we consider possible.

It's not definitive that "anthology" refers only to collections of works from different contributors. The Oxford English Dictionary site does mention various authors, but Miriam's does not, and dictionary.com specifically mentions both a collection by various authors and a collection by a sole author as being anthologies. So I think it's YMMV in this case.

Andrea wrote: "Wonder if I can install a Windows 95 game on a Windows 10 machine...probably not...will see."

Check out gog.com - they have lots of old Win 95 (or earlier) games updated to run on Win 10/11. They have Myst, Riven and Exile.

Yeah, I feel like I've already done a year's worth of work - and June is our busiest month, so the next 4 weeks will be ... interesting 🫥

Welcome to June. Almost halfway through the year.

Almost half-way through the year and I have only completed 6 books on my Bingo card so far, so I need to concentrate my reading a bit more.

I'm about a quarter of the way through Death's End and, so far, I think it's the weakest of the three. That said, I'm enjoying it - Cixin Liu is an excellent author.

I have started Death's End, which will complete the Three-Body Problem trilogy.