Derek
Years ago, somebody recommended Willis [book: The Doomsday Book 24983] to me, and I found it impossible to get into. But then, I kept getting more recommendations for Willis, and particularly this one. This time, I found her funny and engaging and the history is interesting. It's somewhat reminiscent of Fforde's Thursday Next, but without the over-the-top silliness.
I'm both thrilled and annoyed with this. It's a great story, but an example of a kind of trap-marketing that publishers are doing more and more often these days. I paid for this thinking I was getting a novel (at a good price, I admit, but it was the most I'm usually willing to pay for a book—and I got Okorafor's novel-length [b: Lagoon 18753656 Lagoon Nnedi Okorafor https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1383619801s/18753656.jpg 26643213] for only ⅔ the price), and ended up with a fairly long short-story. But I can't blame the author for the shady business practices of publisher's who will soon find themselves practiced right out of business. Binti is a teenaged girl, from an Earth culture considered not much more than savages by the rest of the planet, let alone the rest of the galaxy (“savage”, of course, is a relative term, as they create artifacts of a technology so far above our own as to appear magic). Her people never leave their homeland, let alone Earth, but Binti wants to go to university—so when she's accepted to “the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy”, she sneaks away, knowing her family will disown her. The cost to Binti turns out not only to be the loss of her family, but the loss of her humanity—or perhaps the finding of it.
This is so not my usual sort of reading, but I won it from Tor.com, so it cost nothing to try.
It's paranormal romance, but light on the romance. (the blurb says “urban fantasy”, but I hate that tag for novels where there's little to nothing “urban” about it).
Brianna Hai is, of course, the daughter of a faerie king. So, fairly predictable but quite entertaining.
More awesomeness from Jemisin.
It took me a little while to get over one of the blurbs that said something to the effect that Jemisin's world has five seasons rather than four. After all, “seasons” are quite arbitrarily defined. But, as usual, the people who make the covers frequently have no idea what's actually in the book. The “fifth season” actually refers to periods of great turmoil in the planet's history, which can last anything from months to decades (or, likely, in the case of the Fifth Season of the book's title, a great deal longer—it's no spoiler to say that, as the first line of the book is “Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?”).
Once I got over that, all I had to deal with was a story told from three perspectives (one of them in second person—I hate second person!) in different time streams, and work out the connections between Damaya, Syenite and Essun. Strangely, I came to not even notice the second person...
Damaya is a child who has just discovered she's an Orogene. Orogenes have a kind of Earth magic, and they can do anything that involves using the power of the Earth—in fact, building mountains is easier for them than many much smaller magics, as it's a matter of letting the power of fault-lines and magma streams do what they want. This, of course, makes an untrained Orogene very dangerous, and scary. So Damaya is taken away to school.
Syenite is a trained (and captive) Orogene, forced to work (and breed—that's creepy without really advancing the story) on behalf of the Empire.
Essun is a “wild” adult Orogene, living incognito at the time of the world-ending event that starts the book.
I'm afraid J.J. Adams has made a career of fairly randomly putting together short stories and coming up with a title. This one is very hit and miss. Stephen King's “The End of the Whole Mess” reminds me why I stopped reading King. He always expects you to suspend your disbelief just a little too far. In this case, it's not enough to believe that a scientist would fail to consider the consequences of the application of his science, but he would have to be willfully blind. In any case, even if the side effect is premature dementia, it shouldn't mean the complete end of civilization—people are still apparently living as long as has been known for much of our history before the dementia. Orson Card's vision of the future in “Salvage” is hell for his Mormon church, and a deeper one for the unbeliever. Not what I really expected from Card. Paolo Bacigalupi's “People of Sand and Slag” is more a fable than a true prediction of the future. It's a warning about the way we'll end if we continue to pretend that the world is all about us. As good as anything I've read from Bacigalupi. M. Rickert's “Bread and Bombs” just seemed totally pointless to me, with an over-reliance on foreshadowing. George R.R. Martin's “Dark, Dark were the Tunnels” has been done so many times before. Jack McDevitt's “Never Despair” could have been a great story if Winston had actually sounded at all like the Winston he was supposedly modelled on. As it is, he failed miserably. Cory Doctorow's “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” was interesting—but probably only if, like me, you've been a sysadmin. On the other hand, Catherine Wells retelling of King Arthur, “Artie's Angels” is almost perfect. The Arthurian legend has always been about providing hope for the future when the present looks completely hopeless. So, why shouldn't it be appropriate for a post-apocalyptic world. Gene Wolfe's “Mute” is the one that probably evokes the most emotion. That emotion often being “confusion”. It's hard to say what it's about, but it's not really post-apocalyptic. It's post-life. The setting where all roads lead to the house reminds me of [book: The Last Battle] in Narnia, which always seemed a little creepy to me. “Inertia” is the good Kress, as opposed to the Nancy Kress who wrote [book: Dogs 2453935]. She leaves unsaid, but somehow still clear, that for all that life may be, in some ways, better inside, people are no longer mentally capable of the heights of human creativity. “And the Deep Blue Sea”, by Elizabeth Bear, is a fairly typical deal-with-the-devil story. But the twist here is that we have a character named Old Nick—who is clearly the Devil—but another called Patch—and Patch is also a name for the Devil...
