Derek
I don't know how Kellerman continues to do it, but I'm still enjoying the Delaware novels as much as I did the first one.
I love a good whodunnit where the clues are all there but the author manages to mislead without ever telling you an outright lie, and this is perfect. I had it figured out less than half way through—until I realized I hadn't! It turned out I was half-right.
Totally awesome! I read this because Liz Bourke (Sleeps with Monsters) recommended its sequel [b:Half Life 9991822 The Half Life Jennifer Weiner https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347632948s/9991822.jpg 14886603], calling it “the better book, demonstrating a much firmer grasp of narrative and character”, and I figured “fine”, but I want to read the first book first.... Well, character/schmaracter I say... I loved these characters, and I loved the mathematics even more. Liz is a classical history type, so it's entirely possible that what she likes in these books is completely different from what turns my crank, but she hasn't steered me wrong very often. Cas Russell is a math wiz, but perhaps not in the way that you might think. We all use mathematics (and its applied relative, physics) every day, but we use it intuitively. Cas consiciously understands all that mathematics. It's said that the great hitters of baseball can actually see the seams of the ball as it comes towards them. Cas can not only see the seams, but she can calculate the parabola of its trajectory, and exactly when to swing and how fast to impart the maximum energy to send the ball out of the park. Literally. My math isn't good enough to be able to prove or contradict Cas's abilities but it's good enough for me to suspect that, rather than creating a Superman type superhero, Huang really has given Cas the ability to be the best that any human could be. She can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, but she can jump through second story windows if she can find the right lever. If Cas was playing baseball in the major leagues, every swing would not only be a home run, but nobody would ever find the ball in the stadium. Nobody like Cas Russell really exists (I hope!), but she doesn't seem as far fetched as Spiderman. This story is action-packed, with lots of Boom!, and a strong female lead with a lot of flaws that she's beginning to realize she needs to work on. I'm looking forward to [b:Half Life 9991822 The Half Life Jennifer Weiner https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347632948s/9991822.jpg 14886603]
I almost loved this book, but it has two huge problems. First, as anybody who's read my mystery/thriller reviews knows, I hate mysteries that are solved by coincidence. The mere fact that the protagonist's involvement in a New York murder investigation gives him a cover reason to go to Bodrum, Turkey, where he's searching for a completely unrelated man, is unreasonable. But to have a second murder occur there, which is linked to the one in New York strains all credulity. That annoys me, but since this is more of a thriller than a whodunnit (and we actually know both the criminal and the crime, the story is actually about the search for the criminal), it's not as off-putting to me as it would be in a straight mystery. What was really driving me nuts was the foreshadowing at the end of many chapters. I really think that this could have gone from being a good book to a great book if Hayes had simply deleted the last line of every chapter. In the early chapters it wasn't too bad—“And he would have languished there... except that ... the search for the Saracen hit a desparate impasse.”—but the foreshadowing got heavier and heavier as we approached the climax. Much later, it's more like being hit with a clue-by-four: “I would never have found it if it hadn't have been for a set of traffic lights.” The extra “have” was just a gratuitous freebie.
Still, Hayes is a really good, and graphic, writer (I confess to skipping many of the ghastly bits—he's a bit too graphic for me). When he describes a photo of a woman walking with her children towards a death-camp gas chamber, it's so vivid I can see the picture.”
The villain of the piece is an Arab terrorist, planning an attack against the US. But Hayes isn't just picking the bogeyman-du-jour. Yes, the terrorist is a devout, even fanatical, devotee of a radical Muslim ideology, but he doesn't particularly hate the US. In fact, it's the Saudi royal family he wants to bring down, and he feels that if they don't have the support of the US, they'll collapse. He may well be right. Unlike most of our politicians, Hayes get that the Saudis are no friends of the west.
The particular attack being planned is incredible, but Hayes makes it (almost) entirely believable.
The protagonist (I can't simply name him, because even the name he grew up with wasn't the one he was born with, and as an operative of a US intelligence agency, he adopts and discards identities routinely) says “Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you're fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn't help but think of how many times I had violated our nation's deepest values in order to protect them.” I guess it's something that he still thinks of that—I suspect most of spooks never do—but I'm still not going to believe it's necessary. On the other hand, at the climax he sets up a particularly gruesome scenario, and I can't see the alternative either.
