David Merrill > Recent Status Updates

So, I think one thing that would have improved my internal chronology reading of the Cherryh Alliance/Union books would have been to read the introductory material in chapter 1 of Downbelow Station before reading Heavy time and Hellburner. While it's very dry reading, it does explain the basis for conflicts emerging in those two books and gives a run down of all the planets, stations and some of the ships.

I'm wishing there was more description in this book. I don't really have a visual when they are in the simulators or the pod, where they're positioned and what they are doing. I'm often confused by action scenes because of minimal description. Much of the book is conversations/arguments between people. I'm reminded of low budget movies that rely on board room discussions between characters to keep the budget down.

Cherryh has a way of sucking you in. She brings you in on one character you know in this book, then throws a mystery at you. Unfortunately, in both this book and Heavy Time it’s the same. What happened to Decker? It might have been better had she had it be someone else, maybe even flip the roles and do What happened to Ben Pollard. I’m sure she must have thought about that.

I read some reviews of this book at some point. I read one negative review by someone who didn't like it because there wasn't anything beyond 60's technology in it. I grew up in the 60's. I don't remember any pocket card readers, space stations, interstellar drives. I'm wondering what planet they were on in the 60's. It definitely wasn't earth. This may require further investigation.

Ended up starting this when I left Dead Mountaineer's Inn in the car. It grabbed me because the fossil hunting and discoveries take place in South Africa. Johnny Clegg's recent death definitely had me interested in that.

I'm a sucker for dogs in books. Lel is one of my favorite characters and central to the plot in ways. Lel delivers a gun to Glebsky and leads him to where she found it. I don't know whether this is a spoiler or not. I suspect it's a red herring. I should know soon. I like the kid, Brun too, who thru most of the book we don't know his or her gender. The Strugatskys throw a lot of curve balls in this book, thankfully.

For anyone who has read some of the bad translations of the Strugatsky's, this is a treat. The translation is smooth and moves along without much impedance. This one is completely different than others I've read by them. The part I've read so far reminds me a lot of reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. From reading other reviews here, I know I'll be coming to a major shift in the plot soon. I'm OK with that.

When I first joined Goodreads, I updated status as I went. I soon found this got in the way of my reading and decided to only do minimalist reviews of books. Then I found even entering the book when I started got in the way of reading, so I started entering books upon completion. This eliminated entry of books I didn't finish.