I had already picked up an e-copy of [book: Two Serpents Rise] on sale, but was reluctant to start it before I'd read this one, even though they supposedly stand alone. Then I was lucky enough to win a copy of [book: Three Parts Dead]. Yippee!
The tale is every bit as good as I'd been led to believe.
If this hadn't been Walton's first novel, I'm not sure how I'd have felt about it. She sees fit, in her notes, to say “this is not our world, and this is not our history”, but what it very clearly is is a retelling of the Arthurian legend with the names changed (and not all of them changed very much).
Well, that's not a bad thing: I've read a lot of Arthurian retellings over the years and this is as good as most, and better than many. It just feels somehow dishonest to take one of the best known stories in British history and disguise it.
She's also changed the sexes of many of the characters, to give a much better gender balance, which I have to agree is an improvement on the older versions.
However I felt about disguising its sources, I still find it an amazingly good first novel. It's got flaws: the protagonist, Sulien ap Gwien, can invoke magic to heal near-fatal wounds, clean poisoned wells, or even summon the Lady of the Lake; and others can do the same, but there's actually almost no magic in this world. It's treated by the characters as a commonplace, while it's obvious that there's nothing common about it. That really needed to be explained better. There are hints that such powers could be tied to nobility, which would certainly limit them, except that Sulien's groom, Garah, who is certainly a commoner, had to teach Sulien the spell to clean the well.
The very idea that an unmarried woman can only get pregnant if the gods will it so would have been laughable if it wasn't so creepy. In any case, it was completely unnecessary to the plot.
The tale is redeemed by the characters. Sure, they were created by such as Malory and Chretien de Troyes and Giraldus Cambrensis, but one of the things that's kept people retelling the story for more than a millenium is that there's always more room to put flesh on those bones, and the characters that Walton creates are wonderful.
[book: Old Man's War], the precursor to this book, is a brilliant study in the moral ambiguity of war and what it means to be human.
[book: The Ghost Brigades], unfortunately, is just a rollicking Military SF story. The “Ghosts” are manufactured humans. They're human enough, but they're made to be soldiers, and they're unable to question their roles, and treated as slaves—or at least indentured servants. Scalzi has a couple of the characters point this out to the protagonist, but he goes nowhere with it. In fact, he cops out at the end by suggesting that we the readers might agree with the Colonial Union's decisions if we had all the data. I liked it better when we thought the Colonial Union might be truly evil...
When it is first proposed to take a stored recording of a defected scientist's consciousness and reload it into a clone, the General in charge says that this has serious ethical issues. So Special Forces offers to do it for them, and the General's adjutant says “... this would get around the legal and ethical issues.” What? I hope that's Scalzi being sarcastic but, again, he goes nowhere with it, so we never find out.
So, it's a fun story, but don't expect the moral depth of [book: Old Man's War].
I wish Tepper was a bit better at (or more concerned with) science. She says of the future Earth's “space elevators”: “There's been some talk of building more of them as ocean-based platforms, but the last time that was tried, a tsunami took it out.” Please! Tsunamis don't work that way. At sea, you're unlikely to even notice the wave. It certainly will be smaller than many “rogue” waves. But I have to keep forcing myself to remember Tepper really doesn't write SF, she writes a kind of pseudo-scientific Fantasy. Which I generally enjoy, but every now and then she has characters do things (or makes explanations like the above) that just don't make any sense.
