The Sword and Laser discussion
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What Else Are You Reading?
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What Else Are You Reading - November 2018
John (Taloni) wrote: "Dara wrote: "I finished The Fated Sky. My review. Spoiler: I loved it and I miss it and now I'm gonna go have some serious book hangover."Dara, this reminded me of a Twitter excha..."
Dear lord, that is so true that it hurts.
Ok, The Ruins of Gorlan made me feel really old. Argh, a kiddie book. With very few archery. To console myself now I am continuing some short stories from Kameron Hurley's Patreon collection.
Next in my list as well: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. Been waiting to read this for a while.
John (Taloni) wrote: "^Yeah, certainly Howard's work up to his death was high quality. Hard to say if he would have built on it or drifted off to one-note mediocrity. I tend to think he would have done well. Howard star..."I really enjoyed the movie 'The Whole Wide World'. Bit of an indie and only really interesting to fans of Howard though.
Was reading The Long Earth when my hold on Skyward came in. I wasn't getting into the Long Earth, so I decided to start on Skyward yesterday and had trouble putting it down. Here is my review of the book.
Reading my son Assassin's Apprentice because literature...Reading Borne which is supposed to be SF but jumped he flying bear in the first chapter.
Iain wrote: "Reading my son Assassin's Apprentice because literature...Reading Borne which is supposed to be SF but jumped he flying bear in the first chapter."
Is this the literary version of "jumping the shark"?
Borne is great. It's NOT supposed to be straight SF, it's a cross of SF with the New Weird stuff than Vandermeer does.
Sheila Jean wrote: "In addition to Zeroes, which I finished up on Saturday, my November appears to be shaping up as follows:..."So I've made pretty good progress per my list in post 21. The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North may have broken my brain, but not in a bad way. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where it was going. (view spoiler) Regardless, I liked it. It prompted me to start The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August which has been on my To Read list for a while and easy to grab from Hoopla.
I liked The Monster Baru Cormorant, but it felt very much like a middle-book-bridge to more to come.
I just started The Grey Bastards last night, I think I read the first 5 pages, but Rogue Protocol came in off of hold from the library, so I might switch to that. I have some airport/airplane time over the next couple days and my e-reader is more travel friendly than the hardcover of The Grey Bastards.
Rick wrote: "Borne is great. It's NOT supposed to be straight SF, it's a cross of SF with the New Weird stuff than Vandermeer does."The book is fine, so far, just no need for a bear that is bigger than a blue whale that floats there. The story works just as well without it. I will review the opinion at the end of the book.
It does bring to mind this What-If strip on the number of people a T-Rex needs to eat each day....
The new Peter Grant novel Lies Sleeping just arrived in my Kindle so I'll ditch everything and probably will not lie sleeping tonight.
Started Lovecraft Country on my journey to catch up. Ideally I'd like to be back on pace before the end of the year but I keep starting non-S&L books so we'll see.Along that vein I started Consider the Lobster and Other Essays to continue down the essays path. I've had some friends recommend Infinite Jest so I figured this would be a good intro to DFW before committing to a book large enough to use as a stool.
Silvana wrote: "The new Peter Grant novel Lies Sleeping just arrived in my Kindle so I'll ditch everything and probably will not lie sleeping tonight."US Kindle customers have to wait until Nov 20
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Mark wrote: "Silvana wrote: "The new Peter Grant novel Lies Sleeping just arrived in my Kindle so I'll ditch everything and probably will not lie sleeping tonight."US Kindle customers have to ..."
Yeah, that really sucks :( I hope the audiobook comes out the same day.
Mark wrote: "Silvana wrote: "The new Peter Grant novel Lies Sleeping just arrived in my Kindle so I'll ditch everything and probably will not lie sleeping tonight." ..."Funny thing . . .
A couple of years ago I was given volume 1 in dead tree format - and promptly went and bought all the others in the Kindle . . .
But today I followed your link and found that the cost was £9.99 - so I looked back on my Amazon account and found they used to be £4.99 or £5.99.
Now I can understand that a successful series might justify a bit of a price increase, and time has passed so prices are bound to have risen slightly - but this is just greedy. I don't know whether the greedy bastard I should be swearing at is Ben Aaronovitch or his publisher (Gollancz) - and I suspect it is them - but one or the other deserves my contempt.
Any other comments?
@Alan, didn't he get a new publishing deal in the whole "Midnight Riot" fiasco?