I've loved Gibson since [book:Neuromancer] and [book:The Peripheral] doesn't disappoint.
Gibson likes to throw you in at the deep end, where nothing makes sense. I eventually figured that what I really needed for this book was to have my left eye reading one page, while my right eye was reading two pages ahead—everything has an explanation, and he doesn't leave you waiting too long to get it, but you're going to spend those two pages completely baffled. And of course, by the time you understand one thing that had you perplexed, two more mysteries have arisen.
The story's taking place in two time periods: the first is maybe a couple of decades from now, and the second is seventy years after that (though not strictly the first period's future!). In that later period, a method has been found to communicate with earlier times, but that communication necessarily changes the past, resulting in the two timelines diverging from each other. It also necessarily causes a fair bit of brain pain in the reader...
I loved the characters and the plot, though some of the motivations seemed weak (sure Daedra is a spoiled brat, but it's not in the nature of spoiled brats to do something for nothing—providing her with a motivation would be easy, but it didn't happen). What do the conspirators get? It doesn't seem enough, but perhaps that's the whole point: that sometimes great evil is done for the most banal of reasons. As Flynne recalls her mother saying, “...evil wasn't glamourous but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room ... to become its bigger self.”
There was just one point where it became impossible to suspend my disbelief: “Jimmy's breakfast burritos were gross. Scrambled eggs and chopped-up bacon, green onions.” WTF?
This series is beginning to get tedious.
this volume contains about 75% more words than anybody could reasonably use, mostly to tell us tedious detail of the politics of Manticore. I know it's not really unbelievable that corrupt politicians could bend and break laws to their own benefit, and actually believe their own lies. after all, politicians fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and somehow managed to believe those lies too, but just because truth is stranger than fiction doesn't mean that such fiction is interesting to read.
But even some of the smarter characters act in ways that are at best odd, but at worst stupid. people contradict themselves, act against both their best interests and those of their nation, and just basically make themselves as unsympathetic as possible.
So much of this book is hard to believe. OK, people get swallowed by cults every day, even people who should be more credulous, so that part is understandable. I can even believe that people would give up all their privacy to The Circle: I'm more Internet-cautious than many (I only have a Facebook account to assert my own identity: I don't use the account), but I still permit Google more access to my identity than I'd like. The problem is in imagining that everybody would be happy to accept a system that simplifies their lives while explicitly giving advertisers better access to them. It certainly couldn't happen as quickly as Eggers implies.
Eggers seems to suffer from a need to include any interesting thing he hears about in his story, and then doing no research. He's just so bad about basic facts. Riesling is a sweet wine, he says. As a wine-maker friend says, of German Rieslings (which are essentially the only sweet ones you'll find), they only export those because nobody in Germany would drink them. His description of the founder of The Circle as “borderline Aspergers” is just plain bigotry. He describes tiny, satellite-connected, HD web-cams, with a two-year Lithium battery, and then says that they'll soon have a purely solar-powered version. WTF? If you could get the power requirements of satellite Internet down to the levels that could be powered for two-years by ANY kind of battery, you could get by with solar.
It's a barely believable story on the social level, and completely unbelievable on the technological front.
I started out with a real sense of annoyance with this tale.
Some of it was no doubt due to the fact that I have read some later books of the Honorverse (that is, at least one of the actual Honor Harrington novels, and a couple of other novels that involve the characters in this story), and I was finding it really hard to swallow. I mean, really, a bunch of slaves throw a revolt, conquer a planet and having suffered lives of servitude then proceed to elect a queen...
But, Flint and Weber somehow made the outrageous seem reasonable. And funny (that's got to be the Flint contribution, because this was much lighter than the Weber-only Harrington novels). And after all—this is Space Opera. Opera is supposed to be over-the-top.