Having said that, I really enjoyed this story. The characters—even as seven fragments of one original—were believable and engrossing. The plot was a little predictable, but not so much as to be boring, and the conclusion satisfying (though I could have done without the pseudo-scientific explanation).
It is, perhaps, a little too easy to suggest that humanity is as bad as it is because early in our species' development we pissed off an alien race, and they excised an important part of our brains. But there must be some reason why so many of us are such unmitigated bastards, and most of the rest can't stand up for their own principles.
I'm not entirely sure why I love Benny Griessel. The broken-down old alcoholic detective is a seriously overused trope, but I still can't get enough of Benny.
Partly, it's because he's aware of his failings, and trying to get beyond them. Partly it's because he clearly is a good cop, a good man, and good father—though he's not always been all of those together.
As the story begins, Benny's current love-life is in a period of stress. He loves Alexa, and clearly she loves him, but he has a problem with ... performance. So, a new major case is a perfect chance for him to throw himself into his work and avoid the personal issues
The case involves assassinations, kidnapping, spies, multiple foreign governments, and rogue elements within his own South African government. Benny is in his element. Along the way, the case involves his current partner, Vaughn Cupido a “coloured” with a totally understandable racial chip on his shoulder; his boss the “Giraffe”—a former spy himself; Mbali, a Zulu woman who is the subject of immense prejudice within the police force both because she's a woman, and because she's fat; and a whole cast of equally interesting people.
For the first time in four books, Benny actually gets all of his colleagues working together. Racial tensions must be a problem in any large metropolitan police force, but in South Africa, where for most of the last century the government was actively trying to increase the tension between races , it can only be worse. So this story is as much about teaching the cops what it means to be the upholders of Law, as it is about solving a crime.
In the end, as with the other books in this series, the crime is solved, and the problem of crime is not diminished one iota...
I can't see ever attempting book 2: [book: Hell Hath no Fury].
I found the military aspects of this just completely unbelievable, and with one half of the writing team an author of some of the best military SF available!
I could buy the initial opening of hostilities: two guys who don't ever expect to meet another human being, other than their own exploration party, come across another armed man in dense bush, and react badly. But everybody on both sides knows that standing orders are to avoid confrontation in this sort of situation. So when the “bad guys” (and much as this is supposed to be about what can go wrong when two well-meaning groups come into conflict, there is a “bad” side), catch up to the “good guys” and one man lets his cowardice get the better of him and shoots an unarmed person trying to parley, I can understand that too. But then the supposedly “good” member of the “bad” team proceeds to endorse his actions. Come ON! What is military training for? You teach people to ignore their own natures (for better or worse) and take the orders of those who supposedly know better, for the greater good.
This whole novel (and presumably sequel(s)) is based on the presumption that Arcana has the most terribly trained military in three universes.
Two stars, and I'm being generous.
At least as good as the first book in the series, [b: Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)|Ann Leckie|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628]. This is the first book I've finished in a good while that made me feel sorry it was over. Thankfully, there'll be another one shortly...
As always, tea is important. When newly-minted "Captain" Breq takes command of her ship, The Mercy of Kalr, one of her soldiers thanks her for the tea she's given them. "I'd alloted five grams per person aboard, per week (soldiers—even officer—wrung as much tea as possible out of very small rations...)." I just had to check those numbers. It turns out that I use five grams for the liter of tea I drink every day. So, given that they wring it out, five grams per week seems right. I love it when an author gets the little details correct!
Leckie takes the opportunity to take a few swipes at the current state of policing in the US. For instance, when soldiers (not her ship's company!) are oppressing people purely because of their race: “'That hold,' I interrupted, 'is not suitable for use on citizens. And it's entirely possible to suffocate someone by kneeling on their back that way.'”
When told that the difference between land-owners and servants is that they each have their role and "none of them is any any better or worse, just different," Breq notes that it's "Strange, how equally important, just different always seemed to translate into some 'equally important' roles being more worthy of respect..."