Alan wrote: "Mark wrote: "Silvana wrote: "The new Peter Grant novel Lies Sleeping just arrived in my Kindle so I'll ditch everything and probably will not lie sleeping tonight." ..."Funny thin..."
Not sure having the new book at £9.99 on the day it is released is that expensive.
Lies sleeping is a great tile and I can't wait for it to come in to the library.
All the old books are in the £4 to £6 range except for book 6 which is 99p....
Listened to 14 by Peter Clines followed by its quasi sequel The Fold. Both books are set in the same universe where another Lovecraftian dimension exists and is seeping into our world. Now listening to Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia.
@Alan The trend seems to be to price the newer books where the dead tree edition is in hardback at £9.99 and then the price drops to £4.99 or £5.99 when the book comes out in paperback.For the record I'm 55% through it and not regretting paying £9.99 in the slightest.
Finished Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay and decided it was time to revisit Barsoom, so started A Princess of Mars. Hey, those books were both published in the same year! (1912, that is.)
I am completely ignoring Zeroes and started Skyward before my pre-order of Becoming came in. As I'm going to see Michelle Obama talk on the 25th, I'm focusing my reading time on that book. Though I preordered the audiobook, I opted to grab the Audible edition, which she narrates.
Finished with Lies Sleeping and it worth all the ten bucks I spent on it. Definitely one of the better entries in the series. Now, finally, starting Ka:Dar Oakley in Ruins of Ymr, which I hope could be next month's S&L selection. 3% in and I am mesmerized already.
Silvana wrote: "Now, finally, starting Ka:Dar Oakley in Ruins of Ymr."I really enjoyed that...be interested to hear what you think.
Today I finished Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis, which was interesting and crazy. 4 stars: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...I also just finished the 4th Murderbot installment, Exit Strategy, a rollicking adventure, also 4 stars: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I’ve now equaled my record number of books from last year at 103... except not really, as only 21 of them are “real books”, i.e. full-length novels and non-fiction tomes. The rest are novellas, art books and graphic novels. But that was the plan all along, so I’m good with it.
Mark wrote: "Our week long national nightmare is over! Lies Sleeping dropped for US Kindle owners this morning."Yay!.. I have to get the audio version.
Edit: Holding out for a few days on the off chance Audible or Amazon has a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal :)
Finished up the Conan stories. Very high quality throughout, holds up surprisingly well. Conan's always the same, but the situations he finds himself in vary greatly. Each story has a central premise that's different and interesting.The "Barbarian vs Sorcery" tropes hold, indeed, were invented here. Conan is always stronger than anyone else, and his sword can take on any magical being or object, or technological versions functionally equivalent to magic, like in "The Tower of the Elephant."
Howard seems to have been channeling Burroughs, as "The Slithering Shadow" could be straight out of the techno-magic of one of the city states of Barsoom, while the Cannibal trope of "Shadows in Zamboula" could be right out of later Tarzan. There's some fairly objectionable racism by today's standards as Howard takes care to note that the "good Negroes" don't practice cannibalism. I could just about see Tarzan's Waziri tribe coming through to help out, the stories were so close thematically.
That's later followed up by a female character with depth in "Red Nails" which even passes the Bechdel test. An earlier story, "Queen of the Black Coast," includes a female pirate captain, although her purpose in the story is mainly as love interest.
The world of Conan seems rather small and close together. Apparently one can ride from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan in a few days' ride. South American people mysteriously appear on the European continent. It's all in good storytelling, but a little amusing to note.
Howard makes what others would call "amateur" writing errors. He uses descriptive dialogue tags instead of the "invisible 'said.'" He also regularly repeated words within a few paragraphs of each other. Yet authors would kill to create a character as memorable as Conan the Barbarian.
The original works end with a short novel, "The Hour of the Dragon," which functions as a recap of high points of previous works. To the extent there's repetition though, it is sufficiently different to work within the story. Where other stories were one idea per title, this is really four in one. We see the culmination of Conan's years of battle in his strong generalship, second to none. It even ends on a Conan style capricious note in a way that assures the heir he never had within the previous works.
Overall a great body of work. Taken singly, each individual story works well. Read all at once, though, I wonder what happened to all those women whose affection he won in various stories. Did he just drop them? Did they go on to good lives with other husbands? Or did Conan leave a string of single mothers across the world? Hand them a bundle of gold when he got bored and went adventuring again? Yeah, I'm probably overthinking an adventure series, but enquiring barbarians wanna know.
