I've also realised I'm now 2 William Gibson books behind. The last one I read was Zero History, which was not particularly good, at least by his standards. The Blue Ant trilogy didn't really grab me the way his other stuff did, Pattern Recognition aside.
They were much much better on reread; not sure why. Maybe because I care more about fashion now? The Peripheral is entirely different and very intriguing; I think you’d especially enjoy the British guy in it.
Peripheral is really quite good. Interesting ideas and setting. Some nifty set pieces. Sort of a couple of parallel interesting stories going on, and some neat world building.
Agency I didn't find to be particularly engaging. The world building was more or less already done. It introduces one kinda novel idea over the course of the story, but there's not too much pay off. Not much in the way tension. It could lay some decent groundwork for a third book, but I honestly don't see it.
Agency was a bit of a letdown for me given the wait for it. Verity didn't actually do anything - she just sorta got driven around San Francisco while the stublords watched. I'm ride or die Gibson, and I still enjoyed the language and the alternate history and the bits and pieces of the near future Bay Area, but I hope he moves on to something else next time around. I guess he could explore the actual Jackpot and go more in depth about the resulting cultural changes among the survivors, but...eh...I mean it's just not that intriguing to me. I actually liked it better when it wasn't expounded on.
Speaking of Gibson, I just started Fall; or, Dodge In Hell by Stephenson. It's early days as it is your standard length Stephenson book, but it could be interesting. I've read fairly negative reviews of the back half, so we'll see how it plays out.
Second volume of Norwich's history of Byzantium every bit as good as the first, so I'm ploughing on with the third and final volume.
I'm prepared to say JJN is the most enjoyable writer of history I've ever found. Not a dry sentence in the whole thing, and many, many highly entertaining ones. Over a thousand years of war, intrigue, poisonings, betrayals, insanity, glory and stupidity.
I'm reading a Memory of Empire and so far it's very charming. I guess it won a few awards last year, but I hadn't heard of it before. It's very space opera-y, there's a space station on the edge of a big galactic empire, and some sort of unknown hostile presence past a jump gate, and etc etc.
I love space opera, but more often than not they're usually, well, kinda fascist-y? Authoritarian anyway, it's almost always the military being the only people who can ever fix things and civvies and diplomats being useless idiots. Memory of Empire is like the polar opposite of that, the (young, female) protagonist has just been appointed as an ambassador to said huge space empire, and so far the whole book is just diplomacy and trying to like navigate unfamiliar cultural mores and sometimes not knowing the right word for something or messing up a weird tense and then feeling like an idiot around native speakers. It's also good at having both the foreign culture and the protagonists own culture be kind of weird, there's no "normal" society of people that think 1:1 like the audience does.
There's a really lovely scene where the ambassador lady is attending a poetry event and people are like impromptu coming up with jokey poems that are loaded with puns and references and allusions and she's like "I've spent half my life dedicated to learning this language and culture and I would still be fucking terrible at this" and she's massively bummed out in a way that felt really wonderfully relatable as someone who's struggled to learn a foreign language. Like that xenophile's depression of knowing you'll never quite get it as much as you want to.
I'll be bummed if it gets more conventional in the second half, right now I'm really loving it.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Yeah finished up A Memory of Empire and it was lovely. It can be a bit overwhelming, it throws heaps of characters and relationships and hints of possible relationships at you all at once, and it does this knowing that you're probably going to struggle to keep it all straight because that's the challenge for the main character too. But that stilll makes for a book that requires pretty close reading. There's lots of politicking and various characters end up dead and there's threats about invasions and distant alien war fleets, but at its heart its a story about the like soft power of cultural empire, and the main character loving this culture and dealing with knowing she'll never be part of it and always be an other, and of course also being very conflicted about her own relationship with a foreign power and how her job as an ambassador is simultaneously to facilitate communication between the two cultures while also making sure they don't simply absorb her own little culture through osmosis, even though she herself is quite in love with the culture.
If there was one complaint I wanted like another 200 pages of just Mahit and Three Seagrass like bumming around town making smalltalk, because all of their conversations are incredibly charming.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
That's a lovely description of A Memory Called Empire. I loved it too; it felt like a light read sometimes despite its melancholy and detail because it's so crisply and intelligently executed. And sometimes very funny or cute.
