Ryan
What do you get when you cross a buddy-cop movie with Lord of the Rings? A fun novel by Keith DeCandido, that's what.
A group of questers - a hero, an elf, a dwarf, two halflings, a priest, and a barbarian - walk into a bar. Sounds like the start of a bad joke, but when they start getting murdered, it's up to two detectives to get to the bottom of why, and what this has to do with another investigation into a bunch of bad black-market glamours going around the city.
The book reads a lot like a media tie-in novel; all the characters are put back more or less where they started at the end of the book, but given that that type of novel is what DeCandido usually writes, it's quite understandable. A good, fun, quick read, though.
An early cyberpunkish novel that had a good concept, if nothing I hadn't heard before - people connecting wires into their heads for the latest fix, mind and memory manipulation, a dystopian future.
The story's divided up into two time periods, but the story of each mirrors each the other so perfectly that, by the time the big shocking reveal comes about, you already can guess what it's going to be. Still, it was a quick read, and well-written.
One thing I always like about Spider Robinson novels - he seems to really love the places that he writes about. Sure, some of the characters here have some unkind things to say about Halifax, but it's clear the author loves it, and that shines through the entire book.
This podcast-only novel was something of a space opera, but not quite. It has a lot of space opera-like qualities - there's a lot of intergalactic travel without being too hard sci-fi-ish, some references to old naval traditions, and . What it's lacking, though, is anything particularly operatic. Instead of a grand destiny, or a quest, or anything noble like that, we instead get the story of a guy working on a ship, just kind of doing his thing. He's motivated to go to space mostly because if he doesn't, he'll get deported, and while he seems to enjoy what he does, and is good at it, and that seems to suit him fine enough.
What's great about this story, though, is that Lowell manages to strike at the heart of the fundamental nobility of that kind of a common, working-class lifestyle - that a simple life, well-lived, is something to be proud of. It's not a story that gets told often - a look in any bookstore or library will reveal a lot more stories about generals than soldiers - but it's a nice change to hear a story like this one.
I cut my comics teeth on the Marvel comics of the early 90s, right in the middle of a lot of nostalgia for 60s Marvel due to all of the characters experiencing their 30th anniversaries - as a result, the stories contained in Marvels are all ones that I'm very familiar with, and they're all stories that have been told several times since then as well. Busiek and Ross start with the debut of the Human Torch, Jim Hammond, in 1938, and continue through until the death of Grew Stacy around 25 years after that, which definitely does seem like a turning point in the history of the Marvel Universe.
What makes Marvels unique is the perspective that it takes on - our protagonist isn't a hero, but instead a regular, middle-class, suburban husband and father. Busiek's use of Sheldon as protagonist changes this story from being one about superheroes to one about what heroism means to us as individuals and a society.
Alex Ross' fully-painted art throughout the series is amazing as well. It's a tricky medium for superhero stuff - if done right, it adds a great sense of scale to the material, but at the same time it's easy for painted figures to appear. His paintings during the Galactus scene, for example, with the alternating of full-page pictures of heroes fighting Galactus with multi-panel pages of people reacting on the street tells a story just through page layout. Amazing attention to detail.
A team of research scientists have been illegally working on isolating the genome of the common ancestor of all mammalian life, with the goal of creating chimera creatures that can grow organs that can be harvested for human use.
As one might expect, all goes horribly wrong, and the research scientists soon find themselves hunted by the creatures, just as the largest storm of the year comes barreling through.
Equal parts Jurassic Park, The Thing, and Repo: the Genetic Opera, you might get a certain sense of familiarity when reading Ancestor, but Sigler's strong characterization and dark sense of humour are on full display here, which makes for a very enjoyable read.
The most disappointing thing about sifting through The Ashes of Eden is that, at the core of it, there's an interesting plot idea: that, after the Federation and the Klingon Empire have signed a peace treaty, there are elements within both governments that wish to upend the peace process, and try to bring Starfleet and the Klingon navy kicking and screaming back to the brink of war.