John (Taloni) wrote: "I wonder what happened to all those women whose affection he won in various stories. Did he just drop them? Did they go on to good lives with other husbands? Or did Conan leave a string of single mothers across the world? Hand them a bundle of gold when he got bored and went adventuring again? Yeah, I'm probably overthinking an adventure series, but enquiring barbarians wanna know."They probably found a nice merchant or at least a less-wanderlust-filled barbarian to settle down with. I have to assume that even during the Hyborean Age women liked sex, and flings with random adventurers were common. Probably at least one settled down with Kull.
Conan’s “Sword & Sinew Solves All” reminds me of a D&D joke I read:
Wizard: One of these guards always lies, while the other always tells the truth.
Thief: Now we just have to devise a way to determine which is which.
Barbarian: [unsheaths battle axe, cleaving the head off of one of the guards] He dead?
Guard 2: No.
Barbarian: This one liar.
Thanksgiving Day in America was a good opportunity to read Sister of the Circuit - an Inkshares release I received earlier this year but hadn't picked up yet. A fun story that brings together a future AI and virtual world in the familiar landscape of Southern California.
Joseph wrote: "On to Warlord Of Mars."Awesome. The first trilogy is the best, definitely worth completing. Following that I found the quality uneven but still worth reading.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Awesome. The first trilogy is the best, definitely worth completing. Following that I found the quality uneven but still worth reading."Agreed, although the wheat/chaff ratio in Barsoom is, I think, higher than in most of Burroughs' other series. The only real stinkers in the bunch were John Carter of Mars and maybe Synthetic Men of Mars.
Having said which, now that I've begun I'm committed for the full eleven-book run, stinkers and all.
Finished Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card. I've loved most of the Ender books and a lot of other books by Card but this one is pretty terrible. Right from the first chapter the writing seems choppy and amateurish and the dialogue is stiff. Also some characters who are supposedly amongst the brightest in the world make some really stupid decisions.As an aside I have to specifically talk about chapter 7 in this book. Card is well known for being against gay marriage and I often enjoy reading the views of people I disagree with just to see where they're coming from. In this chapter however, an old gay man lectures Bean and Petra (whom I believe are 15) that in order to find the true meaning in life and feel fulfilled by the time you die you must marry someone of the opposite sex and preferably produce children even if you're homosexual and have no attraction to them. His arguments seems ridiculous and illogical to me but somehow they convince super-genius Bean to do just that even though he was adamantly opposed before this. I think this would be a book throwing moment for a lot of people.
Finished Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds. I should love Reynolds since I like hard SF the most, yet he leaves me meh almost every time. This was no exception.This book is a sequel to The Prefect, itself a side-book to the Revelation Space series. He's trying to recapture the unreliable narrator aspect of Chasm City and really failing. Where that book was a slow reveal, this one has blatant hints and a villain-reveal at the end that only needed a twirling mustache to complete the stereotype.
There's a murder mystery with stakes that are way too low considering the mass death at the end of The Prefect. The amount of death under discussion here is on the level of what you would get from accidents given a population as big as the Glitter Band. Perhaps the Prefects would be more effective if they acted as traffic cops rather than detectives.
It's amusing that Reynolds is returning to the pre-apocalyptic era of the Glitter Band, the habitats orbiting Yellowstone. He seems to love the dystopian side, and the murder/death/kill of most of his books leaves me gagging. This time the setting is half right. I liked the Glitter Band as a concept, but the society is ridiculous. Not the "Democratic Anarchist" concept, go ahead and run with that. It's the idea that people living on a frontier would give up weapons and even the police force would have to petition the populace for the right to use firearms.
Another thing that took me out of this book is Reynolds' puzzlingly bad use of science. This is a guy that routinely gets relativistic travel right, and uses the latest concepts in physics effortlessly. Here he postulates a rotating habitat that is an "exact duplicate" of one on a planet, and the inhabitants are supposed to be whisked away and not notice. Er. The habitat is barely bigger than the original location, so it would have a noticeable curvature for pseudo gravity by rotation. Or if left flat, the apparent gravity would be different at different locations.
This isn't the first such odd error. In The Prefect the characters are thrown off by a sphere's motion since they didn't anticipate the Coriolis effect of its path within a rotating space station. Except that they were all raised in the Glitter Band so they would expect Coriolis.
