Derek
I'm really torn about this.I had an argument in the summer about Kevin Anderson's credentials as an author. I think he's technically a pretty good writer, but I'm still not sure he's any good at ideas - after all, a lot of his best selling stuff is actually [a:Frank Herbert 58 Frank Herbert http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1168661521p2/58.jpg]'s ideas. So, anyway, I expected this should be pretty good, as the ideas are [a:Neil Peart 74340 Neil Peart http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1225553441p2/74340.jpg]'s.And Neil Peart is one-third of the last of the great prog-rock bands, “Rush” (are there any prog-rock bands left in their original lineups?). Neil says he's been a member of Rush for 38 years, so I guess that means I have been a fan since they were founded... sigh. I thought they were older than me.I was disappointed to find that it was all very Young Adult - which is becoming a laughable stereotype when we deal with Steampunk. But then, when your central theme is the lyrics to 66 minutes worth of album (which necessarily has to involve considerable time given to instrumental solos), how deep can you really go?Still, I appreciate the ending. And Peart's afterword is almost worth the price of admission.
I feel totally betrayed by this book, so be warned that I don't care if spoilers follow...And if you think [b:Catcher in the Rye 5107 The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1349928703s/5107.jpg 3036731] had any redeeming features, you may not quite agree with me...For 300 pages, I loved the story. We have two murder investigations, 20 years apart, that may have a connection, a cast of likable characters, and a good, workable plot.Then the two lead characters sleep together, and he turns into Holden Caulfield: a complete self-absorbed jerk.I know real people are like that, and it happens all the time – but why on earth would anybody want to read about them? You don't have to have happy endings, but I feel my time is wasted when nobody even tries to reach one.Three thumbs down.
There are far too many postapoc-zombie books, but this isn't one of them. That is, it is a PA zombie story, but it's not one of the “too many”. The only problem is that it's just a free teaser for the rest of the collection. I'm not sure I like even good PA enough to ever get around to buying volume two.
I really don't know why I read Hammer's Slammers books. I mostly love [a:David Drake 19472 David Drake http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1207164263p2/19472.jpg], and guess I keep hoping that these will reach the standards of his better books, and every time I'm disappointed. It's basically just a litany of death and destruction, without character development or even much plot. I love action as much as (well, more than...) the next guy, but every Hammer's Slammers novel is identical except for the names.
I read this book purely because I'd seen so many references that [b:The Hunger Games 2767052 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) Suzanne Collins http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1337857402s/2767052.jpg 2792775] was a [b:Battle Royale 57891 Battle Royale Koushun Takami http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1331235272s/57891.jpg 2786327] ripoff. Given that the whole idea of sending a “tribute” of youngsters to fight each other, or some monster, until there's only one survivor goes back to at least the Greeks, and that there's nothing else that's really similar between the two books, I'd rather think that [b:Battle Royale 57891 Battle Royale Koushun Takami http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1331235272s/57891.jpg 2786327] is a [b:1984 5470 1984 George Orwell http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1348990566s/5470.jpg 153313] ripoff. No, 1984 didn't involve a teenage deathmatch, but the Greater East Asia of BR is certainly very much like the nations of 1984.The biggest problem with [b:Battle Royale 57891 Battle Royale Koushun Takami http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1331235272s/57891.jpg 2786327] is that it's Japanese. Now, I don't have a problem with Japanese stories, and it may work very well in Japanese, but personally I think the translation is horrible. The language may work wonderfully in Japanese, but it's either been translated incorrectly or literally - and as far as I'm concerned, literal translations are just as bad as incorrect ones. If you want to translate for an English audience, use idiomatic English.
I loved almost every sentence, and I really thought I wouldn't. As the author herself comments about teen coming-of-age stories, they're usually moralistic and everything works out in the end. Boooooring.
I was immediately captivated by Mor's reading list - she's read practically everything I had at her age (and since it's set in 1979/80, she's just a little younger than me), and I'll be going back through the book to find the references to the few I haven't read!
She almost lost me when Mor wrote in a library book -in pencil, at least - but she won me back with her love of Spider Robinson.
It's a wonderful story, full of poignant insights into the meaning of family, and the nature of magic. It's NOT good enough to beat China Miéville for a Hugo, but I can at least understand how the judges might have thought so!
this is a fascinating concept, well written, but with a few flaws introduced,I suspect, by the translators. the author is Russian, and the story is set in New York, but every now and then jarring Anglicisms creep in.
I'm really not sure that it would be possible to have a culture in which forgetting played such a central part, but if you could,Bobl's thesis seems highly likely.
Post-apocalyptic, Man & Dog (well, wolf), Gordie Dickson: what's not to love!
It's years since I read this, but it had a profound effect on me, and I really want to find a copy.
***
Edit: I got hold of a copy.
