Derek
This is probably a funny book.
But at 50 pages in, I decided I just couldn't force myself to read 175 more pages of a single joke.
The whole world needs satires about the "War on Terror", and I love that Porup wrote it, but I couldn't face another line comparing America's obesity problem (real) to it's terrorism problem (still real, but in fact a much smaller problem).
Bug-punk. Not something I've done before.
On the plus side, I love the fact that Hurley doesn't feel the need to explain anything to you. The reader gets dropped in at the deep end, and it's sink or swim.
On the negative side, I'm disappointed that there's no attempt to explain how “magic” works (as far as I can tell, not really magic, just a judicious application of Clarke's Law). It certainly makes it easier on an author...
The story's set on a world far away in space and time, in warring theocracies distinctly reminiscent of Iran/Iraq on Earth. The countries of Nasheen and Chenja both subscribe to a clearly Islam-derived religion - though I have no doubt they'd be considered heretics by any Muslims alive today. Following the dictates of their religion, though, they once permitted other settlers to join them on their planer, so long as they were “People of the book”, and there are other recognizable religions on the planet (except Baha'i, who were exterminated - I can see their unificationist religion would threaten everyone there).
Introduce to Nasheen/Chenja's centuries-long war a few new aliens — recognizable as Christians with their own holy war — and it's obvious that the end-times may be at hand. One apostate assassin is left to solve the problem.
So far, it's all good. Hurley is probably risking a fatwa, but I love the milieu. It's just so darn hard to feel anything for the protagonist, who basically muddles all through the story and gets lucky at the end.
I wasn't as thrilled with this book as I hoped. I love discussions of the English language, and I love to see academics tell me that there's no simple prescription for preserving the language; that English is — and must be — a growing language, but this read far too much like a list of things he hates about all the plans that have been proposed to save the language, without much of a plan of his own.I admit to being incensed when he told us “You have to look hard to find a vestige of a smile in Johnson, Lowth, Murray, Fowler, and all the others” (and not because of the arguably incorrect comma before ‘and'). He may even be right, because I don't have Fowler's original [b:A Dictionary of Modern English Usage 275815 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage H.W. Fowler http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1173337062s/275815.jpg 267469], only the second and third editions, so perhaps the humor of the second edition is from Gowers, the editor and revisor, but I find it endlessly full of humor - and since Crystal had no advice to offer me to make my English better, Fowler will continue to be my go-to when I question my own usage.
I'm both amazed and perplexed by the success of this book. My borrowed E-copy claimed to be “Young Adult” - but it's clearly aimed at somebody exactly like me, because a “young adult” is going to be completely lost in the maze of AD&D and 80's pop-culture references. Now, the ALA gave it an “Alex” award, which is for books “written for adults that have special appeal to young adults”, but really the only appeal to “young adults” is that all of the main characters are actually young adults.otoh, it talks down to the YA crowd (well, it talks down to everybody, but nothing is likely to turn off the YAs faster than being patronized). More and more in recent months, I've been seeing people say “show, don't tell”, and the narration contains far too much “tell”. Apparently, the author felt that those who weren't around for the 80s would rather have all the references explained than have to work them out. And maybe he's right, but I was there, and it annoyed the hell out of me.For instance, on meeting the character Art3mis, we're explicitly told it's ‘(pronounced “Artemis”)'. I've been around long enough to think that anybody who uses l33t is a poseur, but for heaven's sake - does anybody not know how Art3mis is supposed to be pronounced? Or “led many psychologists to conclude that Halliday had suffered from Asperger's syndrome”. Wasn't that obvious from what Cline showed? The one that really drove me nuts though was the introduction to his ‘system agent software', Max. I thought, “great - that's Max Headroom, and he didn't feel the need to tell me.” Then, on the next page, he told me...Cline also shows a fundamental lack of understanding of a couple of things that are rather central to the plot. For instance, “open source software”. “The moment IOI took it over, the OASIS would cease to be the open-source virtual utopia I'd grown up in.” Does he have a clue what “open-source” means? All indications are that OASIS is “free-to-use” but not open-source. If it was open-source, then as soon as IOI took it over somebody would release a “forked” version of the software that remained free-to-use, and there wouldn't be any hidden easter eggs.He's weak on copyright: “Most of these items were over 40 years old, and so free digital copies of them could be downloaded.” At the time (the 1980s), copyright generally held for 50 years after the death of the author. However, in the US this was raised shortly before the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney's death (the “Mickey Mouse” law) so as to ensure the Disney Corp. didn't lose the copyright to Mickey. There's really not much likelihood of that being eased in the society Cline describes.I wondered about his knowledge of 80s music, when we were told “Halliday didn't seem to have had very discerning taste. He listend to everything... From the Police to Journey to R.E.M. to the Clash.” That's not ‘everything', that's the GOOD stuff. The 80s had Duran Duran, John Waite and Wham (all referenced later, thank you), Elton John without Bernie Taupin (and Andrew Lloyd Webber without Tim Rice, for that matter), and a ton of even worse stuff (Culture Club, anyone?). The really bad stuff just left a blank space in my mind.Still, this book is aimed squarely at geeks like me. I knew all that music, played most of those arcade games (badly), loved those movies (“I saw my seat — the only empty one in the room. It was right behind Ally Sheedy”. Ah... Ally! ), owned a Trash-80, and wasted four years of university tuition playing D&D.Anyone giving Rush a central position in his plot has my vote (well, except maybe, Neil Peart, as I wasn't thrilled with [b:Clockwork Angels 13592828 Clockwork Angels The Novel Kevin J. Anderson http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1337657558s/13592828.jpg 19180940]).I just can't quite understand why so many people who aren't me loved this book!Early on, I really disliked the narrator. Elsewhere I called him a pretentious, precocious, prig, and compared him to that whiny Holden Caulfield. The big difference, though, is that Caulfield has no reason to whine; he's entitled to another alliterative adjective: privileged. Wade has reason to feel the world has dealt him a bad hand, and while he starts out a little whiny, he does grow through the story, and I have no doubt that Wade at the end of the book is a vastly better person than the one on page 1.
