I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Daniel Abraham, Blade of Dream: This middle book of a planned trilogy is unusual for a fantasy because there are no real fantasy elements until three-fourths of the way through. Instead, the bulk of the book is Elaine a Sal, the new prince of Kithamar’s heir, dealing with the change in her status including her tryst with a random citizen. The tryst throws both their lives off track—the citizen leaves his merchant family and joins the city guard, while Elaine starts to consider what parts of her life she actually wants, while investigating what is making her father so upset and closed-off from her. (That’s connected to the magic of the first book, as is what happens when, late in the book, the Thread of Kithamar tries to regain its control of the city’s rulers.) I’m interested to see what happens next.

M.R. Carey, Infinity Gate: Across the multiverse, a Pandominion rules hundreds of earths with an iron fist; when it discovers a set of worlds run by machine intelligence, it reacts badly. Meanwhile, a scientist from a world only slightly more deteriorated than our own discovers how to shift universes. They’ll all collide, with a denouement that is pretty exciting and also sets up the sequel.

C.S. Friedman, Nightborn: Coldfire Rising: A “how it happened” narrative creating the background for earlier novels. Human colonists land on Erna and discover that there’s something that can apparently read their minds and manifest dreams and fears, which they label “fae.” The last quarter of the book jumps far ahead in time, to characters we’ve met before, tenuously linked to the first three-fourths. It didn’t seem necessary to enjoy the earlier novels, but I guess there’s a market for this kind of filling out the narrative.

Kate Elliott, Furious Heaven: Space opera on a grand scale, with an Alexander-like hero in Sun, who is still fighting palace politics to ensure her place as heir while preparing for a war against the Phene Empire. Elliott has thought of an interesting way to use physical limitations to get the commander on the front lines, which is otherwise a really dumb thing for a mechanized army that doesn’t work by hand signals. No one is particularly good, and luck plays an important role, but it is still epic.

Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir: Cal is a noir detective specializing in Titan problems. Titans are rich people who’ve gotten access to an expensive life-enhancing treatment that rolls back age but also makes people grow bigger—seven, eight, nine feet. They get stronger and harder to hurt, too, but somehow their hearts don’t give out—look, it’s a metaphor about wealth, ok? Anyway once you handwave the Titans, this is sf noir without much internet; after the beginning murder of a Titan, Cal pounds the street and looks at hard copy records, with the occasional file encoded into a [spoiler]. I liked it.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Spare Man: Newlywed Tesla Crane wants to have a nice honeymoon cruise to Mars with her new spouse—a retired former detective—and her service dog. But someone keeps killing people and trying to blame it on her husband. Punctuated by cocktail recipes, this is an attempt at a classic Nick and Nora style mystery in spaaaace. I found it a bit too convoluted, but that is indeed classic, and it was interesting to have a main character with chronic pain issues (partially postponable with a deep brain implant, but only at a cost).

K.D. Edwards, The Eidolon: Apparently Edwards is planning a spinoff series focused on the kids, which seems completely reasonable though I also want to know what is happening to Rune. This book is set during the events of the previous book but focused on Max, Quinn, and Anna—the intro says it was actually begun when production limits forced the excision of a lot of material from that book. Anyway, it provides new information about what happened and what it’s like to be Quinn, who sees so many futures that he can have trouble dealing with the present.

Genevieve Cogman, Scarlet: The Scarlet Pimpernel, retold in a world with vampire aristocrats—sanguinocrats!—and maybe some leftover sorcery. Eleanor is a servant in an English vampire’s household when she’s recruited for a dangerous mission in France to rescue (she’s told) unjustly accused aristocrats. But she can’t help noticing that the Scarlet Pimpernel has a lot of assumptions about servants and nobility that don’t match her experience. And are vampires really as benevolent as she’s been raised to believe? I liked the Invisible Library series better, but this certainly has adventure and magic too.

David Gerrold, Hella: The main character is an autistic boy with a chip in his head that helps him navigate the world—which is a giant planet on which everything grows bigger than it does on Earth, though that doesn’t turn out to be as significant to the plot as you might have thought because the colonists are trying not to interact too much with the ecology for fear of disrupting it. But some colonists want to start colonizing and capitalizing, driving the conflict of the book, which also includes the protagonist starting to date and considering whether to transition back to being a girl. It felt like a bunch of interesting ideas both about humanity and about what “colonizing” really means were being squished under the YA format.

Ruthanna Emrys, Imperfect Commentaries: Short stories, including some details from her Cthulhu-derived universe, where she explains that one reason The Shadow over Innsmouth inspired her was that it starts with a government raid, meant to read as reassurance that the authorities were paying attention, but if you start talking raids and camps, “I’m going to have some default assumptions about who the bad guys are.”

Sara Beaman, Arlene Blakely, CS Cheely, K.D. Edwards, & Daniel Wood, Doom Days: After a pandemic wipes out most people, the survivors find ways to get by, mostly by scavenging or living in small farming communities. I have questions about the worldbuilding, but if you like “we have to escape the fascist enclaves and protect our small scale lives” then this is fine.