I'm fascinated by the depth of research that went into the Man/Wolf relationship (somewhat forced on him by his wolf researcher, Dr. Harry Frank, who wouldn't let him get away with anything!) but perplexed how at times he gets even the simplest things wrong. For the second time in a week (the first author who did it was forgettable and forgotten), I read how it was important to stay “upwind” of a predator so that it couldn't smell you. No, you stay “downwind”: just as water flows from “upstream” to “downstream”, air flows from “upwind”. And speaking of “upstream”, when Jeebee follows a stream uphill, and finds himself at a branch where two streams flow downhill, how can he possibly even have to investigate to know that one of those streams is man-made? Honestly, Gordie, it can't happen in nature.
That said, I loved the book when I first read it, and I still do on re-reading. The ending doesn't actually make much sense to me, but the journey does, and I love the interaction of man and wolf.
wasn't quite what I had expected - somewhere I'd read that it was an alternate history where the British won the war of 1812, and from a Canadian point of view, they already did! Of course, the British gained no new land in the New World...anyway, it wasn't about that!
What it claims to be about is a history on which the US avoids the Trail of tears - but I wouldn't know, because that's going to have to wait for another book, which is the one thing that really annoys me about this book
Very reminiscent of [a:Andre Norton 4766 Andre Norton http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1202314064p2/4766.jpg] in her SF days, before [b:Witch World 462448 Witch World (Witch World Series 1 Estcarp Cycle, #1) Andre Norton http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1281680151s/462448.jpg 1171819] when she moved almost completely into fantasy. That doesn't necessarily mean great fiction - but I loved those novels...
Imagine a society very much like ancient Egypt, but clearly not on our Earth as their planet (strictly a moon) orbits a gas giant. Now imagine that this society has learned how to harness the power of Jung's “collective unconscious”, collecting the power of dreams and even a person's entire “life force” to cure disease and injury.
This is Gujaareh. The Goddess Hananja's Gatherers go out into the night and gather the Dreamblood and Dreambile of those judged corrupt by the Hetawa - Gujaareh's religious power. In the process, the “corrupt” are sent permanently to the land of dreams. Sharers collect the dream stuff from the Gatherers, and on a lesser scale directly from the dreams of others, and use it to cure the sick of the city.
Obviously, such a system is open to its own corruption. A person's enemies might bribe the Hetawa to find him corrupt. If you have access to a large amount of Dreamblood, it can be used as an addictive narcotic to control others.
Ehiru is the greatest of the Gatherers. When he finds that the practice of Gathering, which he has always believed exists to root out and destroy corruption is corrupt itself, what is he to do? Does he tear it down and throw out the baby with the bathwater?
The Prince wants to be free of the addiction of Dreamblood that caused his father to dance to the Hetawa's tune. Should he eliminate everyone and everything to do with it, at any price - even his own corruption?
Who is good, and who is bad? Which is the greater Evil...
I love a good fantasy, and especially a good fantasy in a foreign setting (in her afterword, Jemisin comments that far too much fantasy is “Simplistic British Isles Fantasy Full of Lots of Guys with Swords And Not Much Else”, which is itself rather simplistic, but certainly strikes a chord with me - not that I mind a good Arthurian legend...). I particularly like stories outside of the normal, and this story drew me in quickly and deeply. I'm looking forward to volume 2.
I don't generally like mysteries with your flawed, self-hating, detectives, but I do love historical fiction, and Kerr's Bernie Gunther is a very special case. When you're a non-Nazi cop in WW II Germany, forced to dance to Reynard Heydrich's tune, you have plenty of reason for self-hate.
Gunther is a good cop in a bad situation, and fighting a losing battle with his own morality – not because he's turning to evil, but simply because every time he tries to do something good, the best that's available is not-quite-as-bad. He feeds two old Jewish spinsters in his apartment building – but all it does is keep them alive long enough to be sent to the concentration camp. He routinely accedes to the wishes of his Nazi masters, purely to stop them using somebody else who would have no qualms about the things he's ordered to do. Of course he feels like committing suicide on a daily basis and – because he's a good man who thinks that he can somehow have a positive effect – day after day, he doesn't. It should be depressing, but somehow it isn't.
My dog is broken.
Now, I'm not surprised by that. She's a rescued dog, who was clearly never socialized with other dogs, poorly socialized with people, and spent at least six months living off the land before she was caught and finally ended up in my care. But I was a bit surprised by how much the examples in this book were underlined by how different my dog is from the ones Horowitz has observed.
My Bella doesn't play. She doesn't know how to react among other dogs (and yet she has little trouble with our cat, who is mean to her). She clearly connects with my wife and me, yet I can't quite feel she's “bonded”.
I've had many dogs - over thirty+ years of dog ownership (with as many as three dogs at a time during), and behaviours described by Horowitz were obvious in almost all of them, and it's quite clear from her descriptions of the causes of these behaviours in what way my poor Bella was broken.
What disappointed me in this book was the lack of depth in most of her analysis. Early on she claims that dogs, unlike wolves, don't form packs to hunt cooperatively. I'm not going to try to argue that dog packs are the same, or even very similar, to wolf packs, but anybody who's lived in a small northern town should be familiar with free-running dog packs (frequently house dogs who go home for breakfast) that cooperatively hunt game as large as deer.