If you enjoyed [author:Michael Moorcock]'s [book:Eternal Champion|30097] series, you'll probably find this a rather blatant ripoff. We have Gods who appear in person, reluctant heroes who act as their champions, bardish sidekicks, and soul-drinking swords. If Weber adds travel across the planes, I'll be really ticked.
Of course, if you didn't enjoy [book:The Eternal Champion|30097], you'll probably hate this series...
Ultimately, I did enjoy the story, but it's far more derivative than I expect from Weber.
This last book in the Horseclans series was published a year and a half before the author's death, but finished so abruptly that I wonder if he stopped writing due to illness (he was only 56 at the time of his death). In the second last chapter, a man introduces himself to one of the characters and invites him to dinner — and that's the last we hear of either of them! The alternative is that I'm missing a lot of pages...
And God knows, the religious and quasi-religious flakes had as many causes over the years as the left-liberal flakes, the right-wing radicals or any of the rest of the lunatic fringe. After a short while, a reader got to recognize the telltale catchwords and phrases that indicated ‘this was written by or for a bunch of flakes' and most of us would just glance briefly over the patent claptrap or skip it entirely.”
I'm not going to rate this book.
It may not be a bad book, but it's certainly not a book for me. TMI ... and TMDB.
TMDB: Too many dead bodies. At the start of this book, there are three characters. By the time I gave up, we'd been introduced to at least a couple of new people per page, and all but one of them were dead. This is probably sheer prejudice on my part — I'll happily read fantasy novels with barbarians slaughtering just as many people, even more messily, but for some reason I expect “civilized” people to be more careful.
“Too much information” may be mostly my lack of interest in military hardware. I don't need to know the make and model number of every single item we come across. Still, there are obviously a large number of readers who like that sort of thing, or Dan Brown wouldn't be a best-selling author (I don't read Dan Brown, even though his themes are far more interesting to me).
However, there are times that it must be too much information for anybody. Did we really need to know that the assassin's sniper rifle was a “Steyr HS” three times on one page? Or “... an anti-traction material: probably something like one part slurry of emulsion and polymer particles, twenty parts water.” What? A “slurry” is a mixture of insoluble material in liquid. An “emulsion” is a mixture of insoluble material suspended in liquid. The polymer would be the insoluble material, but that sentence is redundantly redundant, and I wonder why I would even care that it's a 20:1 mixture, anyway.
A lot of fun, and a quick read.
I found the racism really difficult to cope with - but it's not the author's fault that humans can be pretty nasty bits of work, at times. To think that people would treat others as less than human, just because they have a few mechanical parts is pretty revolting - but actually more understandable than treating others as less than human because of the color of their skin or their gender. After all, Cinder the cyborg really is 36.8% not-human.
More review when we finish our group read...
I love De Lint's novels, so this was a must-read for me.
A little more juvenile than his usual, and more specifically set in America (most of his stories are set “somewhere in North America” and often have recognizable bits of Eastern Ontario where both he and I grew up), but this is explicitly set in Southern California.
Many of the characters are clearly related to, or even appearing in, those of earlier novels - “the cousins”, shape-changers or skin-walkers, appear often, especially various of the Crow clan and Coyote.
In the end, a pleasant and rapid read, but without much depth.
