reviews: series

[rivkat]

Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting: The third book in Robinson’s Washington, DC trilogy (?), this continues the Robinson tradition of combining talking heads with detailed attention to landscape. Policy wonks continue to struggle against global warming, and the forces arrayed against changing human behavior, while also trying to navigate their all-too-human personal lives. Forty Signs of Rain is my favorite book of the three, but hanging out with these folks again, including the monks from the drowned island of Shangri-La, felt comforting. Robinson’s like the liberal Michael Crichton, full of science and hope for the future even as he describes the heavy weather headed towards us.

Patricia Briggs, Blood Bound: Second in a series featuring Mercedes (Mercy) Thompson, mechanic and shapeshifter, and her meddling in the affairs of wolves and vampires. As I said about the first installment, Briggs does an excellent job balancing Mercy’s stated skills with common sense – she behaves like a person who doesn’t have superpowers even if she has extra powers; she behaves like someone who doesn’t know she can’t die because she’s the protagonist. It still feels like Briggs is writing these books because there’s a market, not because there are lots of Mercy stories she’s aching to tell. Because Briggs is good, this story of a vampire enchanter who comes to town and wreaks havoc is still entertaining, but it’s not as juicy as early Laurell Hamilton. Also, the cheesecake cover is a huge turnoff, and it gets worse because the thumbnail on the spine is Mercy’s breasts.

Jim Butcher, White Night: Harry Dresden! Hi, Harry! Speaking of superpowers, Butcher is having to work pretty hard to create antagonists that Harry can’t easily defeat these days. It helps to have some gods in his arsenal, along with powerful and organized vampire tribes. This volume starts off with suicides that aren’t really suicides, but the work of a serial killer out to get witches. Since the human police can’t see the links between the murders, Harry investigates, only to find an even more complicated story involving politics and an assault on – or a betrayal from within of – the White Council he’s reluctantly joined. A side plot involves the continued training of his apprentice, who has to behave herself or the Council will kill them both. Also, Harry’s half-brother the sex vampire is involved in the whole mess somehow. Another side plot – well, at least Butcher remembers them! – involves the fallen angel Lasciel who’s taken up residence in Harry’s head, offering him great power in return for great corruption. I like how Harry is implicated in power structures even when he wants no part of them, and I like the glimpses of how people who just have a little bit of magic view Harry and his ilk – with fear and suspicion, often justified. Harry has really grown on me, and I look forward to further adventures.

Comments

[attolia.livejournal.com]

I've had mixed feelings about Kim Stanly Robinson's books. I haven't been able to get into any of the other than the Orange County Trilogy, which I loved. If you've read that, can you tell me how it compares to the Washington DC trilogy?

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

The DC trilogy is more like the Mars books than the California books, because Robinson is positing smaller social changes than he did in the California trilogy and because his characters are his standard policy wonks, who obviously wouldn't exist in the same form in his alternate Californias. My favorite of his books is the short story collection Remaking History, which I think shows a greater breadth of imagination than anything other than the California books.

[attolia.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll look for Remaking History, then.

[cofax7]

I read Forty Signs of Rain, got to the end, realized it was only the first, and that the next book was going to focus primarily on the character I liked least (I believe he was the NIH researcher), and just had no enthusiasm to pick up the next one. I also wondered whether it should even be properly classified as science fiction, really, given that 9/10 of the novel is -- well, it's fiction about science, but there's not actually a lot of speculation in it. In many ways, it's an entirely mainstream novel. This of course changes in the later books, with the weather. Still.

I respect KSR more than I like him, I have to admit: his characters rarely leap off the page for me, and they pretty much have to do that for me to invest time in rereading anything. I tend to tell people who ask to read Antarctica instead of the Mars trilogy, as it addresses most of the same issues in 1/3 the space. *grin*

But Escape from Katmandu was a wonderful collection, full of humor and creativity, or so I recall. And I really did love the California trilogy.

[cofax7]

Erg, NSF, not NIH. Damned acronymic federal agencies.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the researcher gets even more screentime as the series goes on; the third is primarily him. I never read KSR for the characters -- though I do find them recognizable human beings; they're just not that interesting. Remaking History blew me away. Perhaps in short stories he just whips out the great ideas, and it doesn't matter as much that his characters are walking policy papers.

[cofax7]

Indeed. I'll have to look up Remaking History; I don't think I've read that collection.

[luthorienne.livejournal.com]

I love Harry Dresden.

All the bookstores in Canada (more or less) are owned by one company, so until Heather Reisman(n?) gets more Dresdens in, I'm stuck at four. And not even the FIRST four.