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Still grading, also sick; send help or anaesthetic.
At least I'm participating in this:
Everything Mitt Romney likes, autotuned.
Ken Waid, Irredeemable, vols. 1-7: While I consider Supreme Power the absolute best alternate Superman etc. story, Irredeemable is doing a pretty good job of exploring what happens when Superman—sorry, the Plutonian—finally snaps after a lifetime of never being good enough to save everyone and inherently scaring the crap out of the fragile humans with whom he interacts. When he loses it, his superfriends—none of whom can match him for power—have to face horrific losses as well as painful secrets. This is complicated by the fact that in this version (unlike in Supreme Power or Watchmen) there are alien beings out there who routinely try to conquer the world, and having the Plutonian around—even power-maddened and possibly genocidal—is at least an important deterrent. Distrust leads them to make several different deals with various orders of bad guys to deal with this, with equivocal success. Not to mention that some of his colleagues still think the Plutonian is, maybe, reachable. I’m enjoying it, though I am worried about whether Waid will be able to pull off an ending.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, The Farris Channel: The story of the founding of the House of Zeor out of the collapse of previous attempts to have channels in junct territory. There’s a lot of politics and building new buildings as the remnants of the various Forts, all of which have failed, converge on Fort Rimon, where Rimon Farris struggles both with the challenges of leading a group of fractious and demoralized people and with his growing psychic powers, with the help of a mysterious new channel who believes that Farrises aren’t ordinary channels but rather the next stage in human evolution. If that seems a little incoherent, well. The mystical channel stuff was never my favorite part of the Sime/Gen universe, and even if it was yours you might be better off rereading Mahogany Trinrose, but the book does fill in some of the historical blanks, so maybe nostalgia justifies the read. Warning: the main villain is a pregnant Farris who goes off the rails for reasons that, while they could have been made more compelling in theory, came off like “woman decides that the proper reaction to mistreatment is to become EEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.”
Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, Claudia Gray, Maureen Johnson, & Sarah Mlynowski, Vacations from Hell: Paranormal YA stories, mostly with a romance component and even more predominantly with a twist that ranges from easy to see coming (Mlynowski) to pretty darn creepy (Clare, at least in one line at the end of the otherwise conventional “girl rescues boy from monster” story that threatens to upend the story altogether). Quick and quirky enough to deserve a read, if this is the kind of thing you like.
John Birmingham, Angels of Vengeance: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. Pros: Cracking SF/military storyteller who keeps the pages turning as the Seattle government of what's left of post-apocalyptic America tries to deal with the potential treason of the Texas governor and various smaller players seek vengeance for various wrongs done to them in previous volumes; not all sympathetic characters are on the same side; variety of kickass women in key roles; Islamophobia of previous volume in the series basically MIA (but only by virtue of near absence of Muslim characters, so this is more an absence of a huge negative). Cons: Seriously Republican (though in a more libertarian way than predominates in current non-apocalypse America)--Sarah Palin even shows up as an "authority" on Russia though that may actually be intended as a joke; the Greens are the only caricatures (see: Muslims absent) while the militaristic racist assholes' concerns are taken seriously even as their methods are rejected.
At least I'm participating in this:
Everything Mitt Romney likes, autotuned.
Ken Waid, Irredeemable, vols. 1-7: While I consider Supreme Power the absolute best alternate Superman etc. story, Irredeemable is doing a pretty good job of exploring what happens when Superman—sorry, the Plutonian—finally snaps after a lifetime of never being good enough to save everyone and inherently scaring the crap out of the fragile humans with whom he interacts. When he loses it, his superfriends—none of whom can match him for power—have to face horrific losses as well as painful secrets. This is complicated by the fact that in this version (unlike in Supreme Power or Watchmen) there are alien beings out there who routinely try to conquer the world, and having the Plutonian around—even power-maddened and possibly genocidal—is at least an important deterrent. Distrust leads them to make several different deals with various orders of bad guys to deal with this, with equivocal success. Not to mention that some of his colleagues still think the Plutonian is, maybe, reachable. I’m enjoying it, though I am worried about whether Waid will be able to pull off an ending.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, The Farris Channel: The story of the founding of the House of Zeor out of the collapse of previous attempts to have channels in junct territory. There’s a lot of politics and building new buildings as the remnants of the various Forts, all of which have failed, converge on Fort Rimon, where Rimon Farris struggles both with the challenges of leading a group of fractious and demoralized people and with his growing psychic powers, with the help of a mysterious new channel who believes that Farrises aren’t ordinary channels but rather the next stage in human evolution. If that seems a little incoherent, well. The mystical channel stuff was never my favorite part of the Sime/Gen universe, and even if it was yours you might be better off rereading Mahogany Trinrose, but the book does fill in some of the historical blanks, so maybe nostalgia justifies the read. Warning: the main villain is a pregnant Farris who goes off the rails for reasons that, while they could have been made more compelling in theory, came off like “woman decides that the proper reaction to mistreatment is to become EEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.”
Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, Claudia Gray, Maureen Johnson, & Sarah Mlynowski, Vacations from Hell: Paranormal YA stories, mostly with a romance component and even more predominantly with a twist that ranges from easy to see coming (Mlynowski) to pretty darn creepy (Clare, at least in one line at the end of the otherwise conventional “girl rescues boy from monster” story that threatens to upend the story altogether). Quick and quirky enough to deserve a read, if this is the kind of thing you like.
John Birmingham, Angels of Vengeance: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. Pros: Cracking SF/military storyteller who keeps the pages turning as the Seattle government of what's left of post-apocalyptic America tries to deal with the potential treason of the Texas governor and various smaller players seek vengeance for various wrongs done to them in previous volumes; not all sympathetic characters are on the same side; variety of kickass women in key roles; Islamophobia of previous volume in the series basically MIA (but only by virtue of near absence of Muslim characters, so this is more an absence of a huge negative). Cons: Seriously Republican (though in a more libertarian way than predominates in current non-apocalypse America)--Sarah Palin even shows up as an "authority" on Russia though that may actually be intended as a joke; the Greens are the only caricatures (see: Muslims absent) while the militaristic racist assholes' concerns are taken seriously even as their methods are rejected.
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