I think the one thing that really annoyed me is the lack of explanations of most of the actors motives. It begins with the aftermath of the assassination of Hieronymus Stein, leader of the Renaissance Association. I'm guessing Stein's assassination actually occurs in some other book in the Honorverse, but here we find out who performed the assassination, but no explanation of why or even what difference his death might make to anybody. And we don't even get more than the barest explanation of what the Renaissance Association is! Now, that's not always necessary. The Audubon Ballroom is mentioned throughout the novels of the Honorverse (they take center stage here), and very little is ever made explicit, but their actions define them—and a quick google of “Audubon Ballroom” makes it very clear why they're called the Audubon Ballroom. But the fact is, and it applies to far more than just the Renaissance Association, this is not a stand-alone novel. You're expected to be conversant with the rest of the Honorverse, and I'd hate that if this was book 2 of a trilogy, but it's not. It's actually book 1 in its own series, and I don't even know which books I should have read before this to get all the background.
Again, a fascinating retelling of a part of British history that should be more well known to those of us educated south of Hadrian's wall.
I've been really annoyed by the lack of a good map, so I started one here.
I was led to believe that this was a trilogy, but I hope not, as it's far short of being finished. I trust Whyte's going to continue through at least the rest of Wallace's campaign, and preferably to Robert Bruce's coronation.
As with the previous entry in this series, my biggest objection is poor editing. Weber has published, literally (if not literarily) dozens of novels with one of the largest SF houses on the planet. They should be able to edit his books!
I'm not even sure if this one: “[the] flag briefing room was on the small size” is the author's error initially, or just a typo. I've heard too many people say exactly that, so perhaps Weber really thinks it should be “size” and not “side”, but dammit! His copy editors should have got it right. But that was nothing compared to seeing: “Here, here!”, when nobody was calling a dog.
I still enjoyed the story, but Baen Books should be able to produce something that looks a little better than the most recent self-published works...
Another fairly predictable entry in a long-running space opera. Honor is too perfect, but it's still fun.
Its most redeeming feature is probably that it got me to do some research about the French Revolution. I knew who Robespierre was, so was pretty sure that the People's Republic of Haven's President, Rob S. Pierre had to be so-named for a reason, and I though I recalled somebody named Saint-Just. So, it's pretty heavy-handed, but it got me looking at the historical precedents on which Haven's Revolution was based, so it can't be all bad.
If I have one real objection to these stories, it's the fact that David Weber has a colonial's command of the English language. Please stop using “less” when you mean “fewer”!
This is a complete divergence from anything I've read by Drake before. It's neither SF, nor military, nor even epic fantasy.
This is a collection of five short stories about Old Nathan, a Tennessee pioneer in the late 1820s. Nathan fought in the American revolution, where he unfortunately lost his genitals at the battle of King's Mountain (which is a historical event). Apparently the loss of his “knackers” was offset by gaining the ability to perform magic and talk to animals. Talking to animals leads to his becoming a vegetarian (no doubt a rare thing in 1820s Tennessee); the magic leads to him being shunned but still much in demand by people who actually need a magical intervention.
While the stories stand alone, they do tie together. In the first, Nathan loses his bull Spanish King, and in the fourth he gets him back (with the bull complaining about how it took so long). Cullen “Bully” Ransden, a man who is everything Nathan is not, figures into three of the stories, and various other characters occur in multiple stories.
Nathan won't eat mammals and birds, but he doesn't mind the odd fish—presumably they don't talk to him. “As for Old Nathan—he wasn't going to smoke and eat a hog any more than he was going to smoke and eat a human being... though there were plenty hogs he'd met whose personalities would improve once their throats were slit. Same was true of the humans, often enough.” On the other hand, he keeps a cat (or is kept by a cat...) who of course insists on fresh game, and he has no problem with the cat hunting: Nathan's not responsible for anybody else's nature.
Old Nathan is a man with a highly tuned sense of “right”, an accidental understanding (but not knowledge) of magic, and very little fear of anything in this world or the next.