That could have been an interesting story. Instead, what we get is some of the most amateurish, unrealistic author-insertion fan fiction that I've ever read. A certain amount of that is to be expected, because the author spent 25 years, off and on, playing the main character, but there's so much more than I would have assumed. It's rumoured that Shatner had the book ghostwritten, but it's such slavish “Kirk is TEH AWESOME” that I can't believe that anyone other than him wrote it.
Star Trek VI, the final one featuring Kirk and his crew, is my favourite of the Star Trek movies, and it's a perfect send-off to those characters. I think they should have let that stand as a final journey for them, and never referenced them again after that.
A lot of science fiction literature takes a somewhat negative view of scientific progress, ‘cautionary tales' that point out the problems with scientific inquiry. I enjoy a lot of stories like that, but, when that type of story becomes too dominant within the genre, you end up with a very pessimistic view of things - I once heard an author refer to Michael Crichton's entire publishing history as “Here's a great scientific idea - AND HERE'S HOW IT WILL KILL US ALL.”
Fortunately, there are also books like The Collapsium, which take the view that the ultimate problem isn't science; if anything, it's people, who are going to be the ones to use science to evil ends. Fortunately for us, people are also the solution to all of our problems, because they're capable of incalculable acts of greatness and determination. Hanging between the two is the act of being human, the definition of which has been a driving force throughout all artistic endeavours since the dawn of humanity.
This was my first exposure to McCarthy's writing style, and I fell in love with it right away. At first it seems kind of flat and workmanlike, but then he has these brilliant little moments of wonderfully crafted literature in the middle of it, like the stars themselves puncuating the vacuum of space. The more I get into it, though, the more I realized that it isn't flat at all, but that there's a lot more subtlty going throughout it. I found myself rereading several passages mid-paragraph to make sure I got all of the nuance within it.
I enjoyed this book so much that I feel kind of bad that I only got it out of the library; I'll have to get a copy for my bookshelf some day.
The thing this book most reminded me of was Snakes on a Plane. When I first heard about both SoaP and Death Troopers, my first reaction was “That's an amazing idea and should be tons of fun! Why did no one think of this sooner?” Both situations ended up being similarly disappointing, though, although of the two Death Troopers was an order of magnitude more disappointing.
DT was disappointing because the only time it felt like a Star Wars novel was when Han Solo showed up, and even that felt kind of contrived (and seriously, if this only takes place a year or two before ANH, wouldn't Han at some point in that movie have said “Blow up a Death Star? Wow, that's almost as crazy as that time I had to fight a bunch of zombies last year”?). It was also disappointing as a zombie novel because the best (non-comedic) zombie stories are visceral, bloody things; this one felt mostly clean and antiseptic in comparison.
I still really like the idea of zombies in space, so hopefully this won't stop someone else from writing a similar (non Star Wars) book in the future.
I'm a big fan of Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series, so I was curious to try this out, but wasn't expecting to enjoy it all that much because I'm not much of a YA reader.
Really enjoyed it - it's Armstrong without a lot of the sexual/violent undertones her other work usually has, but it's told well enough that you don't really miss that content not being there, and the main character of Chloe can easily stand alongside Armstrong's other female protagonists.
The ending's a cliffhanger, which always bugs me when books are in a series, but that is all the rage for YA novels, so it's understandable that she chose to go that route.
And so begins part two of Fables. In which the citizens of Fabletown learn that everything has a price, and that sometimes there's nothing worse than getting exactly what you wanted.
A great repositioning of the Fables story, introducing an interesting Big Bad and pulling a lot of rugs out from under people..
Written is a very classic sort of 80s space opera style, A Distant Soil tells the story about two psychically powered siblings who discover they have a role to play in the future of the alien civilization they didn't know they were a part of.
ADS tells a story epic in scope while at the same time deeply personal. The plot is clearly developed, the characters are well-established; as a result, this feels like you're already several chapters into the book, rather than starting at number 1. My only complaint about the book would be that it seems like a bit of a kitchen-sink type approach; Doran throws in everything she's interested in, from Medieval knights to aliens to psychic powers, and I'm not entirely sure if it all fits together nicely. We'll have to see how she fares with volume 2.