Steven Brust, Tsalmoth: Back in time, to the run-up to Vlad and Cawti’s wedding. Some of the events are surprising, because Vlad forgot them. He gets involved in a Tsalmoth conspiracy or two, runs up against a faction or two of the Left Hand, and experiences some surprising sorcerous attacks. It seemed like there were some boxes to check before the series finale, and mostly Vlad’s relative youth was shown by having him learn new words, but I still want to see how the last one goes.

Sharon Shinn and Molly Knox Ostertag, Shattered Warrior: Graphic novel about a young woman on a planet being exploited for its resources; although the loss of her family and position has left her wounded, finding her young niece as well as connections to rebels leads her to choose connection and dangerous sabotage attempts against the (larger, human-related) overlords. It’s fine but I mostly wanted new Ostertag.

Martha Wells, Witch King: Wells returns to fantasy with this story of a demon prince (aka witch king) that unfolds across two timelines: during a rebellion against the genocidal Heirarchs and long after, when some things have gone well and others haven’t. There was a lot to process—humans, witches, demons, Immortal Blessed, their constructs, and the Heirarchs were the key players, with lots of palace intrigue as well as fighting. I know it’s reasonable to fear descending into caricature when the market really likes one of your projects, but I confess I want more Murderbot instead.

Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard War: Final volume of the trilogy that deals with magic that destroys the ecology and also allows its practitioners to control other people with engraved bone shards. Actually tries to deal with the fact that "the most powerful magician should rule" is not a great principle, though the emperor arrives at this conclusion in a fairly abrupt manner.

Audrey Schulman, Theory of Bastards: In an increasingly fragile world, a researcher arrives at one of the last sanctuaries for apes and starts studying bonobos in order to further her theories about female sexual selection. She’s also recovering from surgery from endometriosis, the pain and medical neglect of which is described in detail. And she is navigating her own recovering body and her sexuality, including her relationship with the initially offputting but increasingly attractive researcher assigned to support her work. After a dust storm cuts them off from the rest of the world, things get pretty scary; the ending is ambiguous at best but it’s sf of feminist ideas in terms of the questions it considers important (especially: what does choice mean when we have these bodies evolved in specific ways?) and I found it engaging despite the terrible romance-novel cover it has on Scribd, which was staring at me every time I opened it.

Someone gave me 2 months of LJ. Thanks, whoever you are! But now I need advice about what I can do with a paid account, because I haven't been around here that long. What should I do?

I, too, paid money to see Nemesis ($20 for two tickets, plus $7.14 for popcorn and a drink, thank you very much New York City). Bits warmed my fangirl heart, but mainly the movie reminded me of why I like Firefly.

1. On Firefly, explosions in space don't make any noise. And they shouldn't. One small step for science, one giant step for television.

2. On a related note, Z. pointed out that -- absent really good, but stupid, gravitic stabilizers -- what happens when one solid object rams into another of about the same mass in space includes transfer of momentum, so that the second mass would move and not just hang there, getting progressively more crunched by the first. The ramming scene was, however, cool, and so Nemesis gets a bit of a pass on that. Does anyone remember a ST novel (TOS, I think, but TNG is a possibility) which includes a passage something like: "He gave an order rarely heard in the annals of spacefaring: 'Ramming speed!'" There was something about the difference between battle shields and the standard skinshields used by starships to deflect space junk and other small objects, too. I looked for it in my collection, but I think it might have gone in the great purge of '02.

3. Forget the Prime Directive -- everybody else does -- it's dereliction of duty for the captain to be on the away team. Okay, on a diplomatic mission, I see the need to have all the high-ranking officers, but that's an exception. Random planet? Redshirts should comprise the team, not just be in the background to get slaughtered. TNG had some great episodes, but it was often hampered by storylines assuming that no one involved ever read the When I Am an Evil Overlord list. Contrast Mal, kicking the recalcitrant goon into the engines. He's read the list, he is the list.

4. Relatedly, there are other ways to create dramatic tension than to have the captain say, "This is something I've got to do for myself." I devoutly hope that I wasn't the only one in the theater who muttered, "No! No it's not!" This is a fundamental difference in outlook. I love Joss Whedon's universes because bad things happen to good people, and they can't be taken back, and no one's an expert in everything (and when someone tries, it's generally Bad and Wrong, viz. Willow and River), and sometimes Giles has to do what Buffy can't. Joss deals in brutal reality, albeit through metaphors; he's a lot like Stephen King that way, whose memorable answer to the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" in the story "The Moving Finger" was "Because they can." This is a theme running through King's writing; "From a Buick 8" was a particularly heavy-handed version of the same thesis, but it's there in the rest of his work too. In TNG, the captain can say that stupid line because he's not really going to die -- the plot protects him. In Firefly, he might die -- technically, he did die -- and so he doesn't act all macho about it. I could go on about how this is related to one's idea of God, and how Whedon's version is a lot kinder to God in that it posits that God isn't killing babies and whales purposefully, but I won't.

