Reading in June 2011

Reading for June:

Dune by Frank Herbert (1966)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1967)
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1968)
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1968)
 
Heretics of Dune... but I'm almost finished with it. Then, I guess I'll flip a coin to decide between The Martian Chronicles and Ringworld.
 
I like the Bradbury, found the Niven to be pretty unentertaining for me....
 
Fair enough.

As of last night, I'm over halfway through The Lost Fleet: Courageous, and I only started it yesterday lunchtime! I think it's a pretty good read, better than the previous two at least. My only concern is that the plot is going to get old before the final book.

Edit: I actually have a second concern. The author absolutely loves the line "Captain John Geary released a breath he didn't know he was holding". I swear that exact line has been used about 8 times in this series, perhaps more. It's starting to get a little annoying, if I'm honest.
 
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Rob B said:
Well, I've only read two books by him, but they've both been of superior quality, so I can't do anything but agree.

I wonder if the Vaughan from KoE is related to certain telepath in the future.
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I think the Bengal Station books are well worth a read (not the same Vaughan though!) and Engineman too. I still need to read Guardians of the Phoenix and also catch up with his older stuff (Virex trilogy, Penumbra).

Cheerwell said:
As of last night, I'm over halfway through The Lost Fleet: Courageous, and I only started it yesterday lunchtime! I think it's a pretty good read, better than the previous two at least. My only concern is that the plot is going to get old before the final book.

Edit: I actually have a second concern. The author absolutely loves the line "Captain John Geary released a breath he didn't know he was holding". I swear that exact line has been used about 8 times in this series, perhaps more. It's starting to get a little annoying, if I'm honest.
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I think the story takes a turn upwards towards the end of this book and into Valiant, while Relentless and Victorious finish the series nicely :) And I completely agree about the overuse of the same phrases - I'm pretty sure he does the same when talking about Desjani and Rionne!
 
chitman13 said:
I think the story takes a turn upwards towards the end of this book and into Valiant, while Relentless and Victorious finish the series nicely :) And I completely agree about the overuse of the same phrases - I'm pretty sure he does the same when talking about Desjani and Rionne!
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I'm not going to stop reading the series, I've come too far and they are fairly good reading, but I just wish Campbell didn't overuse everything.

You're right about Desjani. She either squeals in joy or glares at everything.
 
I just read the first two of Song of Ice and Fire, which is obviously off topic. They have served to remind me why I don't read fantasy any more. Mild bad dreams and an overall funk.

back to sci-fi please!
 
As promised, I finished The Lost Fleet: Courageous.

The more I think about it, the less I like it. It was easily the most boring and samey of the books so far. Space battle after space battle, jump after jump, Geary having sex after fighting with Rione. Oh, and of course, he liked to release breaths he didn't know he was holding. The book truly was three or so ship battles filled with ridiculous amounts of commands such "Ships turn starboard four zero degrees at time one zero three, fire weapons at time five zero one." which, to be honest, gets annoying during the more complex manoeuvres. It's pointless information, and he could have gotten the details across in more simplistic and less annoying ways.

It also suffered from some of the worst editing I've seen thus far. The dialogue for two different characters was often on the same line, meaning it was sometimes a pain to work out who said what. There were a few punctuation and other errors, too. It seemed at times that they were trying to save paper, which is utterly strange as Titan love to reprint the same interview and author-related things in every single book, and also to leave a nice amount of blank pages at the back. It's ridiculously wasteful.

I'm also not sure how the map works. Looking at it, he should have jumped from Baldur last book to the next system along, which has a hypergate, but instead he jumped somewhere completely different. I'm not sure how it works.
 
Infernal Devices & Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy

Both K.W. Jeter's Infernal Devices and Kage Baker's Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy belong to the steampunk subgenre, so your tolerance for them may depend on your tolerance for the subgenre. Having enjoyed old movies like Mysterious Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and having been a fan of the original TV show Wild, Wild West, I apparently have a high tolerance.

Jeter's novel is a seminal work, as I understand, one of the earlier examples of a recent writer blending technologies like those in the stories of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, adding still more and confabulating what the consequences might be in an adventure story. The plot revolves around a young man, George (whose last name I've forgotten), who has taken over his father's business. His father had a genius for clockworks and mechanical devices that George doesn't share. As former customers drag George into trying to fix or make work some of those devices, George has a series of adventures from traversing a little known section of London called Wetwick (which seems a bit like an outreach program of Lovecraft's Innsmouth) to stopping a member of the aristocracy from destroying the world.