Based on the cover art and the back of the book, I was expecting this to be a “Superman, Martian Manhunter, and Lobo” story. Instead, it's a Lobo story with Superman and Martian Manhunter thrown in as secondary characters. The main problem with that is that Lobo's not a terribly interesting character - he started out as a parody of the “grim and gritty” character archetype I generally dislike, and somewhere along the way became one of the leading examples of that character type.
Additionally, the plot was fairly pedestrian, and didn't really offer any new insights into the characters or their world. What the book did have going for it, though, was that I went in with very low expectations, and had been counting on it being nothing more than a book to pass the time with.
John Constantine's never been my favourite character. I like him enough in small doses (like in his roles in Moore's Swamp Thing and brief appearances in Gaiman's Sandman and Books of Magic series), but I've never found him interesting enough to be a protagonist.
I do have a fondness for haunted house stories, though, especially when elements of reality TV are thrown in the mix (van Belkom's Scream Queen, the Halloween: Resurrection film), and this one seemed to have some shades of Whedon's Dollhouse thrown in as well, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
It's a fairly good story - Rankin knows how to lure a reader in by giving them just enough information that they can start to draw their own conclusions, but not so much that you guess where everything's going. The art is, for the most part, servicable but not anything special, aside from one nice little trick with the colouring of the page borders after a certain key plot point. I suppose that when you've lured in a novelist as popular as Rankin, of course, the art becomes a secondary concern.
The one thing I really didn't understand about this book is that it's a launch title for the new “Vertigo Crime” sub-imprint ... but it's not really a crime story at all, just a typical Vertigo-type story told by an established crime author. I really hope that's not going to be typical of the VC line.
Prequels are a tricky business. We already know the ultimate fates of the characters featured in them, so a lot of the drama is taken away from them, and instead we have to focus on how the decisions they make ultimately inform the versions of the characters that we already know.
Unfortunately, we don't really get any of that in Gauntlet, the story of Jean-Luc Picard's first starship command. Instead we get a very paint-by-numbers pilot story, where all of the characters are introduced and given equal focus, which means that we don't really get to know any of them in any real detail. The plot fizzles somewhat, as well. Picard and co. have to track down a space pirate who, we learn, really isn't a pirate, and it's made clear that if he doesn't succeed, his career his career is doomed to failure. So he lets the not-really-a-pirate-but-a-heroic-ethnobiologist White Wolf go, which as we can tell from later books and TV series has no real affect on his career.
I gave this one a lower rating when I first listened to the podcast, but in retrospect I'm not quite sure why - I think maybe I had gone into it thinking it was one kind of story, and then found out it was entirely a different kind, and that affected my rating? Reading it in print, though, revealed an amazingly enjoyable story.
7th Son is best described as a technothriller about cloning and memory, although doing so is kind of like describing Battlestar Galactica as “a space opera with robots”; it's descriptive, but completely ignores what's special about it. The story is simultaneously a thriller, a sci-fi story, an existential horror piece, a family drama, a tale of conspiracy, an adventure story, and most of all a crackin' good read. Fitting for a tale of 7 strangers who are brought together to find out that not only are they all clones of the same man, but that that man is a madman who has already murdered a president in step one of a larger plot for world dominatin. Hutchins shows a real talent for melding those different aspects of the story into a larger whole, as well as for creating seven protagonists who are unique individuals, but still recognizably from the same genetic code and early life history.
Enjoyed this one a lot more than the first volume. It helps that this one focuses more on Faith than on Buffy, and that BKV is more experienced with telling stories in comics than Whedon is.
Also: more new villians are introduced! Genevieve Savidge, a young woman who's become a slayer but has no desire to be part of Team Buffy, and who considers herself superior due to her aristocratic upbringing. Perfect sort of Buffy villianess, and much more interesting than this “Twilight” character that they're pushing as the current Big Bad.
I've always been a little confused by the term “rock star chef”. I can understand chefs who are celebrities, your Bobby Flays, Nigella Lawsons, and whatnot. But the term “rock star”, for me, carries a little more to it than just being a celebrity - there's a certain lifestyle and personality that have to be involved.
