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John Scalzi, Lock In: Future crime story. After an epidemic leaves hundreds of thousands of people “locked in”—unable to move their bodies, but able to participate in virtual reality and to use “threeps” as robot bodies, one of the poster children for the locked in becomes an FBI agent. Almost immediately, Chris is thrust into murders and conspiracies galore. It helps that Chris is really, really rich: kind of Fox Mulder with a robot body and no missing sister. I read it in a day and enjoyed it, but I doubt it would bear close scrutiny.
John Scalzi, Unlocked: A bunch of “oral histories” of the epidemic in the main book. Not much extra story here; more for if you really really want to know about Scalzi’s worldbuilding.
Stephen King, Revival: A young boy meets a preacher. Soon thereafter, the preacher cures his older brother’s muteness, and soon thereafter a horrible accident destroys the preacher’s faith. Many years later, the boy—now a guitarist and drug addict (King’s standard creative protagonist)—meets the preacher, but he’s not preaching any more, though he’s still doing strange things with electricity, and he cures our hero’s addiction. When they encounter one another again, the healing has turned sour. A little bit Frankenstein, a little bit Lovecraft, but doesn’t fully manage the creepiness. I don’t think King’s concrete, fleshy style works to convey Lovecraftian eldritch horrors. It has a monster that can keep you up nights (more than one, really), but its evil isn’t madness, not like Lovecraft’s. Though the graphic novel King did, N, worked okay for eldritch horror, I guess, but there you had some assistance from images. I’m just not feeling this one—too little buildup to the madness behind the mountains, too much telling in the foreshadowing instead of showing.
Steven Brust, Hawk: Vlad Taltos, book 14! Relatively short, and ultimately a caper book: Vlad is tired of being on the run from the Jhereg, so he comes up with a plan to get them to back off; he really wants to see his son. I’m glad I got this (partial) closure, though I think it does rely very heavily on our existing affection for Vlad.
Sherwood Smith & Rachel Manija Brown, Stranger: Postapocalyptic YA—in a world transformed by natural disaster and the appearance of strange mutations that change humans, plants, and animals physically and psychically, a stranger comes to town. And kind of gets nailed to a tree, or at least has a tree try to grow out of his blood. The singing trees that eat people are pretty interesting and I’d like to know more about them. Tensions between apparently unaltered humans and altered ones are a significant part of the plot, but it’s also about growing up, figuring out who you are in a world that mostly doesn’t care and also wants to kill you, and falling in love. Lots of ethnic and sexual diversity; one real Mean Girl complicates the protagonists’ lives within the town, but to her credit when the town faces an outside threat she works with everyone else instead of being dumb about it.
James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Fourth in Corey’s Expanse series, which has pulled off the intriguing trick of completely changing the type of space adventure it is in each book. In this one, humanity suddenly sees the potential of hundreds of Earth-type planets open for settlement. But on the first one, unauthorized settlers are clashing with the corporation that has the official charter, and the planet’s rich lithium stores are at stake. The UN sends James Holden and his ship to fix things, but Holden is still seeing the ghost of his quasi-friend Miller, who is actually a manifestation of the protomolecule that’s almost all that’s left of the alien race that set up the transportation system humans are now using to get to these planets. As it turns out, there are alien artifacts on New Earth/Ilus as well, and Miller wants Holden to go deal with them while the colonists and corporate scientists are duking it out. A sociopathic security officer is the worst bad guy, but the great thing about this kind of sf is that everyone has intelligible (if occasionally unsympathetic) motivations, and there is a lot of competence displayed across factions, both technically and politically. I enjoyed it a great deal.
John Scalzi, Unlocked: A bunch of “oral histories” of the epidemic in the main book. Not much extra story here; more for if you really really want to know about Scalzi’s worldbuilding.
Stephen King, Revival: A young boy meets a preacher. Soon thereafter, the preacher cures his older brother’s muteness, and soon thereafter a horrible accident destroys the preacher’s faith. Many years later, the boy—now a guitarist and drug addict (King’s standard creative protagonist)—meets the preacher, but he’s not preaching any more, though he’s still doing strange things with electricity, and he cures our hero’s addiction. When they encounter one another again, the healing has turned sour. A little bit Frankenstein, a little bit Lovecraft, but doesn’t fully manage the creepiness. I don’t think King’s concrete, fleshy style works to convey Lovecraftian eldritch horrors. It has a monster that can keep you up nights (more than one, really), but its evil isn’t madness, not like Lovecraft’s. Though the graphic novel King did, N, worked okay for eldritch horror, I guess, but there you had some assistance from images. I’m just not feeling this one—too little buildup to the madness behind the mountains, too much telling in the foreshadowing instead of showing.
Steven Brust, Hawk: Vlad Taltos, book 14! Relatively short, and ultimately a caper book: Vlad is tired of being on the run from the Jhereg, so he comes up with a plan to get them to back off; he really wants to see his son. I’m glad I got this (partial) closure, though I think it does rely very heavily on our existing affection for Vlad.
Sherwood Smith & Rachel Manija Brown, Stranger: Postapocalyptic YA—in a world transformed by natural disaster and the appearance of strange mutations that change humans, plants, and animals physically and psychically, a stranger comes to town. And kind of gets nailed to a tree, or at least has a tree try to grow out of his blood. The singing trees that eat people are pretty interesting and I’d like to know more about them. Tensions between apparently unaltered humans and altered ones are a significant part of the plot, but it’s also about growing up, figuring out who you are in a world that mostly doesn’t care and also wants to kill you, and falling in love. Lots of ethnic and sexual diversity; one real Mean Girl complicates the protagonists’ lives within the town, but to her credit when the town faces an outside threat she works with everyone else instead of being dumb about it.
James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Fourth in Corey’s Expanse series, which has pulled off the intriguing trick of completely changing the type of space adventure it is in each book. In this one, humanity suddenly sees the potential of hundreds of Earth-type planets open for settlement. But on the first one, unauthorized settlers are clashing with the corporation that has the official charter, and the planet’s rich lithium stores are at stake. The UN sends James Holden and his ship to fix things, but Holden is still seeing the ghost of his quasi-friend Miller, who is actually a manifestation of the protomolecule that’s almost all that’s left of the alien race that set up the transportation system humans are now using to get to these planets. As it turns out, there are alien artifacts on New Earth/Ilus as well, and Miller wants Holden to go deal with them while the colonists and corporate scientists are duking it out. A sociopathic security officer is the worst bad guy, but the great thing about this kind of sf is that everyone has intelligible (if occasionally unsympathetic) motivations, and there is a lot of competence displayed across factions, both technically and politically. I enjoyed it a great deal.