I visited the North Carolina Museum of Art just after reading it and felt a big space opera mood when I met this "edgeshine of a knife" sculpture and also this "real Radchaai hours" portrait. Though, not to be dismissive of those works in their own right.
I interrupted my Elemental Logic to read the anthology The Mythic Dream, which I do recommend. It's short stories in the category "myth retellings" by a really stacked group SF/F writers. Stephen Graham Jones writes a darkly indulgent werewolf Lycaon. Sarah Gailey takes Thetis' point of view in a "Heaven in the Dust" setting. Some other standouts:
Labbatu Takes Command of the Flagship Heaven Dwells Within - Arkady Martine (Inanna Takes Command of Heaven / Inanna and Enki)
Buried Deep - Naomi Novik (Ariadne and the Minotaur)
The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself - Carmen Maria Machado (Erysichthon)
Florilegia; Or, Some Lies About Flowers - Amal El-Mohtar (Blodeuwedd)
And no real flops. I felt Anne Leckie's The Justified (Hathor and the Destruction of Mankind) tread real close to the thematic concerns of the Ancillary series, but without bringing the same sense of depth; but on the other hand, it was a fun and high-color bit of catharsis. T. Kingfisher's entry is short and charming.
Yeah, just going to reiterate how great A Memory Called Empire. Really just makes me think the Ninefox books and the Ancillary series got together and had a wee bouncing baby space costume drama thing.
How To Lose the Time War was... a weird little love story? It's shortish and worth a read. Quite good.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
I feel that Dr. Tingle reached his literary peak with the 2015 classic Pounded In the Butt By My Own Butt, but I'm all for him promoting responsible behaviour in this time of public crisis.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
I didn't like How to Lose the Time War as much as I thought I would. It was really inventive and clever, but that constant cleverness made it a bit of a chore to read sometimes. Like it was too focused on the mechanics and not enough on just the emotion. Still def worth a read though.
I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant and it's very good except I'm still not really convinced the author actually understands how fiat currency works. But as a character study it is very, very good.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I didn't like How to Lose the Time War as much as I thought I would. It was really inventive and clever, but that constant cleverness made it a bit of a chore to read sometimes. Like it was too focused on the mechanics and not enough on just the emotion. Still def worth a read though.
I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant and it's very good except I'm still not really convinced the author actually understands how fiat currency works. But as a character study it is very, very good.
I mean, are there any other better fantasy novels with a fiat currency storyline?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I didn't like How to Lose the Time War as much as I thought I would. It was really inventive and clever, but that constant cleverness made it a bit of a chore to read sometimes. Like it was too focused on the mechanics and not enough on just the emotion. Still def worth a read though.
I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant and it's very good except I'm still not really convinced the author actually understands how fiat currency works. But as a character study it is very, very good.
I mean, are there any other better fantasy novels with a fiat currency storyline?
Hrrrmmmm.... Spice and Wolf has an arc about minted coins with established values that are not directly tied to their actual metal content.
I didn't like How to Lose the Time War as much as I thought I would. It was really inventive and clever, but that constant cleverness made it a bit of a chore to read sometimes. Like it was too focused on the mechanics and not enough on just the emotion. Still def worth a read though.
I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant and it's very good except I'm still not really convinced the author actually understands how fiat currency works. But as a character study it is very, very good.
I mean, are there any other better fantasy novels with a fiat currency storyline?
Daniel Abraham wrote the Dagger and the Coin series which stars a banker as the main protagonist. She uses that position to fight a war against an evil mind control cult.
Daniel Abraham is half of James S A Corey, from the The Expanse show/books.
I've been reading False Value, the latest Rivers of London novel. It's pretty good. Not the best in the series but not the worst, either. Nice that there's a mystery to solve rather than just chasing around London after another wizard again.
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
Also recently read The Relic by Preson and Child. It was a pretty good... I don't know the term for the genre. Whatever genre Dan Brown is. It's weird in that it seems way more dated than it seems like it should be, being from 1995. Yet at the same time the stuff he's got computers doing is (partially, anyway) still not realistic today. Fun enough as dumb entertainment, though, and utterly dissimilar from the movie based on it insofar as I recall what happens in the movie.