Anthony Bourdain is a rock star chef. He's a drug addicted, uncouth, dangerous man who comes across, at times, as a bit of a douche. He's also, apparently, a pretty damn good cook. That's where the rock star metaphor breaks down a little, though. If someone says, for example, that The Clash's London Calling is the greatest album of all time, someone can easily listen to that and either agree or disagree. But if I get told Bourdain (or any other chef) is a great chef, there's no way for me to actually know that - I just have to take it on the authority of the person telling me, which is odd.
Purely as a memoir, though, this was an excellent read. Bourdain's a great storyteller, and is able to infuse a lot of humour into the story of his life. He's also not afraid to tell the more lurid parts of his life, but manages to maintain an attitude of “yeah, it was fun, but it probably wasn't the wisest choices to make”.
Phenomenal.
By far the best zombie book I've ever read, and one of the best zombie pieces I've experienced in any media. I'm a little surprised at how much I enjoyed it; I'd read and enjoyed the Zombie Survival Guide by the same author, and thought that I wouldn't enjoy this, because maintaining the tone and style of that book would be too difficult to do. Luckily, Brooks didn't even attempt to do that.
WWZ is post-apocalyptic; it takes place after humanity has successfully fended off the zombie menace, and have started to rebuild society. Our main POV character tours the world interviewing people and their tales of survival; the transcripts of those interviews make up the bulk of the book.
Because it's a book about survivors, the horror and suspense don't come from wondering who's going to die, or how; instead, it comes from hearing what depths people would be willing to sink to in order to survive, which in turn forces the reader to ask themselves what they would be willing to do under similar circumstances. Of course, the zombie setting means that while we as readers can connect with the characters and their emotional situation, but we're still allowed to distance ourselves from it a litle bit and prevents the novel from getting too dreary or depressing.
Wow. Talk about your strong endings. No, everything doesn't get tied up in a nice little bow, but the important questions get resolved, character arcs get resolved, and we learn that sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.
Without giving too much away, there's one death scene that almost made me tear up - one that we had to have known was coming, but it still surprised me.
Meh. In the right hands, the concept (angels direct a group of WWII soldiers to fight off a fallen angel who, with the help of some Nephilim, wants to steal the sword of heaven) could have been amazing. As it was, it was okay enough to read to pass the time, but I'm really glad I got it out of the library rather than buying it myself.
One thing that really bothered me: what group of soldiers would voluntarily name themselves “The Light Brigade”? I can't see that happening.
I was torn while reading this. On one hand, it's a fascinating accomplishment, telling the story of the history of Middle-Earth and filling out a lot of the backstory for Tolkien's other works. It's also fascinating from a stylistic perspective - Tolkien wanted to really stress the concept of the Silmarillion as myth, so he presented it in a style similar to the King James bible, which is a subtle yet masterful way of giving the tale the presentation it deserves.
The unfortunate part of it is that Tolkien died before the book could be finished, and it shows in some points - it takes the Silmarillion around 100 pages to really find its gear, and the other stories in the book (the Ainulindale, the Valaquenta, and Akallabeth) are all much stronger stories than the main one. It's a shame that they get a bit of a short shrift in terms of the narrative of the book.
One of those “classic” books that would no doubt fail to find a publisher today, not only for its cultural insensitivity, but for the naughty behaviours kids would pick up from it (calling 911 needlessly, smoking a pipe, breaking out of jail, stealing balloons, etc). Still, you can definitely see why kids respond to it so well.
This was a weird one to read. I've loved all of Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, so this story, set in the same universe, seemed like a natural fit. And it was a good story, definitely, but it didn't have the same feel as the Song, aside from the ending. And, with it set a century before the other books, all of the house alignments are different, and the political landscape is radically different as well.
Taken on its own, however, the tale of Dunk the Lunk from Flea Bottom, and how he became Ser Duncan the Tall, is an interesting if not overly remarkable tale told by one of the masters of modern fantasy.
Adams books are interesting creatures. The characters don't ever seem to evolve that much over the course of the stories, and the plots are something like soap bubbles - if you spend too much time focusing on what's happening, the entire thing will pop.
That being said, it's a hilarious book. Adams has one of those great, classic British comedy voices that remains funny even after multiple reads.