Having just just panned an indie novel for leaving me hanging at the end of book one of an intended series, I feel it's important to start by saying this book does it right: there's actually a sense of completion at the end of the book — even though it's obvious that there's more to come (well, even without the ads for book II at the back...), this book stands on its own.
I presume this is aimed at young-adults, but it doesn't talk down and works well for adults too. There's a little mushy teenage romance, but not too much, and it's not central. The central characters are teenagers, but it makes complete sense in the context, because we're dealing with changes that come with puberty.
It's a big “what-if?” What if kids entering adolescence started to hear each others thoughts? What if some kids, “zeros”, thoughts couldn't be heard? What if some kids, “jackers”, could not just hear others thoughts, but change them? To the first two questions, Quinn gives a response completely different from the usual telepath story: usually it's the mind-reader who is considered suspect, prying into other people's thoughts, but Quinn points out that if most people read minds, it's the people whose thoughts can't be heard that are suspect — just what can they be hiding? But the last question is the heart of the story. If you can control other people's thoughts — and you must, to fit into society — just how far can you go? Can you control strangers? Friends? Family?
And you thought you had it tough when you were a teenager...
A pretty good story, with a couple of glaring holes. The holes may be purely due to its biggest drawback — which is that it is not book one of a trilogy. It's the first third of a thousand page tome. I really hate that. In a series, every book needs to have some conclusion. In this case, I received this volume free, so it's more like a teaser for the rest, but if I'd paid for it, I'd be more than a little miffed finding it end in a cliff-hanger, without even really much of a clue what the apparent conspiracy is about.
The major plot hole is the rebuilding of an incredibly advanced civilization just 59 years after an apocalyptic event. Sure, it looks as if the collapse of civilization may have come 800 years or so from now (some diary entries dated 2814.1 and 2814.2) and so the technology demonstrated is probably less advanced than the tech before the collapse, but you couldn't possibly rebuild our current technology from nothing in 59 years. You need working machinery to build the machinery. It took 300 years to get where we are from the beginning of the steam age. We can be sure that, if we managed to save the know-how, we could do it over in much less time, but you need to show me how that's going to work, instead of assuming it.
Sometimes it reads as if Thomas is trying out words just to demonstrate his vocabulary. Unfortunately, he needs to actually consult a dictionary. There's a difference between wrath and wroth, and between apropos and appropriate.
Edit: May 16
OK, this just took a nosedive from a 2-star review to a 1-star because I received a “thank-you for your review” message from the author, who proceeded to tell me I was wrong.
“There were a few errors in your review that pertain to the details contained within the story. Perhaps it is simply me who has failed as an author, but I would like to point them out to you. There are no spoilers, as you have already read the novel.1) The events of the novel take place over a time span of 300+ years. This is covered in detail and exposition as the story progresses. The protagonists are simply led to believe that the story takes place over 59 years.”
Yeah, except he forgot to tell us that... [oh, and the blurb says it's “Sixty years later...”!]
“2) Primae Noctis is a trilogy, as the books were planned concurrently in a story arc. Many authors choose to write one novel and see where the whim of story takes them, but The Once and Future Lords Trilogy has a story bible for all three books. I apologize if you felt that the end of the novel was a bit of a cliffhanger, but this was my deliberate intention to set the stage for Tempus Belli.“
So what if it was your intention? I have a right to feel cheated. And to warn readers that they're likely to, as well.
“3) Wrath and wroth are different forms of the same root word. ... I choose my words quite deliberately and chose the language I use in the novel as a patois of older more formal English and the ‘newspeak' of the world of the novel.”
Except that you used the adjectival form where you wanted the noun. And that was only the example he actually thought he could defend...
Geez, authors. Take your lumps and be quiet - you can never win by arguing with your reviews.
I never miss an Alex Delaware novel. I'm mostly highly sceptical of psychologists and psychiatrists – prodding around inside peoples heads, without a very clear understanding of what really happens in there. But, of course, fictional shrinks aren't taking stabs in the dark, they know as much as their authors want them to, so Alex is the perfect shrink. That might seem manipulative and not conducive to the reader's suspension of disbelief, but ironically I find it makes Kellerman's mystery/thrillers easier to believe than many others.
Face it, any mystery novel has to take short cuts – if the cops could solve a murder in the time it took me to read this book, it wouldn't be much of a mystery. Many other writers rely on massive coincidence to create those shortcuts. Alex, through his understanding of other people, gets to manufacture his coincidences.
I felt completely betrayed by this. This isn't even a short story. It's a prelude to a novel - a novel that it appears the author has no intention of writing.
It's one thing to write a story and leave the reader wondering what happens next, but in this case we get a story without any kind of conclusion, and a sense that even the author doesn't care what happens next.
It's a good thing it was only a waste of 15 minutes.
Interesting but ultimately disappointing.