Much later, she introduces Thomas Nagel who asked “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, shortly after it became apparent that bats “see” via echolocation. Horowitz makes a big deal about how important that is - that we really can't ever understand another species - and yet, in recent years, we dohave people who “see” via echolocation: see Daniel Kish; and we have cameras that convert video to audio-scans where the user eventually learns to see - the brain even converts the signals to images! So, are we so different from bats? I'd love to know what Nagel thinks about that - and if something as different as seeing via echolocation is not enough to differentiate us from another species, maybe dogs are pretty similar to us after all.
This is a book that you're likely to form an opinion of in the first few pages. It's a good story, but the style may well put you off. The entire tale is told in the form of an oral examination for entrance to “The Academy”. Frankly, I hate the style, but I'm sure it was pretty well done.
The story itself is interesting, with a twist that I anticipated, but not so soon as to ruin the ending. The editing is pretty good - my one quibble is that multiple voices are not supposed to speak in a single paragraph.
Perhaps I owe someone a bit of an apology. A while back, I had an argument with a self-published author who claimed that readers held indie authors to a higher standard than those published by mainstream houses. I disagreed. I have to admit that perhaps we were both right to a degree. The problem is, readers give authors a bit of a bye when their work goes through a large publishing house. It's the publisher's responsibility to see that the work is properly edited, and even when it's obvious that the writer can't write, we blame the publishers, because their editors should have caught and fixed the problem.
So, in the case of self-publishing, I still maintain, we're not harder on the author-as-author, but we may be harder on the author-as-publisher! I will repeat my mantra: no author, independent or not, can afford to publish work that has not been edited by a qualified third-party. Which gets to the long-missed point of this review —
This is a fine story, and with good editing it would be worth at least 3 stars, quite possibly 4, but the editing (if there even was any) is tragic. It's not just the silly typos (“loose” for “lose”, at least three times), they're not actually much more common than in many a mainstream novel. It's the use of sentence structure that is either, at worst, bad English, or at best, local idiom. It's the use of local trade names (hands up if you know what a “Sheila maid” is - and if you do, would you expect to encounter it in an Oriental-themed fantasy?). It's redundancy: “She hadn't recalled hitting her head, but she obviously had” - if you've done your job as an author (and she did!) you don't need to insult the reader by saying “she obviously had”. It's the use of words and phrases that the author has probably used all her life, but are just plain wrong: somehow, I feel a Kimono dragon is just not quite as frightening as she intended.
All in all, I'd be happy to reread the 2nd edition, when a publisher picks it up, but I'm not likely to read another self-published Forsythe.
This is a style of book I really love: science fiction in a pre-industrial society. Not quite “steampunk”, more like fantasy.
Weber is an author I often choose just for light and easy reading, but every now and then he comes up with something with great characters and a deep plot, and this is one of his best.
I enjoy these books, partly because they're set close to where I grew up, but have I told you how much I hate coincidences in crime novels? Aargh! If you don't mind that the fates bring together two events in such a way as to provide the the clue that solves the crime, instead of it just being good police work, this is a great story. If that ruins it for you, three stars might have been generous.
I'm not even sure how this came to be on my to-read list. Possibly the last holdover from an attempt to read all the Canadian SF writers I'd never heard of.
It's seriously hampered by the fact that I'm not very fond of short stories, but “The Children of Crèche” is frighteningly believable. “The Last Day of the War, with Parrots” is thought-provoking, chilling, and somewhat depressing. “Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream” is just plain brilliant - managing to skewer religious intolerance, creationism and McCarthyism in about 10 pages.
And on top of that - I realize I know the author from my university days, and too many days hanging around the WATSFIC office.
I didn't think I was going to like this story at the start. When, by page 5, we've seen that a post-human Solar system, inhabited solely by robots, looks almost identical to the worst one we might have had if humans had survived, one might not expect much.
Add to that, that purely coincidentally, one of my GoodRead friends read this between the time I took it out of the library and getting around to it, and she found the identity-switching very confusing (as individual robots can insert their siblings' “soul chips” and gain their experiences and memories), and I was sure it was going to be a disaster.
In the end, I found that it needed a fair bit of concentration to keep the identities straight, as Freya switched between her “self” and two or three versions of Juliette (more recent copies of her soul chip), but it wasn't too complicated.
The moral of the tale is worth the trouble. If mankind creates robots in its own image, and embeds Asimovian laws upon machine-kind, are we any better than our slave-owning ancestors? In what real way is a sentient, sapient, human-appearing android different from a human? And if the slave-owners suddenly disappeared, would the slaves ever want them to return?
A well written and edited book, but ultimately the story let me down.
One night a Berlin-type wall goes up around the “Zones”. Inside the wall, life goes on much as it might have done in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II - right down to the daily commute of slave labourers to work in outside factories. Now, ghettoization is nothing new in human history, and the fact that this happened isn't unreal - but why did it happen? We never find out. Why does nobody outside the Zones care? In Warsaw, the Nazi overlords whipped up already existing anti-Semitism and many people were happy to see the Jews confined to the ghetto, but in Project Hope, the Zones are still getting TV from outside, and as far as anybody can tell, nobody even notices that they've been walled off from the rest of the world.
I liked the characters, but they need a better background.