What else...
Peter Clines' Terminus was fun. Much more of a sequel to his other Threshold novels than Dead Moon was.
I've been reading False Value, the latest Rivers of London novel. It's pretty good. Not the best in the series but not the worst, either. Nice that there's a mystery to solve rather than just chasing around London after another wizard again.
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
Also recently read The Relic by Preson and Child. It was a pretty good... I don't know the term for the genre. Whatever genre Dan Brown is. It's weird in that it seems way more dated than it seems like it should be, being from 1995. Yet at the same time the stuff he's got computers doing is (partially, anyway) still not realistic today. Fun enough as dumb entertainment, though, and utterly dissimilar from the movie based on it insofar as I recall what happens in the movie.
What else...
Peter Clines' Terminus was fun. Much more of a sequel to his other Threshold novels than Dead Moon was.
The Relic is also the start of a long-running series featuring the further adventures of the FBI agent. Sometime there are monsters, sometimes not.
I've been reading False Value, the latest Rivers of London novel. It's pretty good. Not the best in the series but not the worst, either. Nice that there's a mystery to solve rather than just chasing around London after another wizard again.
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
Also recently read The Relic by Preson and Child. It was a pretty good... I don't know the term for the genre. Whatever genre Dan Brown is. It's weird in that it seems way more dated than it seems like it should be, being from 1995. Yet at the same time the stuff he's got computers doing is (partially, anyway) still not realistic today. Fun enough as dumb entertainment, though, and utterly dissimilar from the movie based on it insofar as I recall what happens in the movie.
What else...
Peter Clines' Terminus was fun. Much more of a sequel to his other Threshold novels than Dead Moon was.
The Relic is also the start of a long-running series featuring the further adventures of the FBI agent. Sometime there are monsters, sometimes not.
Yeah, I've got the second one... The Reliquiary, maybe? And I read the third one at some point years and years ago without realizing it was a series.
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
It's a trilogy and I think the setting ends up justifying most of this. That said the first book is far and away the best, so if it's not working for you then stop rather than riding the train all the way down the hill
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed: It's an action-packed, Cthulhu-flavored adventure that gets most of its juice not from any of that, but from its focus on the dysfunctional relationship between the two main characters. I wasn't maybe in the right mood for it; I felt like every chapter overstayed its welcome by about 10%.
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
It's a trilogy and I think the setting ends up justifying most of this. That said the first book is far and away the best, so if it's not working for you then stop rather than riding the train all the way down the hill
Finished Fifth Season today. It was alright. I'll probably look up the blurb on the second one to see if I wanna bother with it. I'm curious what happens next and I've listened to worse fantasy novels.
Speaking of which, I started the 5th Mountain Man book, Make Me King, by Keith Blackmore. They're super cheesy post-apocalypse zombie action things. Not terribly well written but also not terribly written. R.C. Bray narrates them and I've found I can listen to almost anything that guy reads. If you need an audible read that's oddly fitting our current world the first one, Mountain Man, is okay entertainment about a guy living alone after the zombie apocalypse who has a positively prescient fixation on collecting toilet paper.
I didn't like How to Lose the Time War as much as I thought I would. It was really inventive and clever, but that constant cleverness made it a bit of a chore to read sometimes. Like it was too focused on the mechanics and not enough on just the emotion. Still def worth a read though.
I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant and it's very good except I'm still not really convinced the author actually understands how fiat currency works. But as a character study it is very, very good.
I mean, are there any other better fantasy novels with a fiat currency storyline?
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
It's a trilogy and I think the setting ends up justifying most of this. That said the first book is far and away the best, so if it's not working for you then stop rather than riding the train all the way down the hill
Finished Fifth Season today. It was alright. I'll probably look up the blurb on the second one to see if I wanna bother with it. I'm curious what happens next and I've listened to worse fantasy novels.
Speaking of which, I started the 5th Mountain Man book, Make Me King, by Keith Blackmore. They're super cheesy post-apocalypse zombie action things. Not terribly well written but also not terribly written. R.C. Bray narrates them and I've found I can listen to almost anything that guy reads. If you need an audible read that's oddly fitting our current world the first one, Mountain Man, is okay entertainment about a guy living alone after the zombie apocalypse who has a positively prescient fixation on collecting toilet paper.