Breq is singlehandedly going to bring justice and democracy to the thousands of worlds of the Radch if it kills her. It's naive, but despite being several millenia old, Breq has only been arguably "human" for a few years. In this novel's predecessor, [b: Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)|Ann Leckie|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628], Breq was clearly not quite human. She was the last surviving ancillary (a sort of mobile appendage, created from what had been a human being) of the ship Justice of Torens, after the ship's destruction. Now she's learning, and proving that humanity is not necessarily a matter of either nature or nurture.
For all my favorite people at the Musquodoboit Harbour branch of the Halifax (Nova Scotia) Public Library, p. 113 says it all:
LIBRARIAN: Good morning!
PATRON: It's always nice to see your smiling face. You must be on the good drugs.
152 pages of laughs (and a few happy tears) about the things that happen in libraries.
I love this new series from Ridley Pearson, but I have a hard time really saying why. Hard enough that I never did get around to reviewing the first book.
John Knox is an ex-mercenary (oh, sorry, the Americans call them “security consultants”, because mercenaries are only used by evil people) and currently runs an import-export business with his handicapped brother. Grace Chu is a an ex-Chinese People's Army soldier and currently a forensic accountant and hot (in every way) hacker.
They get called in by their employer, Rutherford Risk, whenever one of Rutherford's clients is in trouble that can't be solved by legal means. In this case, Rutherford's client isn't in trouble himself, but dozens of young girls in Amsterdam are—forced to work in a “knot shop”, making Turkish rugs; some of them in absolute slavery, some for a wage that might as well be considered slavery.
What follows is absolute mayhem, lots of blood, and a high body count. Yet, it still manages to be smart, funny, and full of really good detective work. I must say, through much of this story I didn't like Knox much. He got all macho, and insisted that he was the only one who knew how to go about their investigation, even though Grace had an important—and probably better—approach, but rather than detract from the story it gives both John and Grace more depth; and John learns that he isn't always right.
Awful. Just awful.
A stranger approaches Adam Price at the local Legion hall, and tells him a secret his wife, Corrine, has been keeping from him—that she faked a pregnancy (followed by a miscarriage). When Adam confronts her, first she insists it's not what he thinks it is, then that she needs time, then she disappears. From the start, I'm thinking the way this story should continue is:
“Well, if that's the mature way you're going to handle this, good riddance.” THE END
But, instead, Coben sends Adam on a long, tedious, and largely incomprehensible search for the truth. The more I learned about Corrine, the more I was sure I was right that Adam was better off without her.
Half-way through the book, you're still completely in the dark about what's going on. And not really caring.
In the end, we have a humongous coincidence that wasn't even necessary to solve the mystery, and a clue that the author hid from the readers.
Ultimately disappointing. I've enjoyed everything I've read from [a:Ken Liu 2917920 Ken Liu https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1400610835p2/2917920.jpg] (as well as his translation of [a:Liu Cixin 5780686 Liu Cixin https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1339387737p2/5780686.jpg]'s [b:Three Body Problem 20518872 The Three-Body Problem (Three-Body, #1) Liu Cixin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1415428227s/20518872.jpg 25696480]) but this fails to meet the standard he's previously set. In the first place, it's an old story of empire, rebellion, and then dissent among the emperor's successors—à la [b:Julius Caesar 13006 Julius Caesar (Oxford School Shakespeare) William Shakespeare https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1354574927s/13006.jpg 2796883]. And it's no more “fantasy” than [b:Hamlet 1420 Hamlet William Shakespeare https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351051208s/1420.jpg 1885548], [b:King Lear 12938 King Lear William Shakespeare https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1331563731s/12938.jpg 2342136], or maybe [b:The Tempest 12985 The Tempest William Shakespeare https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327793692s/12985.jpg 1359590]—the land of its setting is just as “real” as Shakespeare's locations. I include [b:The Tempest 12985 The Tempest William Shakespeare https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327793692s/12985.jpg 1359590] because there is the minor inclusion of Gods, but they don't actually do anything. Which is not to say it's bad: I'm comparing him to Shakespeare! Just not what I was hoping for.
Vastly better than the previous Joe Pickett novel I read (#13, [book:Breaking Point]).
It's still a little heavy on coincidence, but Box does his job and provides plausible explanations. Like [book:Breaking Point], the story once again involves federal government agents tasked with protecting the ecology against the rapacious nature of man: Box seems to share the distrust of the federal government that is displayed by many of his characters.
