Kim Miller
Absurdistan
Campbell is an Australian TV journalist who dreamed of becoming a war correspondent. He gets the job as his news outlet's man in Moscow. And from there he travels to various places in Russia and under Russian influence, wherever the news takes him. Things get very dangerous as his team heads into an all too real conflict and his cameraman is killed by a bomb blast. It's a memoir that starts out with a dream and ends in a nightmare.
Campbell is an Australian TV journalist who dreamed of becoming a war correspondent. He gets the job as his news outlet's man in Moscow. And from there he travels to various places in Russia and under Russian influence, wherever the news takes him. Things get very dangerous as his team heads into an all too real conflict and his cameraman is killed by a bomb blast. It's a memoir that starts out with a dream and ends in a nightmare.
Shteyngart has a way of making the most ridiculous fictional story sound real. He digs into his Russian heritage to tell of a Soviet republic selling its oil to a multinational company. His father in this telling is an influential criminal who manages to dupe the company into believing all those oil wells out there are sitting on a mass of oil. "It's all yours for the right price." It's a tale of one betrayal after another as the author tries to crawl out from underneath his father's mess.
Shteyngart has a way of making the most ridiculous fictional story sound real. He digs into his Russian heritage to tell of a Soviet republic selling its oil to a multinational company. His father in this telling is an influential criminal who manages to dupe the company into believing all those oil wells out there are sitting on a mass of oil. "It's all yours for the right price." It's a tale of one betrayal after another as the author tries to crawl out from underneath his father's mess.
Shteyngart was born in Russia and was a child when his family moved to the US. This is his memoir of his early life and beyond written in his particular style of making things satirical, sad and funny all at the same time. It's the story of a constant misfit finding his way in a world that probably doesn't want him.
Shteyngart was born in Russia and was a child when his family moved to the US. This is his memoir of his early life and beyond written in his particular style of making things satirical, sad and funny all at the same time. It's the story of a constant misfit finding his way in a world that probably doesn't want him.
This book is a total romp - if you are a Deadpool fan. If Deadpool is not for you then this book will be a real turn-off. It starts with a content warning of depictions of violence, sexual content, and explicit language.
A bonkers mix of the time loop of Groundhog Day, the foul language, sarcastic humor and death recovery of Deadpool, and an Earthling magicked to a world of orcs and furries.
Davi has lived through hundreds of lives, and every time she dies, usually from torture, she awakens in the same pond of freezing water and the same wizard hails her as the one to save them all. Trouble is, she keeps on dying instead of saving. So this time she decides she will become the Dark Lord from whom everyone needs to be saved.
This book is a total romp - if you are a Deadpool fan. If Deadpool is not for you then this book will be a real turn-off. It starts with a content warning of depictions of violence, sexual content, and explicit language.
A bonkers mix of the time loop of Groundhog Day, the foul language, sarcastic humor and death recovery of Deadpool, and an Earthling magicked to a world of orcs and furries.
Davi has lived through hundreds of lives, and every time she dies, usually from torture, she awakens in the same pond of freezing water and the same wizard hails her as the one to save them all. Trouble is, she keeps on dying instead of saving. So this time she decides she will become the Dark Lord from whom everyone needs to be saved.
This is book #2 of Chambers' Monk and Robot books. I was so impressed with #1 that I got into this the next day. It doesn't have the consistency of #1 as it tends to drag a little at about the 75% mark. However is finishes well and the ending explains a bit of those slower parts.
Tea Monk Dex and Robot Mosscap met in the wilderness as Dex was in a time of crisis. Mosscap proved to have greater understanding of Dex than Dex did. In this book they continue as travel companions, now out of the wilderness and visiting villages along the road. Mosscap's goal is to find out how the humans are doing with the question, "What do you need?" As they travel the two companions go more deeply into their own responses to that question.
Where book #1 dealt with personal identity and meaning, #2 deals with community, family, and friendship. Once again the deeply human is opened up by Chambers to try to understand why these fundamental relationships can be so difficult.
This is book #2 of Chambers' Monk and Robot books. I was so impressed with #1 that I got into this the next day. It doesn't have the consistency of #1 as it tends to drag a little at about the 75% mark. However is finishes well and the ending explains a bit of those slower parts.
Tea Monk Dex and Robot Mosscap met in the wilderness as Dex was in a time of crisis. Mosscap proved to have greater understanding of Dex than Dex did. In this book they continue as travel companions, now out of the wilderness and visiting villages along the road. Mosscap's goal is to find out how the humans are doing with the question, "What do you need?" As they travel the two companions go more deeply into their own responses to that question.
Where book #1 dealt with personal identity and meaning, #2 deals with community, family, and friendship. Once again the deeply human is opened up by Chambers to try to understand why these fundamental relationships can be so difficult.
This book is a total delight. It is the second I've read of this author and has what I imagine is her characteristic quirkiness coupled with a deeply optimistic humanity.
The setting is a far post-robot future. The robots did not take over the world but have left to live their own lives and the humans have them only as a distant history.
Sibling Dex is a Tea Monk who travels around nearby towns and sets up shop, listening to people's troubles and blending them soothing tea. Dex has no gender - Sibling replaces Brother or Sister. Dex is restless and decides to travel to a distant pilgrimage shrine that might no longer exist. Somewhere along the abandoned road a robot approaches and says, 'What do you need?'
And so begins an unexpected friendship. The genderless human and the robot who sees itself as an 'it'. Without any socially constructed identities and in an abandoned shrine the troubled Dex learns to listen to himself and find inner peace. The monk learns meaning in life from the robot and the robot's first question, 'What do you need?' is not so strange after all.
This book is a total delight. It is the second I've read of this author and has what I imagine is her characteristic quirkiness coupled with a deeply optimistic humanity.