Characters are otherwise flat, and the book depends too much on its predecessor. I read The Prefect a few years back and didn't recall all the precedents. Oh well, not worth a reread to remember.
I got the book from the LA Public Library. Four copies and not a long wait. Peter Hamilton books have more copies and a longer wait. Hamilton does ridiculous things like have the galaxy's central black hole replaced by the Dreaming Void yet somehow the galaxy doesn't fly apart. It's just that Hamilton's Commonwealth is much more enticing and his characters more engaging. I'm somewhat glad to see Reynolds doing more in the pre-apocalypse part of Revelation Space as there's an opportunity to show an interesting future culture.
Elysium Fire is just fine as insomnia reading. It's not good enough to go to the top of the TBR pile but is fine when you're low on books. If there's a third in this series I'll read it. Eventually.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...Rereading Gateway. I read it once as a jr high school bratling and I recalled I liked it but I forgot much of the book. So, time to read a good ol' paperback.
Reading The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell after binging the third season of The Last Kingdom on Netflix which adapts the fourth and fifth books of Cornwell's Saxon stories.https://www.goodreads.com/series/4358...
These are classified as historical fiction, but they don't seem much different from the grimdark fantasy novels that I've read and enjoyed.
Mod
The Singularity Trap - ★★★½☆ - (My Review)
To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History - ★★★½☆ - (My Review)
Zeroes - ★★★½☆ - (My Review)
Just finished Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. Such a fast paced and quick read. Another excellent novel from my favorite living author.
Thanksgiving followed by Black Friday, so the holidays are in full swing. What better to do than...catch up on some terrifying elder gods? After dealing with in-laws over turkey and stuffing, I think I'd rather Cthulhu ate my soul than do that again!I've read some Cthulhu Mythos and decided to read some more. I'm helped in this by the Wikipedia article based on Lin Carter's work that delineates the core Mythos stories. I'd already read Call of Cthulhu and Shadow Over Innsmouth, and those are really the best. Had fun with the buzzing fiends of Dunham and the Olaf-Stapledon-like earthly predecessors of humanity in Shadow out of Time. Dream of the Witch House may have been the underlying story for one of the segments in Lovecraft Country - anyone know for sure? Those and the others at the link below are all solid stories, and only suffer in comparison to the high quality of Call of Cthulhu and Innsmouth.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecra...
Along the way I am interested to find that Cthulhu stories are separated into "Mythos" stories (above) and "Cthulhu Dream" for a world only entered in dreams. Also, somehow one of the greats, Colour Out of Space, doesn't fall into either. Zu wha? A terrifying item falls from space and shows evidence of being made not of normal matter, plus dense New Englanders who don't have the sense to run when their environment is wrecked? What could be *more* Cthulhu Mythos?
Well anyway, from what I've read I think Lovecraft should be savored rather than read in one go, so I'm going to pause now. Look to Windward just came in and I'll read that next. Up soon, either the Dream cycle, or a mini-run of the "non Mythos" stories The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Halfway into Aurora. The first parts are excruciatingly boring. It does pick up but I think I liked Red Mars better.
Ctgt wrote: "Silvana wrote: "Now, finally, starting Ka:Dar Oakley in Ruins of Ymr."I really enjoyed that...be interested to hear what you think."
I am 1/3 already but will postpone the read for a few days so I could join the discussion next month. It has been good and unique, albeit slow. Love the voice.
I just finished reading Trail of Lightning along with the "Team Hooman" book club. Really enjoyed it. Now, starting The Fated Sky.
Just finished Zeroes. Wendig did his homework. I work in the computer security field and all the hacks were real and he mentioned some fairly obscure stuff. Definitely not "CSI Cyber" :) Loved all the referenced to old stuff too...BBSs, phreaks, etc. At first I thought the characters were all a little stereotypical and one dimensional but the all got fleshed out nicely as the story progressed.
I enjoyed the first half being better than the second half - thought it kind of jumped the shark, sort of like Daemon->Freedom, but it was a very enjoyable book and was great fun to read.
Just started Autonomous in audio + kindle
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The Sword and Laser
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I just finished Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan
And I'm in the middle of Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri. So far it's really good at world building and the characters are intriguing.
Next up after I finish Empire of Sand will be Queen of Zazzau by J.S. Emaukpor
Galleys in my pile to but won't be released until early 2019 are
Looking forward to tackling A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers Edited by Victor Lavalle
Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
Non galleys I'm reading is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister and I just finished America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America