The result is a romp, bawdy, funny -- perhaps all the more so because of the narrator's haplessness -- slightly satiric, and quite well-written, capturing the tone of Victorian prose as well as the feel old adventure novels.

Baker's short novel, with which comes a short story, "The Bohemian Astrobleme," is a bit more openly knowing, seeing as the main character is a lady of good breeding fallen on hard times who makes her way in the world through supplying gentlemen with their ... fantasies, all in the service of Nell Gwynne's, which is a front for the information gathering exploits of a secret society. Knowledge is power, after all.

Again, the adventure revolves around an advanced technology -- though in this case, the idea is to acquire it for the secret society -- and includes competition for the prize, an old castle with secret passages and rooms, people not being who they seem, chases and duplicity and murder and secrets and dessert.

I thoroughly enjoyed both of these books as confections meant mostly to amuse and delight, not as deep-thought on anything in particular. They are the best sort of "beach read," written with intelligence and wit, playing skillfully with the formulas of adventure fiction, and whisking the reader along on lines of solid, engaging prose.

Now, whether I should be mentioning them here or in the fantasy forum ... I haven't a clue.

Randy M.
 
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I started The Lost Fleet: Valiant last night. Ugh, Titan have done it again already. The first page of the novel is page 15. Seriously. Campbell has already repeated something for at least the third time, too.

I'm also a bit further in The Honor of the Queen by Weber. It feels like heavy going.
 
Picked up Maelstrom by Peter Watts. Its the second in a trilogy but seems to stand on its own pretty well. However there is quite a bit revolving around the main character Lenie Clarke that Im in the dark about. I like the writing style; It jumps around alot from whats going on in the present, to a past reference explaining this or that to some random thoughts he has about it... But its very structured and keeps the plot going nicely.

I will definitely be finding the first book Starfish and read that asap to fill in some of the blanks.
 
Chrysippus said:
Just finished the first chapter of Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths. I like it so far.
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Just finished this one. I enjoyed it. It's the first real science fiction novel I've read in some time, and the first one I've read that hasn't been absolutely terrible in an even longer time. But I haven't totally digested it yet. Nor have I really decided whether it warrants the time investment required to really sort it out. Definitely worth a read, though.
 
Chrysippus said:
Just finished this one. I enjoyed it. It's the first real science fiction novel I've read in some time, and the first one I've read that hasn't been absolutely terrible in an even longer time. But I haven't totally digested it yet. Nor have I really decided whether it warrants the time investment required to really sort it out. Definitely worth a read, though.
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Yeah, that was a pretty good story. Robert Charles Wilson has written some decent scifi, and he usually really brings out the human element in the story.

If you haven't already you should try Spin too (and if you like it read the next in the series Axis and the soon to be released third book Vortex.) I also really liked his short story collection The Perseids.
 
Westsiyeed said:
Yeah, that was a pretty good story. Robert Charles Wilson has written some decent scifi, and he usually really brings out the human element in the story.

If you haven't already you should try Spin too (and if you like it read the next in the series Axis and the soon to be released third book Vortex.) I also really liked his short story collection The Perseids.
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This was the first novel of his that I've read, even though the novel that brought him to my attention was Julian Comstock and the first novel of his that I purchased was Darwinia. I'm looking forward to reading those, and eventually getting to the series you mention.

I agree with you about the human element. I was surprised by it, actually. The blurb on the back cover didn't really suggest that angle to me when I read it. I'm not totally persuaded by his characterizations - I feel sort of lukewarm about most of the characters here - but it's clear that time travel and violence aside, this novel is about how world-historical events affect real, ordinary people like Scott Halden, and how those people try to cope with said events. Definitely a worthwhile novel.
 
I'm about 1/3 into the fourth Destroyermen novel by Taylor Anderson, Distant Thunders. This is a pretty entertaining series with some good elements (fascinating look at an Earth that evolved differently than ours in terms of biology, history and landscape) that isn't without its faults (sometimes it is a bit overwrought).
 
I'm a couple of chapters into Elizabeth Moon's Marque and Reprisal, the second Ky Vatta book.

It's alright so far, I'm just trying to remember who is who.
 
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