What else are you reading - January 2023

[Seth]

Read some Robin Hobb a while ago and thought they were good, but it's taken me quite a while to start in on the Liveship Trader's series. I wish I'd read it long ago, I thought Ship of Magic was great and immediately started in on The Mad Ship and like it just as much so far. That'll keep me busy for a while.

[Trike]

Seth wrote: "Read some Robin Hobb a while ago and thought they were good, but it's taken me quite a while to start in on the Liveship Trader's series. I wish I'd read it long ago, I thought..."

It’s always cool to find a series you vibe with, especially one that has a dozen+ books in it. I did a super binge with the Vorkosigan series a few years ago like that.

[John (Taloni)]

Finished the fixup book Red Tide. It's a novella and a novelette from Niven on the subject of the Floating Permanent Mob from his early teleport-booth stories in Known Space, plus stories from two other authors. It was...adequate.

Niven passed the "inspired" phase quite a while back. He wrote this when he was 75 or so. It's low second tier Niven, but as it's Niven it's still readable.

The novella follows a new character blamed for the first floating riot, trying to redeem himself by figuring out how to contain it. The original stories in this vein featured a future LA that had enough real world to feel the actual LA while being well into funky SF stuff. This one is a little too painfully the actual LA with not enough freaky SF. I've been where he went and lived where he lived. The story is partly about the economic impact of new technologies, but it's not well worked in.

Followup story is about a teen girl who gets caught in a teleport booth loop just as they're solving the momentum issue (different parts of the Earth move at different speeds so if you teleport without adjusting you are moving fairly fast.) The teen girl is a student at the Cate School in Carpinteria CA. That's a school I happen to know fairly well. During my karate days we held summer "Special Training" there. Those are four day knock down drag out training sessions intended to break you down physically and build you up mentally.

Anyhoo, Niven wrote in, I think, N-Space about how he came up with the 40-mile-high Mount Lookitthat while overlooking Carpenteria from a bench on a high area. I have sat on that same bench between practices. It is indeed an incredible view.

The next one is a dog story by Brad Torgersen delving into the character of the man who pioneered teleport booths. Adequate, likely done with Niven's direct supervision. He's good about helping out other authors.

The last one is kind of portal fiction as a character finds himself suddenly transported into the future, in a way that explores the pseudo technology of the transport booths. This one, however, gets back to the worst of SFF. He's met on arrival by a sexually aggressive woman who handles him psychologically while aliens inject him with youth-restoring macguffins. Then she has her way with him repeatedly. Er, why must we? There was all too much of this in the 80s/90s as aging authors put in wish fulfilment. Or perhaps reality, as a con-going author likely had fans throwing themselves at him. There was a particularly puke-worthy subplot in one of the Niven/Barnes Dream Park books. Well, I guess it sells. In any event I find it distasteful. Not to worry, though! The woman has chosen a South Asian skin tone and body type, so her exploitation is okay! The mind boggles at deconstructing all of this. Then there is some barely adequate "big smart object" discussion, and a wish-fulfilment ending. Bleah. Adequate technobabble encased in blechworthy subplots.

[Gary]

I finished reading The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson. It is the seventh book of the Mistborn series and the last book of Mistborn Era 2 featuring Wax and Wayne. It is intimately tied to the Cosmere series and it will be interesting to connect all the dots between the different series. I am reading Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. It is the first of four books released in 2023 from the Kickstarter campaign of 2022 called the four secret novels. The novel is also from the Cosmere series. I plan to read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip next.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

I started reading the Russian Cold-War Era Science-Fiction classic:


Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky

[Geoff]

I decided to take a break from Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table to read Children of Memory. But then I realized that it wasn't released yet, so I started reading Shards of Earth instead. So far, so good... it's more good old fashioned space opera than I was expecting, but that's not bad.