From what I remember the 2nd book in Broken Earth was mostly about the long term background of the world and not so much with the present story. It was alright but it's a hobby horse of mine that it didn't deserve the Hugo win that year.
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The author treats the apocalyptic earthquakes/eruptions as way more common than they are. They happen centuries apart. I mean, that's often for an apocalypse, sure, but is like tens of generations. Calling them "fifth season"s doesn't make a lot of sense. Nor do a lot of the cultural attitudes. Everyone acts like they've lived through a handful of them most of the time but, in fact, no one in living memory has ever seen one. The cultural bias against metal is just weird, considering just how far apart the seasons are (any tools made of metal are going to break or wear out long before they're destroyed by acid rain during a season anyway, in all likelihood - and it's not like stone tools are more durable in day-to-day use) and the fact that they clearly do mine and use metal for some things (they have telegraph networks, after all).
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
It's a trilogy and I think the setting ends up justifying most of this. That said the first book is far and away the best, so if it's not working for you then stop rather than riding the train all the way down the hill
Finished Fifth Season today. It was alright. I'll probably look up the blurb on the second one to see if I wanna bother with it. I'm curious what happens next and I've listened to worse fantasy novels.
Speaking of which, I started the 5th Mountain Man book, Make Me King, by Keith Blackmore. They're super cheesy post-apocalypse zombie action things. Not terribly well written but also not terribly written. R.C. Bray narrates them and I've found I can listen to almost anything that guy reads. If you need an audible read that's oddly fitting our current world the first one, Mountain Man, is okay entertainment about a guy living alone after the zombie apocalypse who has a positively prescient fixation on collecting toilet paper.
From what I remember the 2nd book in Broken Earth was mostly about the long term background of the world and not so much with the present story. It was alright but it's a hobby horse of mine that it didn't deserve the Hugo win that year.
The second book focuses on developing the Nassun storyline. It's really upsetting!
I just finished The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood. It is bottom tier Atwood for sure. Really kind of tawdry book, affairs, Vegas aesthetic and some 50s aesthetic, sexbots. It's kind of all over the place both in story and in premise; it's the story of Stan and Charmaine's relationship but that relationship sort of doesn't actually evolve very much and you don't see a lot other than them kind of missing each other for half the book. The setting--what is it trying to do? You think maybe the interesting part is that there's a weird planned community but actually
it's a prison but actually they kill people and sell 'organs or DNA; whatever' but clearly not in quantities that lead to making enough money to be The Dark Secret; and ok there's surveillance and also there's sex robots and also there's a brainwashing women operation and there's a journalist and it's just...I don't know, it's a really unfocused scifi setup with no exciting reveal and instead a grab bag of sort of weird things that don't come together
The characters are all unsympathetic and don't quite read right; Atwood usually writes characters that aren't realistic exactly but have extremely real feelings that resonate, but these ones somehow were both off.
I wasn't happy with this, especially reading it right after Bluebeard's Egg, a phenomenal collection of Atwood's short stories from the late 80s.
Baru Cormorant and Memory of Empire make for a really interesting reading pair
Both queer, both about empire, both about a young female official from a tiny nation navigating said empire, both struggling with their own role and identity as part of that imperial system, both interested in the way imperialism shapes thought and self identity.
And yet they're very, verrry different books
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Baru Cormorant and Memory of Empire make for a really interesting reading pair
Both queer, both about empire, both about a young female official from a tiny nation navigating said empire, both struggling with their own role and identity as part of that imperial system, both interested in the way imperialism shapes thought and self identity.
And yet they're very, verrry different books
I don't feel like you could write a book similar to Baru Cormorant without it being an obvious rip-off. Similar to Ancillary Justice. It's too weird and unique to be similar to anything.