But that's a small part of the story. The major part involves the investigation of a vicious assault on Joe's daughter April. Joe knows who did it, but someone else is arrested. Was he guilty? You'll probably change your mind three times before all is revealed!
Camilleri still manages to surprise me. So, a spoiler to begin:
I should know better by now, after 17 previous novels, but I was half-way through the opening dream sequence before I twigged: "Oh, right, Salvo's dreaming..."
Sartarelli's translation is, as always, amazing. How on earth does he manage to make such idiomatic translations?
In this latest creation, Montalbano manages to not upset his subordinates, think his way through a mirror maze, and actually get justice against a mafia mobster. I read a lot of fiction set in Italy, and justice is pretty hard to find...
I paid money for this??? I think I'm through with Niven. This is the second dud in a row (though at least I finished this one). I bought this because I've always been a fan of Niven, and I've loved the few Benford books I've read. But this is probably the worst edited book I've ever seen from a major publishing house. I was suspicious. Right from the beginning, I thought “Niven's already written [b:Ringworld 61179 Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) Larry Niven https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1408793358s/61179.jpg 924711], what is he going to do new, with a similar structure with only slightly different geometry.” Trust me, ... nothing. It reads as if Niven and Benford separately sometimes wrote the same scenes, and then nobody bothered to properly merge them. So we have a situation where the Earth expedition sends a landing party to the “Bowl”, and the party gets split in halves. First, “Coiled tubes...reached Tananareve, caught her.” Then the rest of her half of the party get caught, while those who had already entered an airlock get away on the other side. But the next thing we see, Tananareve is providing first aid to one of the guys who escaped. Then, three paragraphs later, Cliff and Irma are providing first aid to the same guy... Later, we know that the people in command of the Bowl are known as Astronomers, but suddenly one is called an Astronaut—and it's only a couple of pages later that we're told that “The Astronomers also included some called Astronauts.” Geez, can't you even do basic continuity? “That seemed now like many days ago.... That was now a bigger problem for them all—telling when an Earth day had gone by.” Why? They're all carrying something very like a modern smart phone—it can't keep time? And really, why is it that important to know that an Earth day has passed—they'll never actually see another Earth day. Towards the end, they're in an elevator: “They went on, Cliff limping.” Except, they're still in the elevator! Where's he going? Motivations are completely suspect (which, to be sort-of fair, is a problem with [b:Ringworld 61179 Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) Larry Niven https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1408793358s/61179.jpg 924711], too). When a generation-ship heading for a star 45 light-years (I think) from Earth, comes across an enormous bowl-shaped habitat with a star at its focus, apparently moving through space under its own power, they actually have to THINK about whether to stop and check it out. Even when they already know that their calculations were wrong, and they are unlikely to even reach their destination! Duh. Later, one party finds the Bowl's transportation system: “The e-train zoomed on, at speeds Cliff estimated to be at least ten kilometers per second.” What? How is he estimating that? It's a subway. I'd give this one 1-star, except that I reserve that for books I couldn't finish. otoh, it breaks my cardinal rule for series novels: it's not self-contained. There is no conclusion to this story, everybody is just left hanging (though, it's not even suspenseful enough to be called a cliff-hanger—it's more like they submitted 1000 manuscript pages to the publisher, and the publisher cut it into three equal portions). So, I've talked myself into it: they haven't actually LET me finish this story, and I'm definitely not buying the sequel.
I've only just discovered this “Online magazine of Literary Adventure Fantasy”, which has survived through 170 issues, so is obviously doing quite well. Each issue appears to runaround 50 pages, containing two or three stories.
I picked it up when I saw a mention of the second story, “Wild Things Got to Go Free”, and thought “haven't I already read that?” [and the answer is “No.'] I was intrigued, though a little turned off, by the magazine's “Literary” pretensions but I have to admit that's a little hypocritical. If I'm annoyed that a “literary” author like Margaret Atwood can pretend that she doesn't write Science Fiction, then it's hardly fair to also object to the converse: SFF authors should be able to write Literary fiction.
In any case, both stories were well written, could easily be considered literary, and were fine fantasy. Beneath Ceaseless Skies is well worth a read.