What else are you reading - October 2021

[John (Taloni)]

One more for the "books backlog" of a recent binge. Rob Kroese's Titan, first book of an anticipated trilogy titled "Mammon." It's about the attempt to bring a minerals-rich asteroid to Earth orbit - an attempt that spectacularly fails.

The book owes a lot to Lucifer's Hammer, especially in the form of a slow motion apocalypse. But, this isn't the asteroid itself falling. It's the free-fall of an economy tied to anticipation of the asteroid's wealth as that promised resource becomes more and more remote. Imagine the falling rock of Lucifer's Hammer, but it's the falling dollar that destroys the world. A calamity seen a decade in advance, but every government colludes to increase its own power and coopt businesses to go along. Cryptocurrency provides some relief, but that can only avoid inflation and not the economic issues themselves.

Rob's created a world of tomorrow that is depressingly close to the situation of today. I could be reading tomorrow's headlines. And I reaaaallly don't want this to come true...

To my great amusement (modest spoiler) (view spoiler)[ the asteroid doesn't even hit in the first book. That'll be in the second. (hide spoiler)]

Besides the book itself, Rob is noteworthy as one of a new breed of authors. I speak of the low-volume, high-margin works enabled by social media. I got the entirety of the Dreadstar run plus the new work for $100 on a Kickstarter. $30 got me a Badger prose novel from Mike Baron. I was glad to pay, partly for the product and partly to pay back for the joy those works brought me in my younger years.

The double Prometheus Award winner Travis Corcoran put out a book "Escape the City" on farming for newbies that I bought into for fun - joining many others as that brought in $120K. They're all no-middlemen works that enrich the author.

I bought into this one on the Kickstarter for, IIRC, $30. It earned $23K overall. That's before Amazon sales. I'll cheerfully keep supporting Rob for quality product like this.

[Mark]

Trike wrote: "Brits seem particularly vulnerable if they know a vicar or live within walking distance of a launderette or either wear or are an anorak, whatever that is."

well, no wonder

[Trike]

😂

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

I finished the Russian dystopian classic


We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Rating: 3 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ruth]

Trike wrote: "I wish there were more mysteries that didn’t involve murder. I have a hard time equating the notion of “cozy” with the violent ending of someone’s life. It devalues both life and our emotions regar..."

The UK is full of little old (and not so old) ladies who just love to read about really gruesome murders. I don’t get the appeal of most crime fiction, tbh, but it sure is popular.

[John (Taloni)]

AngelFrancis1 wrote: "Start earning today from $600 to $754 easily by working online from home. Last month I generated and received $19663 from this job by giving this only a maximum of 2 hours a day of my life. The eas..."

Ooooh! So, I guess I can answer "Internet Scams" to "What else are you reading?"

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

John (Taloni) wrote: "Ooooh! So, I guess I can answer "Internet Scams" to "What else are you reading?""

In related news, I'm happy to announce that I just won the Google Lottery.

[John (Taloni)]

^ Cool! As for me, I'm getting some notifications that I must address immediately! Or at least so they tell me. Hm, I don't even *have* a Chase account. Welp, better give them my social and other identifying information so they can figure it out.

[John (Taloni)]

With the month's thread ending soon, may as well finish up with the backlog of "binge reading" books that ended about ten days ago.

So...

First up, two books from the St. Mary's time travel series. Books 10 and 11, Hope for the Best / Plan for the Worst. Both were enjoyable, but they do follow a formula and tend to run together. At the remove of a month I have a hard time remembering what happened in one of these versus other books in the series. There's resolution of a major plot point, but given the vagaries of time travel as established by the series, I'm not sure how resolved it actually is. In any event I'll be back for the last available one at some point, as well as the Time Police series once the trilogy is complete. And then there's the short stories...

[John (Taloni)]

Then read Inhibitor Phase. A new Revelation Space book, set after the main sequence which was presumably already done.

There's quite a bit to like about Alastair Reynolds and his take on hard SF. This one gets a little astray. There's plenty of orbital mechanics in the early part of the book, and relativistic travel that's realistic if you grant the engines. It's just that we get further and further away from the more realistic things Reynolds has set up. One plot point has the ship encased in a field that protects it from a hostile outside environment, shutting the ship off from the outside. But, it can still thrust. So...physics fail?

But hark! Read further and these are "darkdrives" that...don't emit any noticeable exhaust. What do they do, pull along lines of magnetic force? Just call it warp drive and give up if you're gonna go that far.

And speaking of these advanced drives: The "conjoiner" drives use zero point energy, plus propellant heated and shoved out the back. So not fusion per se, therefore no quibble that there isn't enough ambient hydrogen in this region of space for Bussard ramjets etc etc as some will say of Niven's best loved interstellar transport method. BUT: As we know from the short story Winter, the conjoiner drives are actually conjoiners who have agreed for one reason or another agreed to live in isolation, spending their lives balancing the unstable zero point. Soooo when the MC "blows the conjoiner drives" in an attempt to hide from the death-dealing Inhibitors, he's actually killing innocent people. So much for that part of his, well, redemption arc.

And then the Juggler Worlds, oceans that store the minds of those they choose. Why do they exist? Not clear, but they serve as a convenient Deus Ex Machina here.

And why the Inhibitors? If we believe the tidbits dropped throughout the series, a group of intelligences unleashed them before they went and hid behind some gravity gradients. Plausibly to sleep out extended periods of time. The given reason is that the Inhibitors are to keep newly evolved races from interstellar travel as they would get messed up when the Andromeda galaxy arrives in several BILLION years. Um. Lifespan of a yellow sun is about ten billion years so they're sleeping away a goodly portion of the expected existence of the Milky Way as it existed when they evolved. And, for that matter, if the Inhibitors were intended as zookeepers, well, they're kinda off their programming as they've been killing races that obtain interstellar travel. (Hell of a way to explain the Fermi Paradox.)

So there's lots to like about this book. Characters and situations from other Revelation Space books show up and some get really good resolutions. Scientific stuff abounds, and there's a great sequence about descending into a super-Jovian planet.

It's just that it feels like Reynolds wrote himself into a corner and isn't sure how to get out.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one thing that always takes me out of a Reynolds book. That's the obsession with graphic violence. There's always at least one scene of grotesque grossness. And Reynolds feels the need to one up himself. Not gonna front, I'm aware that his fans on average probably like the grittiness. I'm just not among them. In this case it's as if he said "hey, remember when I had a character volunteer to be tortured to death to achieve a greater good? Well THIS time it's EVEN WORSE!" Okay Alastair, *pat pat,* you're a toughie.

[Seth]

Ruth wrote: "I recently read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman which is a cosy mystery set at a retirement village, in which four septuagenarian armchair sleuths solve a real murder. It’s a cleverly constructed mystery with a great cast of characters."

I liked this so much. And the sequel came out a couple weeks ago and is just as good.