A collection of obituaries from The Telegraph (entertainingly written, but a few too many old duffers who did little but fox hunt and yell at the poor) and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which so far absolutely convinces as a first hand account of a young boy’s scattershot brain.
finished broken earth book 1, did not like it all that much. thought the concept was fine, thought the story they were creating ok but it took too long to get interesting and there was no climax (well there was but it was terrible). 3/5 for effort but the author hopefully got a better editor for book 2 and 3 which i will not be reading.
finished broken earth book 1, did not like it all that much. thought the concept was fine, thought the story they were creating ok but it took too long to get interesting and there was no climax (well there was but it was terrible). 3/5 for effort but the author hopefully got a better editor for book 2 and 3 which i will not be reading.
I had a rough few starts with that book. I absolutely LOVED her Inheritance Trilogy and was eager to devour more of Jemisin's book after that. I didn't know about her other work when I started so I was excited when I learned about The Broke Cycle series and how it had gotten some high praise and awards. But it has been a struggle for me and I keep bouncing right off of it.
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Got Peripheral from the library today, and as I was loading the kindle book, I saw a suggestion for an Adrian Tchaikovsky book I didn't recognize. I was trying to find the book on the library site, and I couldn't find that, but he has written a lot more books than I anticipated. Are any of these besides the Children of Time/Ruin any good?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Got Peripheral from the library today, and as I was loading the kindle book, I saw a suggestion for an Adrian Tchaikovsky book I didn't recognize. I was trying to find the book on the library site, and I couldn't find that, but he has written a lot more books than I anticipated. Are any of these besides the Children of Time/Ruin any good?
i very much enjoyed Children of Time. I need to go read Ruin.
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Yeah, I like Children of Time, which is why I'm surprised to see what looks like mass output fantasy hack and slash, and wonder if it might be readable.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
The city in the middle of the night is less a novel and more of a collection of interesting ideas about a setting that don't quite hang together.
The final section was a bit of a clear "oh no, I don't know where this going and want to end it!"
That said I really enjoyed the setting and I hope the author managed to do something with tighter plotting in the future
That all is pretty close to my opinion on it. It has some really good stuff in it but it doesn't really have a narrative arc so much as some stuff happens and then some other stuff happens. Eventually some emotionally resonate stuff happens and then the book just stops.
She also wrote All the Birds in the Sky which is better plotted though it is hard to call it "tight".
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I just finished The Peripheral, which I rather enjoyed. I was a little worried, because the last of his books I had read was Pattern Matching, which fell kind of flat for me, but this reminded me to some degree of all the things I love about Neuromancer.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Reading Scalzi's new book The Last Emperox. It has a mood:
Whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages.
1. Denial.
2. Denial.
3. Denial. 4. Fucking Denial.
5. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.
It was written last year but it is feeling way too appropriate to current events.
I don't know if Scalzi is purposefully writing an allegory for climate change but he's writing an allegory for climate change. Only less bleak because at least one person in power - even if their power is fairly nebulous and uncertain - actually gives a shit.
Reading Scalzi's new book The Last Emperox. It has a mood:
Whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages.
1. Denial.
2. Denial.
3. Denial. 4. Fucking Denial.
5. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.
It was written last year but it is feeling way too appropriate to current events.
I don't know if Scalzi is purposefully writing an allegory for climate change but he's writing an allegory for climate change. Only less bleak because at least one person in power - even if their power is fairly nebulous and uncertain - actually gives a shit.
It is totally a climate change allegory. The way the oligarchy acted felt a little overdone in the first book back in like 2017 but among our current "Go save the economy by throwing your bodies into the COVID fire" situation I feel like I owe Scalzi an apology.
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Agency was a bit of a letdown for me given the wait for it. Verity didn't actually do anything - she just sorta got driven around San Francisco while the stublords watched. I'm ride or die Gibson, and I still enjoyed the language and the alternate history and the bits and pieces of the near future Bay Area, but I hope he moves on to something else next time around. I guess he could explore the actual Jackpot and go more in depth about the resulting cultural changes among the survivors, but...eh...I mean it's just not that intriguing to me. I actually liked it better when it wasn't expounded on.
Speaking of Gibson, I just started Fall; or, Dodge In Hell by Stephenson. It's early days as it is your standard length Stephenson book, but it could be interesting. I've read fairly negative reviews of the back half, so we'll see how it plays out.
I'm prepared to say JJN is the most enjoyable writer of history I've ever found. Not a dry sentence in the whole thing, and many, many highly entertaining ones. Over a thousand years of war, intrigue, poisonings, betrayals, insanity, glory and stupidity.
