So Far So Good: Final Poems: 2014-2018 by Ursula K LeGuin
By a Silver Thread: DFZ Changeling Book 1 by Rachael Aaron
Categories
Category: Books
Categories
Spring Reads 2024
The Blue Machine – How the Ocean Works by Helen Czerski
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Busted Synapses by Erika L. Satifka
Arguing with Zombies by Paul Krugman
(then into the heat of summer…)
Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
Categories
Recent Reads
Recent reads for early February.
Categories
Recent Reads
December and January
Categories
Alien Echoes and Neuromancer
Alien Echoes by Mira Grant was an interesting take on the alien universe. The first half of the book was an excellent and gritty story about the struggles of colonies, with fascinating extrapolated biological issues.
When the aliens come crashing down, it’s clear that they’re trouble of a wildly different scope — too perfect to be accidental. Olivia offers fascinating viewpoints — she explains what’s expected and what’s really unusual (from an amateur Xenobiologist’s POV), which proves to be a fascinating breakdown of plausibility for the various alien traits.
Neuromancer by William Gibson is a classic; I think I’ve read other Gibson novels, but this was unfamiliar enough that I think it’s a first encounter. Case is our sole POV, but his interactions with Armitage and Molly, and the interestingly textured characters that they run into at each stop, really lend the gritty feel of a complex world that’s ground on with interlocked histories, at national and personal levels.
It gets very ambitious, with a lot of travel to different interesting places, including orbit by the end.
Categories
Recent Books 11/19
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh was excellent, and very subtle in a few ways. Our POV character, Kyr, is a young woman from a defeated humanity, raised to gain glory for her fallen people. The society that’s she’s raised in has added some blinders – as has Kyr’s self image. As the book continues, and the way the universe expands, Kyr finds herself reevaluating what she has always known… it’s a rough road.
The book features quite alien societies – definitely more than humans in funny suits – and weird universe changing technologies that are hard to understand for everyone. There’s interesting simulations and temporal variations… Kyr doesn’t get a smooth path, but it’s a fascinating read, and the Kyr who emerges is so different but still grounded in the girl we first encountered.
Spear by Nicola Griffith is a powerfully Welsh retelling around the edges of the round table. Celtic myth and gods patrol the edges, but it’s a very human scale. Some of it was familiar, or familiar at a slant from Hawk of May, but Peretur comes from a very different, not nobly raised background that renders the political largely invisible to her.
The world isn’t particularly rough or cruel, though it’s a lot closer to the bone, and the nobility’s share is a sizable bite. The story as a whole feels very concise – it doesn’t mess about with multiple viewpoints, or try to handle multiple big events. It’s not the end of Caer Leon – it still feels like summer, and Medraut isn’t in the picture yet. This tale comes to a firm ending about Pereteur’s storyline – if not that of the companions that Peretur is joining.
Categories
Recent Reads
(As of 9/21/2023)
Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. Set in the world of today, it’s mostly an excellent story; the primary POV was Katrina Nguyen, a young violin prodigy on the run. She’s very much a modern youth, who interacts oddly with Shizuka Satomi, a violin teacher with a dark past. In parallel, Lan Tran, a starship captain in disguise runs a donut shop. I had to push past the “you’re putting peanut butter in my chocolate” for the melding of modern, fantasy, and space opera; fortunately, the strong characters keep you riveted and moving through.
The River Road by Karen Osborn. Another book set in the world of today, without any fantasy to relieve it. It’s mostly about how two families deal (and fail to deal) with tragedy. There’s a lot of confused memory, glorious flashbacks and unbridled youth. It’s a very nicely textured deep look at a rural near town friendship, and the slices we each see of each other.
Crip Up the Kitchen is a book filled with excellent advice about how to work around disabilities and conserve spoons, with careful and detailed explanations for the various tools and their uses. The recipes are similarly carefully detailed and thoroughly explained — even new cooks, and cooks exploring new tools are setup for success. The stories of adaptation and perseverance are excellent and inspiring; the gatekeeping lectures preceding each recipe that the author has a personal cultural connection to were wearying and repetitious.
Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, N. K. Jemsin Editor. A very broad mix of short stories, most relatively short and well crafted. I’d come across a few stories in other collections, and they run the gamut from quite familiar to entirely unique. Not every story was a great match for my taste – but the majority were, and craft was evident in them all.
Categories
Recent Reads
(August 25, 2023)
It’s been a while since it visited the library, so I’ve been rereading several novels. (I have added many more books to my library queue and requested several, so I’ll soon be back to new books.)
World War Z by Max Brooks was a fast reread; the various little tales are all quick, and when you start to encounter characters again in the second half of the book, there’s a warm burst of familiarity. A minor flaw is that the lack of continuous storyline meant that it didn’t embed in my mind, preventing it from being as useful when trying to sleep.
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman was a fascinating flash back to the world of 25 years ago, where a story centered on an asexual aromantic lead character was played up as genuinely alien to standard galactic society. Tedla, blands, and the whole society of Gammadis are a fascinating look at where desires for service and gender interact – and don’t.
The Dispatcher by John Scalzi is a fun thought experiment, looking at a world where most murder victims pop back to life immediately after dying. It’s fleshed out to tackle some quick exploits – like integrating Dispatchers, basically licensed assassins, into high risk surgeries, or the adaptation of society to mercy killings basically as a “do over” for nasty accidents, etc. It feels like a long short story – one big concept well explored, rather than the complex storylines of most novels.
Vatta’s War is a five book series by Elizabeth Moon. We follow a few POV characters, but the anchor is Ky Vatta. The series kicks off with Trading in Danger, where Ky begins the story by getting kicked out of the academy for “helping” in a way that backfires with terrible publicity. She’s a great character, who is put through a lot of misery but comes through it surprisingly well. There are a number of parallels to Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion books, but Ky manages to stand apart – in part because the universe is facing a different threat than Pak’s tale.
Categories
The Lies of the Ajungo
Moses Ose Utomi’s debut novella, The Lies of the Ajungo, was a fascinating read. It feels much like a good Leguin novel, with a carefully selected words and a very deliberate pace and feel.
The reversals and subtle revelations are well paced and great to experience.
Categories
Rule 34 and Imago
Rule 34 is an interesting Charles Stross book set in a downward sliding Scotland, and a whole host of disinvestment and rot in public institutions after the great recession.
We’re guided though the worlds (physical and internet) with a few viewpoint characters. Liz is a cop, who mostly reviews the net side of crimes… with a slowly revealed backstory explaining how she got derailed from promotions and into her current role. The other half is anchored by Anwar, a scammer out on parole, trying to make some money and support his family in a very challenging world.
There are some interesting detours into pseudo-states and international crime, some characters from the main characters’ pasts come back to complicate their lives, and AI runs amuck. Solid, but not my favorite of his.
Imago was a good conclusion to the Xenogenesis trilogy. It doesn’t include the rough toddler POV that made the middle book harder to love. Jodhas is a very interesting adaptation to Earth; very human looking and male to begin, but with a fascinating development path.
We get to see the threads begun by Akin in the previous book flourish, though it’s not directly addressed or a main focus. The huge slide of the human settlements that we saw last book has slowed, but there are new settlements to find.
All in all, a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy… though Dawn is enough stronger than the other two that I’d recommend it as a stand alone to most… and just let them know that the other books exist if they want to see the whole sequence together.