In other news, I've been reading Nancy Kress and C.S. Friedman, thanks again to Half.com. I finished Kress's "Probability Moon" and "Beaker's Dozen." The former is the first in a trilogy about World, a planet of humanoids with one major difference from Earth humans: they share Reality, a sort of collective consciousness (though not a group mind) such that only people who share Reality are human and others are completely ignored or even killed. Although certain crimes such as theft are expected, crimes against the body break Reality and cause the perpetrator to be thrust from society until the crime is properly expiated. An Earth expedition, following up a preliminary expedition, comes to World, ostensibly to study the culture but in fact to check out a device in the planet's system that may be a superweapon against the Fallers, an alien race whose attacks are destroying Earth's colonies and threaten Earth itself. And that's just the first few chapters. The book is a good read, though Kress's primary human villain is too much caricature to be really satisfying. I'll read the rest of the trilogy when I can get it cheap.

"Beaker's Dozen" is, as one might expect, a collection of short stories, including one about World. The collection includes the original "Beggars in Spain," a story that stands very well on its own and in my opinion is stronger in this form than in the expanded novel Kress wrote after she got the Hugo (or maybe it was the Nebula). Most of these stories are about manipulating the human brain, or occasionally the human body, to be better or different than it is via evolution alone. Sometimes the mutants are nonhuman, dogs or viruses. Kress's ideas are fascinating and the stories usually satisfying. The cruelty of women, often sisters or mothers, to each other is the other major theme, entwined into the biomanipulation plots. I wish that there had been more positive female relationships in the stories, but that's my preference and not a statement about the stories themselves, which were provocative and generally well-done. The final story, about ballet and children as extensions of their parents, and partially told from the POV of an enhanced dog, was particularly powerful.

"Maximum Light" remains my favorite Kress novel, about a world in which multiple low-level chemical exposures -- go here for a bit of the underlying science -- have produced a generation of humans with ADHD, developmental delays, and other big problems. The protagonist is a girl who's smart and competent by comparison to her cohort, but who's seemingly incapable of rising to the standards of past generations. She gets caught up in a scheme that violates the bodies of some of the remaining healthy people -- to say more would give away too much. The book is troubling, in part because the main premise is all too plausible.

I read "In Conquest Born" by C.S. Friedman a while ago, and found it well-written and interesting but offputting because of the gender politics of one of the competing human variants. (I should make clear that Friedman didn't endorse those gender politics; it was part of the plot.) Friedman likes to write about opposing worldviews and the difficulty of thinking like the Other, whether the Other is human, alien, or something in between. "This Alien Shore," which I bought because it was a NYT Notable Book, is about a young girl being pursued by a vicious Earth corporation, in a universe in which humanity has subdivided into multiple subspecies. One of the subspecies has mastered the art of FTL travel; everyone else who tries to pilot an FTL ship dies horribly, along with the rest of the ship. This subspecies therefore dictates the behavior of everyone else. Jamisia doesn't know why the corporation is after her, but her brainware is slowly giving her clues as her personality seems to be coming apart. Friedman manages to create a satisfactory universe in a single, though long, book, and doesn't succumb here to the trilogy temptation.

Bolstered by this good experience (and seduced by the Michael Whelan covers, which used to be enough to get me to buy any book so adorned), I tried "The Madness Season," which is my favorite so far. Daetrin is human, sort of; he's old, as in centuries old, and has certain needs that are not shared by normal humans. He's lived under the domination of the alien Tyr for centuries, along with the rest of humanity, until some of his special characteristics are discovered and he's taken from Earth to be studied. The Tyr are a group mind -- with some notable exceptions. Daetrin has to figure out how to survive, which requires him to remember parts of his past he's been all too successful at forgetting. And, perhaps, there's something he can do to liberate Earth. The plot is complicated and engaging, though perhaps a bit weakened by the presence of some aliens with really useful powers at crucial points. The dialogue I most envy:

"What happened with you and Kost?" she asked softly.
I managed to shrug. "He offered me power and glory. I called him an asshole."
"He's very angry."
"I said it well."

I'm about to try Friedman's big trilogy, which sounds a bit more fantasy-oriented, though also based on a "colonization" framework. I'm hopeful. Friedman reminds me a bit of M.A. Foster, who also wrote about human variants, though maybe it's just the Whelan covers that remind me.

Finally, Lois McMaster Bujold, "The Spirit Ring." This one isn't a Vorkosigan novel. Set instead in a past Italy where magic works, the main protagonist is a young girl, daughter of a powerful mage and goldsmith. When her father's patron is brutally slaughtered, she's thrust into intrigue and magic plots and must find her way between survival, revenge, the church's condemnation of many types of magic, and true love. Engaging enough, but I think I like the Vorkosigans better.