Oh. Wow.This is a book that I've been intending to read for a while... right after I knock off the other 120 unread books. But apparently our meeting was fated. My mother accidentally checked it out from the library, the day before I was to leave for home. My mother despises SF, so I had to read it, and I had 24 hours to do it.This is one of the few books I've ever read that I wanted to restart as soon as I finished (though, part of that is because I had to read it too fast in the first place). Unfortunately, that's going to have to wait, now, as the book and I are about to part ways!I felt it started a little woodenly, but wasn't sure whether that was an artifact of the translation or intentional on the part of the author—since I've never read a [a:Ken Liu 2917920 Ken Liu https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1400610835p2/2917920.jpg] original that I didn't love, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt as a translator. Pretty soon, I was immersed and it stopped mattering.It's a far-from-classic alien invasion story—after all, the aliens in question won't be here for 450 years—with a lot of hard mathematics & physics thrown in (the math is all virtual: be not afraid!). He almost lost me at unfolding protons into two dimensions—I mean, why? We don't work in two-D, we work in three, so it makes far more sense to unfold an 11-dimensional proton into three-D. In any case, conceptually it should be possible; practically, maybe not so much.Early in the book, a physicist commits suicide because she's discovered that the immutable Laws of physics are not-so-immutable. [a:Ted Chiang 130698 Ted Chiang https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1399023404p2/130698.jpg] did this in [b:Stories of Your Life and Others 223380 Stories of Your Life and Others Ted Chiang https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356138316s/223380.jpg 216334]—somewhat more believably. In Chiang's case, a mathematician couldn't cope with finding a proof that 1=2. That really would undermine everything we think we know. In Liu's case, particle physicists are finding that their experiments are not reproducible. OK, I'm no graduate physicist, let alone one of the top minds on the planet, but that just says to me that at a quantum level, there's chaos: which we already knew. otoh, maybe my reaction is like that of the husband of the mathematician in Chiang's story, who essentially says “So what? Mathematics still works, right?”Later on, we meet Mike Evans, a disciple of [a:Peter Singer 12397 Peter Singer https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1255667717p2/12397.jpg] ([b:Animal Liberation 29380 Animal Liberation Peter Singer https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386924543s/29380.jpg 1547077]). Mike's supposed to be a bad guy (such as there are, in this story: Liu really doesn't judge anybody), but I'm predisposed to judge him as worse than he probably is because of the Singer connection. It's not that I really disagree with everything Singer says, but I had to take a Scientific Ethics course in university where I failed to realize until it was too late that I wasn't supposed to debate Singer, but was required to swallow his propaganda whole. I'm a little biased...Liu manages to discuss politics, man's inhumanity to man (and other creatures), the advance of science, and just about anything else under the sun (or suns), all in the context of the three-body problem (a real “holy grail” of physics), and all, apparently, without upsetting the censors of what is still a totalitarian state. A tour-de-force, and well worth all the attention it has been getting around the world.
This is a hard book to categorize, and a long way from what I expected as I think of Simmons as an SF writer (and lots of people on Goodreads have this shelved as Science Fiction).
So it's not, in any sense, Science Fiction.
It's a story about a man's search: for love, for friendship, for family. Along the way, he'll solve a mystery.
Richard was an astronaut. He walked on the moon. You might think that would have been the high-point of his life, but all Richard really remembers is the regimentation of checklists on an Apollo flight. Now, he's divorced, estranged from his son, and in a dead-end job.
When his son, Scott, seems to have been pulled into a suspicious cult, Richard flies to India to try to see him, with the predictable result. Instead of bringing his son home, he meets Maggie, his son's girlfriend.
Maggie takes Richard sightseeing in India, showing him places that resonate with her, rather than necessarily the great tourist landmarks (though it does include the Taj Mahal), and she talks to him about “places of power”. Through the rest of the story, Richard searches for those places of power (not usually consciously), both with and without Maggie. He hang-glides from the peak of Uncompahgre (one of the highest peaks in the US); finds a concrete replica of Stonehenge in Oregon; rebuilds a cabin on an artificial lake; and visits Maggie's own favorite, Bear Butte (yeah, I'm still immature enough to find that funny) in South Dakota.
While his relationship with his ex-wife is irreparable, Richard rebuilds his relationship with his old friend and crewmate on the moon mission, Dave, and with his son. Dave's now a politician, an Air Force reservist, a writer, ... and he has terminal cancer. When Dave dies in the crash of an Air Force T-35, everyone, including his much younger—and pregnant—wife, suspects suicide and Richard inserts himself into the investigation to find the truth.