Le Guin posits a society of genetically engineered humans who are hermaphroditic — being sexless at most times, but periodically entering kemmer where they may express either male or female attributes.
You'd think that she could make a great deal of this, but the main narrator is an outsider, who can't help but filter everything he sees through his masculine point-of-view. The only lessons I take from the story are that no matter how stable a society like this could be, it would eventually fail; and that without “men” there's no way we'll ever found an interstellar civilization.
I love this sort of story. Good old space opera!
It's just a rollicking good read, with interesting character studies of 4 different sapient species (humans and three others).
I'm a little disappointed in the treatment of the main female character, who despite being “Queen of the Universe” (that's just a joke one of the other characters makes) still seems to require a husband to validate her existence, and the portrayal of humanity as the smartest and most adaptable of the four species is jingoistic, but that's pretty much in the nature of this subgenre.
For all that I love dogs and intend to always have at least one (and preferably more) dogs, I don't actually read many books about dogs and their behaviour. I think it comes down to [b:The Intelligence of Dogs 396926 The Intelligence of Dogs A Guide to the Thoughts, Emotions, and Inner Lives of Our Canine Companions Stanley Coren https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347435296s/396926.jpg 517510], [b:Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution 715516 Dogs A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution Raymond Coppinger https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348327637s/715516.jpg 701768], [b:Inside of a Dog 6332526 Inside of a Dog What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Alexandra Horowitz https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347980799s/6332526.jpg 6518250], and now this.Not terribly surprisingly, Hare references the latter two (quite frequently) and Coren gives this book a glowing review on the cover (I'm a little surprised that he didn't get referenced in the text - though he might be in the bibliography, but [b:The Intelligence of Dogs 396926 The Intelligence of Dogs A Guide to the Thoughts, Emotions, and Inner Lives of Our Canine Companions Stanley Coren https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347435296s/396926.jpg 517510] is pretty much a pop-science book, short on the real science.I was a bit dismissive of this book when I first heard of it, because it sounded like he was covering a lot of the stuff from Coppinger, but I got over it because, first, he clearly respects Coppinger, and second because he doesn't come across as a know-it-all scientist at all. One of the things I really loved was that after first telling his faculty advisor (talking about the amazing things that infant humans could do) “I think my dog can do that”, and going ahead to show that his dog could do that, he proceeded to give us all the dead-end research he did: “so we hypothesized that it was this, and that was wrong...”The only down side is that, despite the title ... my current dog is not smarter than I think. She's unfortunately been damaged beyond repair by a previous owner. On the positive side, I'm pretty sure the cat isn't as smart as he thinks!
I read these mystery/thrillers set in foreign lands as much for the insight into another culture as for the mystery, so this novel was a disappointment when I learned almost nothing about North Korea. It's an authoritarian system. Great. I didn't even get much of a sense of “asia-ness” about it. As for the actual mystery - nobody actually seemed to care about the “Corpse in the Koryo” hotel, and it's solution was a throwaway at the very end.
Ho hum.
There's nothing new in this, except for some of the grammar. It's tagged as a dystopic, post-apocalyptic, horror, thriller. There's no horror, no thrill, and the apocalypse may have all been a lie. As for the dystopic elements, it's all been done before and better.
It's not even a believable dystopia. No contact is allowed between men and women unless they are willing to marry and produce children. How do you expect that to happen? And two children? You do realize that's below replacement, right? Even if you can get far more people to marry than you obviously are...
An interesting Hemingway-ish story about an Englishman (who isn't either English or a man), in a Europe that isn't Europe, going with his friends (who aren't, really) to Pamplona (ditto) to see the running of the bulls - which are of course, not bulls.
About the only things in the tale that are what they seem are the trout (I think) and the rat (I'm sure).
An interesting example of both post-apocalyptic and alternate-history SF - because we have two Earths, one in which World War II didn't happen, and one 300 years from now after plagues wipe out all life on our Earth.
However, it has a few really annoying problems. In the first place, the central character, Verity Auger is an archaeologist. Well, when you are going to rely on focus on a field, you'd better try to avoid anachronisms. Diamond styluses were not in general use in the same period when shellac records were being produced. That was just one of many.
Then, Verity is a terrible Mary Sue. At one point, Floyd (from 1959 Earth) volunteers to fly a spaceship - and is laughed at - but nobody has any problem with Verity flying it, even though she knew no more about such things than Floyd before her one previous flight. In fact, he's told “You can begin by telling me what you already know about matter/exotic matter coupling parities...” Really? At the beginning of the story, Verity barely even knew more than that such things exists, but apparently she's still expert enough to fly this ship. Give. Me. A. Break.
But the most evil problem with this book is that, while it can stand alone, it is clearly intended as book 1 in a series, and I absolutely hate getting taken in like that.