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I love space opera, but more often than not they're usually, well, kinda fascist-y? Authoritarian anyway, it's almost always the military being the only people who can ever fix things and civvies and diplomats being useless idiots. Memory of Empire is like the polar opposite of that, the (young, female) protagonist has just been appointed as an ambassador to said huge space empire, and so far the whole book is just diplomacy and trying to like navigate unfamiliar cultural mores and sometimes not knowing the right word for something or messing up a weird tense and then feeling like an idiot around native speakers. It's also good at having both the foreign culture and the protagonists own culture be kind of weird, there's no "normal" society of people that think 1:1 like the audience does.
There's a really lovely scene where the ambassador lady is attending a poetry event and people are like impromptu coming up with jokey poems that are loaded with puns and references and allusions and she's like "I've spent half my life dedicated to learning this language and culture and I would still be fucking terrible at this" and she's massively bummed out in a way that felt really wonderfully relatable as someone who's struggled to learn a foreign language. Like that xenophile's depression of knowing you'll never quite get it as much as you want to.
I'll be bummed if it gets more conventional in the second half, right now I'm really loving it.
If there was one complaint I wanted like another 200 pages of just Mahit and Three Seagrass like bumming around town making smalltalk, because all of their conversations are incredibly charming.
I visited the North Carolina Museum of Art just after reading it and felt a big space opera mood when I met this "edgeshine of a knife" sculpture and also this "real Radchaai hours" portrait. Though, not to be dismissive of those works in their own right.
I interrupted my Elemental Logic to read the anthology The Mythic Dream, which I do recommend. It's short stories in the category "myth retellings" by a really stacked group SF/F writers. Stephen Graham Jones writes a darkly indulgent werewolf Lycaon. Sarah Gailey takes Thetis' point of view in a "Heaven in the Dust" setting. Some other standouts:
Labbatu Takes Command of the Flagship Heaven Dwells Within - Arkady Martine (Inanna Takes Command of Heaven / Inanna and Enki)
Buried Deep - Naomi Novik (Ariadne and the Minotaur)
The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself - Carmen Maria Machado (Erysichthon)
Florilegia; Or, Some Lies About Flowers - Amal El-Mohtar (Blodeuwedd)
And no real flops. I felt Anne Leckie's The Justified (Hathor and the Destruction of Mankind) tread real close to the thematic concerns of the Ancillary series, but without bringing the same sense of depth; but on the other hand, it was a fun and high-color bit of catharsis. T. Kingfisher's entry is short and charming.
How To Lose the Time War was... a weird little love story? It's shortish and worth a read. Quite good.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant and it's very good except I'm still not really convinced the author actually understands how fiat currency works. But as a character study it is very, very good.
I mean, are there any other better fantasy novels with a fiat currency storyline?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Hrrrmmmm.... Spice and Wolf has an arc about minted coins with established values that are not directly tied to their actual metal content.
Daniel Abraham wrote the Dagger and the Coin series which stars a banker as the main protagonist. She uses that position to fight a war against an evil mind control cult.
Daniel Abraham is half of James S A Corey, from the The Expanse show/books.
Also listening to (and nearly done with) The Fifth Season. It's alright. I like the creativity but a few things about it bother me.
(Fifth Season spoilers)
The cultural lack of curisioty also bothers me. I get that the whole 'not giving a shit about dead civilizations' thing is supposed to be ingrained in everyone via their store lore but it goes well beyond that. The author calls it out at one point near the beginning but never really gives a reason why everyone should be so incurious. There are so many times when some topic comes up and people just bliethly shrug and not give a shit that neither they nor, apparently, anyone knows why something happens or how something works. Like there's a bit where Alabaster is explaining the actual history behind the famous story and Cianite (I'm guessing at the spelling), after saying she's never learned any of this, gets bored with it. I mean, it could just be her that's incurious but similar attitudes show up in other characters as well.
And maybe it gets explained in the last 8% or whatever I've got left of the book but I found the whole second person aspect of the one, current-time story-line to be weird and kind of off-putting and, so far, I haven't seen any justification for it. I guess maybe to obscure the fact that all three stories are about the same person? But I guessed that basically immediately, so it didn't really work if that was the intent.