And of course, he falls in love with Maggie. But she's his son's girlfriend...
The premise of this story is interesting, but not ultimately believable.
Instead of tattoos, people are now getting skin grafts from other animals—animals which are especially bred to not require transplant rejection drugs. I could believe that (though the idea that animal grafts could ever not cause rejection when they still haven't solved the human-to-human rejection problems, is harder to swallow), but the idea that people (“xenos”, or “xenofreaks”, depending on your point of view) with these grafts would automatically become criminalized, merely for getting the graft, is really hard to swallow. I can totally believe that non-xenos might find them repugnant: many find the current fashion in tattoos to be repugnant. But Conway's created a Xeno Intelligence Agency to police them, which makes zero sense.
It's a self-published book, and like many self-published books, it needs some editing. Better than most, it's mostly typo-free, but please: people don't have gastrointestinal tracks [sic]; it's never “between she and” anybody (the pronoun is the object of a preposition!); and a host of lesser evils.
Conway also doesn't really know anything about porcupines. Our heroine is kidnapped and has her scalp replaced with a porcupine pelt. As someone who has dealt with a lot of porcupine quills (a few of them in me), from two decades of de-quilling my dogs, a dozen is not what you get from an intentional assault. A dozen is what a dog that has been quilled before gets when he tentatively tries to touch a porcupine without getting hurt. You can't protect yourself from quills with a piece of shower curtain, and when you do get one in yourself accidentally, it's not like being pricked with a pin. One that I got after it had been lodged in a shirt for two weeks, with an intervening trip through the laundry, was so hard to remove that my wife resorted to cutting it out with a utility knife. Also, I once talked to a veterinarian who commented that in 35 years of removing quills, he'd never seen one pierce an eyeball. Now, I've also never known a porcupine to actually attack a predator—they wait for the predator to come to them, rightly believing they're near-invulnerable—so maybe it could happen, but on top of the rest, it doesn't ring true.
Finally:
“This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people”. I refuse to accept any author's or publisher's right to apply “terms” to the way I read books. I don't “share” ebooks. I don't post them on websites. But I absolutely reserve the right to give away my only copy, just as I would with a paper book. I actually support the idea of paying royalties on every transfer of any work of art (though how it would ever work, I can't imagine), but authors and publishers neither have a moral right nor (in most countries) a legal right to demand that I can not give away a book I have purchased.
I do not “agree” to your terms.
I really don't know how to respond to this. David Weber is one of the kings of military SF, and the writing is up to his usual standard. But it's a cliched old sub-genre (invasion of Earth by alien forces, plucky humans fight back against all odds), with a weird twist.
I'm not going to say anything about that twist. Except that a portion of the plot takes place in Romania. Nudge, nudge... wink, wink... say no more...
I enjoyed most of the story (though there was too much time spent enumerating military hardware, but really: why would I read military SF if that bugged me?), but that twist (which I saw coming a long way off) rather cheapens it). I can't quite bring myself to rate this at two-stars, but...
I'm afraid Goodreads managed to eat my original review...
I'm not entirely sure how to categorize this one. It's hardly a “courtroom procedural”, as it's far from typical court procedure. It's a bit of a “whodunnit”, but your options are limited from the beginning. But mostly it's a lot of unlikeable characters bulldogging through a trial to come to the truth.
None of the characters are very likable. Josie, the protagonist, is a whiner. She does her job, gets a client (who she believes is innocent) off a murder charge, and then throws her career away when the woman turns out really to be a murderer. Josie's love interest, Archer, handles confrontation by retreating (perhaps understandably, but it doesn't make him any more likeable); her supposed partner, Faye, doesn't want her practising the kind of law she knows Josie is good at; the girl accused of murder doesn't want to be liked; the victim was a creep; his son is a victim of child abuse who turns into a creep; and the accused's mother—and wife of the son—is the biggest creep of the lot.
I Am Not A Lawyer™, but many of the courtroom scenes don't ring true to me—and at least one reviewer who is a lawyer agreed.
There are really only three possibilities for the killer, and Forster commits the cardinal sin in a mystery writer of telling us that somebody else did it. Misleading the reader is good; lying to the reader—not so much.