The setting is a far post-robot future. The robots did not take over the world but have left to live their own lives and the humans have them only as a distant history.
Sibling Dex is a Tea Monk who travels around nearby towns and sets up shop, listening to people's troubles and blending them soothing tea. Dex has no gender - Sibling replaces Brother or Sister. Dex is restless and decides to travel to a distant pilgrimage shrine that might no longer exist. Somewhere along the abandoned road a robot approaches and says, 'What do you need?'
And so begins an unexpected friendship. The genderless human and the robot who sees itself as an 'it'. Without any socially constructed identities and in an abandoned shrine the troubled Dex learns to listen to himself and find inner peace. The monk learns meaning in life from the robot and the robot's first question, 'What do you need?' is not so strange after all.
A collection of short stories that sit between books #2 and #3 of the Sun Eater series. These stories lack the fire of the novels and this collection is not up to the level of previous novellas, The Lesser Devil (set parallel to book #1) and Queen Amid Ashes (set after book #2).
There is a long time gap between novels #2 and #3 and Ruocchio has set Queen and these short stories into the gap to explain some of the intervening time. I've been reading them before I get into book #4 and they recede too far into the past, but the way they've dealt with piecemeal events has been frustrating when compared to the power of the main series.
A collection of short stories that sit between books #2 and #3 of the Sun Eater series. These stories lack the fire of the novels and this collection is not up to the level of previous novellas, The Lesser Devil (set parallel to book #1) and Queen Amid Ashes (set after book #2).
There is a long time gap between novels #2 and #3 and Ruocchio has set Queen and these short stories into the gap to explain some of the intervening time. I've been reading them before I get into book #4 and they recede too far into the past, but the way they've dealt with piecemeal events has been frustrating when compared to the power of the main series.
This is one of the filler novellas sitting after Book#2 of the Sun Eater series. Hadrian Marlowe has been made a Knight of the Empire and given a high class space ship and sent off to mop up after a Cielcin invasion of a distant planet. The Cielcin fleet has been blown apart by Empire forces and their main worldship has disappeared into hyperspace.
He finds the planet devastated and the main city burnt to ashes. The Baroness who rules the planet is hiding with many thousands of her retainers and general population in underground tunnels.
It is when he is clearing out the remaining Cielcin that he makes a horrifying discovery and in that moment his whole purpose on the planet has changed. Hadrian has to take his newly given authority as a Knight of the Empire to an expected level as he seeks to give the planet a new future.
The story ends suddenly at the 75% mark and the rest is back-matter. There is a long history of the Marlowe dynastic line with a reference to the erroneous claim by some that they are descendants of Christopher Marlowe the English playwright of the 1500s. Coincidentally, Hadrian's new space ship is called the Tamerlane, similar to the original Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great'. Some characters in Hadrian's story are similarly named after characters in that play.
Other back-matter sections are various personae and a thesaurus of Ruocchio's terms.
This is one of the filler novellas sitting after Book#2 of the Sun Eater series. Hadrian Marlowe has been made a Knight of the Empire and given a high class space ship and sent off to mop up after a Cielcin invasion of a distant planet. The Cielcin fleet has been blown apart by Empire forces and their main worldship has disappeared into hyperspace.
He finds the planet devastated and the main city burnt to ashes. The Baroness who rules the planet is hiding with many thousands of her retainers and general population in underground tunnels.
It is when he is clearing out the remaining Cielcin that he makes a horrifying discovery and in that moment his whole purpose on the planet has changed. Hadrian has to take his newly given authority as a Knight of the Empire to an expected level as he seeks to give the planet a new future.
The story ends suddenly at the 75% mark and the rest is back-matter. There is a long history of the Marlowe dynastic line with a reference to the erroneous claim by some that they are descendants of Christopher Marlowe the English playwright of the 1500s. Coincidentally, Hadrian's new space ship is called the Tamerlane, similar to the original Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great'. Some characters in Hadrian's story are similarly named after characters in that play.
Other back-matter sections are various personae and a thesaurus of Ruocchio's terms.
This was like wading through porridge from the get go, until part way in I looked it up on Wikipedia where they have a chapter by chapter synopsis. Once I got an idea of where it was heading the reading got easier. Accelerando is a music term meaning, keep getting faster from here. The book is hard SciFi about the rapidity of AI taking over human consciousness, starting from neural implants to full downloading of the person into software to the point of being able to split off multiple copies of yourself. He packs every sentence with crazy terminology and new concepts so that many sentences don't make sense, although page by page it's somehow coherent. There's a famous sentence in writing, 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' which is nonsense as a sentence and filled with self-negations even though it is grammatically correct. That is this book in a nutshell.
About two thirds the way through I suddenly thought, "This is one giant piss-take. He's filling the story with all this crazy stuff and all the while sitting there with a smirk thinking, 'See, I'm still doing it to you.'
This was like wading through porridge from the get go, until part way in I looked it up on Wikipedia where they have a chapter by chapter synopsis. Once I got an idea of where it was heading the reading got easier. Accelerando is a music term meaning, keep getting faster from here. The book is hard SciFi about the rapidity of AI taking over human consciousness, starting from neural implants to full downloading of the person into software to the point of being able to split off multiple copies of yourself. He packs every sentence with crazy terminology and new concepts so that many sentences don't make sense, although page by page it's somehow coherent. There's a famous sentence in writing, 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' which is nonsense as a sentence and filled with self-negations even though it is grammatically correct. That is this book in a nutshell.
About two thirds the way through I suddenly thought, "This is one giant piss-take. He's filling the story with all this crazy stuff and all the while sitting there with a smirk thinking, 'See, I'm still doing it to you.'