I dunno. I've enjoyed it overall but something makes me wonder once a chapter or so and not in the good sort of wondering way. I bought the whole trilogy on Audible when they were on sale for $5 each, though, and it doesn't bother me enough to stop so far.
Also recently read The Relic by Preson and Child. It was a pretty good... I don't know the term for the genre. Whatever genre Dan Brown is. It's weird in that it seems way more dated than it seems like it should be, being from 1995. Yet at the same time the stuff he's got computers doing is (partially, anyway) still not realistic today. Fun enough as dumb entertainment, though, and utterly dissimilar from the movie based on it insofar as I recall what happens in the movie.
What else...
Peter Clines' Terminus was fun. Much more of a sequel to his other Threshold novels than Dead Moon was.
The Relic is also the start of a long-running series featuring the further adventures of the FBI agent. Sometime there are monsters, sometimes not.
Yeah, I've got the second one... The Reliquiary, maybe? And I read the third one at some point years and years ago without realizing it was a series.
It's a trilogy and I think the setting ends up justifying most of this. That said the first book is far and away the best, so if it's not working for you then stop rather than riding the train all the way down the hill
Finished Fifth Season today. It was alright. I'll probably look up the blurb on the second one to see if I wanna bother with it. I'm curious what happens next and I've listened to worse fantasy novels.
Speaking of which, I started the 5th Mountain Man book, Make Me King, by Keith Blackmore. They're super cheesy post-apocalypse zombie action things. Not terribly well written but also not terribly written. R.C. Bray narrates them and I've found I can listen to almost anything that guy reads. If you need an audible read that's oddly fitting our current world the first one, Mountain Man, is okay entertainment about a guy living alone after the zombie apocalypse who has a positively prescient fixation on collecting toilet paper.
From what I remember the 2nd book in Broken Earth was mostly about the long term background of the world and not so much with the present story. It was alright but it's a hobby horse of mine that it didn't deserve the Hugo win that year.
The second book focuses on developing the Nassun storyline. It's really upsetting!
The characters are all unsympathetic and don't quite read right; Atwood usually writes characters that aren't realistic exactly but have extremely real feelings that resonate, but these ones somehow were both off.
I wasn't happy with this, especially reading it right after Bluebeard's Egg, a phenomenal collection of Atwood's short stories from the late 80s.
Both queer, both about empire, both about a young female official from a tiny nation navigating said empire, both struggling with their own role and identity as part of that imperial system, both interested in the way imperialism shapes thought and self identity.
And yet they're very, verrry different books
I don't feel like you could write a book similar to Baru Cormorant without it being an obvious rip-off. Similar to Ancillary Justice. It's too weird and unique to be similar to anything.
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I had a rough few starts with that book. I absolutely LOVED her Inheritance Trilogy and was eager to devour more of Jemisin's book after that. I didn't know about her other work when I started so I was excited when I learned about The Broke Cycle series and how it had gotten some high praise and awards. But it has been a struggle for me and I keep bouncing right off of it.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
i very much enjoyed Children of Time. I need to go read Ruin.
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The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The final section was a bit of a clear "oh no, I don't know where this going and want to end it!"
That said I really enjoyed the setting and I hope the author managed to do something with tighter plotting in the future
I enjoyed it a lot but yeah it was a bit of a mess.
That all is pretty close to my opinion on it. It has some really good stuff in it but it doesn't really have a narrative arc so much as some stuff happens and then some other stuff happens. Eventually some emotionally resonate stuff happens and then the book just stops.
She also wrote All the Birds in the Sky which is better plotted though it is hard to call it "tight".
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The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
It was written last year but it is feeling way too appropriate to current events.
I don't know if Scalzi is purposefully writing an allegory for climate change but he's writing an allegory for climate change. Only less bleak because at least one person in power - even if their power is fairly nebulous and uncertain - actually gives a shit.
It is totally a climate change allegory. The way the oligarchy acted felt a little overdone in the first book back in like 2017 but among our current "Go save the economy by throwing your bodies into the COVID fire" situation I feel like I owe Scalzi an apology.
It’ll be interesting to see if she finishes it.