rivkat: Dean reading (dean reading)
( Mar. 20th, 2023 11:52 am)
Blair Braverman, Small Game:general fiction )
Max Gladstone, Dead CountryBack to the Craft )
R.B. Lemberg, The Unbalancingkind fantasy about bad things )
Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Wordsaliens make you drunk )
Samit Basu, The City Insidefuture India )
Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few:more cozy sf )
Barbara Hambly, The Iron Princessold school fantasy )
rivkat: Dean reading (dean reading)
( Feb. 14th, 2022 05:40 pm)
Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Gomermaids on land )
Barbara Hambly, The Rainbow Abyssa book of setup )
Kali Wallace, A bunch of books, SF&F )

Genevieve Cogman, The Untold Storythe final chapter )
Daryl Gregory, Revelatorbootleggers find God )
Max Gladstone, Last ExitGladstone's version of The City We Became x The Dark Tower )
Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monstersnot for me )
John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society:somebody had fun writing about kaiju )
Charles Stross, One Laundry Files, one Merchant Princes )
I'm still reading books, and occasionally writing something about them.

fiction: Hambly, Morgan, Martin, Bradley et al., Ruff and Butler )

Aspirationally: more books, comics, and maybe thoughts on character mutability under corporate ownership.
Patricia Briggs, Dragon Blood. As [livejournal.com profile] melymbrosia said, this sequel to Dragon Bones isn’t as good. Dragon Bones told the story of Ward Hurog, the heir to a small but important part of a kingdom. Because Ward had feigned stupidity to avoid his brutal father’s wrath, he had a hard time proving himself fit to rule when his father died. In Dragon Blood, everybody understands that Ward’s a good, competent guy, and so the interesting conflict is gone. The story just sort of plods along. It also bothers me a bit that the homosexual characters are all bad guys (the exception, who really wants to be sleeping with his wife rather than another man, is a victim of molestation and dark magic to bind him to the bad guy, and so I’m thinking he doesn’t count). This isn’t really fair of me, because I don’t think Briggs is homophobic and I don’t think all gay/bi characters have to be good, but it just makes me nervous.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books include one in which a man is coerced into sex with other men, by drugs and not magic, but it doesn’t bother me so much because many of the characters are comfortable with polymorphous perversity. The patriarchal Barrayarans aren’t generally, but they’re backwards folks being dragged into the fiftieth (or whatever) century by the recently reestablished contact with other worlds, some of which are very strange, to Barrayarans and to us. I like Bujold’s style. She has a real gift for putting heroic quips in characters’ mouths, and when a bad guy’s head is cut off, his last words are “You can’t --“instead of a complete sentence. There are very few Evil Overlords about; indeed, one of the things I liked most about Diplomatic Immunity, the most recent book in the series and also the most recently written, is that the bad guy is really clever, thinks of lots of fallback plans, and is not easily defeated at all. Go space opera!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer script books are up to Season 2, vol. 3 of 4 now. They’re great to have around, because the writing is fantastic, but it’s sad that the typos and spelling errors haven’t been corrected. Sure, I’d like insight into the process, but that’s a little too much insight. Exception made for the direction “FITE! FITE! FITE!”

The West Wing Script Book, by contrast, has six chosen episodes, rather than a complete set. The scripts have much less direction to the actors than the BtVS scripts, though both are dialogue-intensive. It turns out that I like reading BtVS scripts better, because the actors on WW are relatively more important to my enjoyment of the dialogue than the actors on BtVS.

Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead is set long before the time of Vlad Taltos (pronounced Taltosh), one of the best characters in modern fantasy. Vlad will be a human thief in an elvish world, though the elves call themselves human, which is a great detail. Anyhow, this book purports to be a history of a time before Vlad, but it turns out that I only like Vlad. Well, I like Sethra Lavode, a sorceress who will know Vlad later in life and who plays a role here, but the style of the book made me sick. It’s a conscious decision by Brust to write in a slow, precious style, where the characters constantly repeat themselves and engage in other verbal tics that often end with “I hardly think I have been asking anything else for the last hour!” when a questionee finally restates a question asked a page ago. That it’s conscious doesn’t make it tolerable. Apparently, Brust intends to write at least one more book in this manner, and I doubt I’ll buy it even in softcover. I want more Vlad! People who want a great fantasy world with a funny, engagingly flawed protagonist should check out Jhereg and the other Vlad books, which are being reissued in double editions, or To Reign in Hell, Brust’s spectacular version of Paradise Lost. But skip this one.

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Federation is the book with the hilarious ramming scene, of which I was reminded by the latest Star Trek movie. The ramming scene is as great as I remembered, complete with Geordi calling up from Engineering, asking what just happened, and, upon getting the response, asking “No, really, what just happened?” The rest of the book didn’t move me much. It’s a Zefrem Cochrane story, crossing over between TOS and TNG, and it’s been Jossed (Gened?) to hell and back by one of the TNG movies. I can’t really recommend it unless you’re a real fan of Zefrem. Or, you know, books in which one spaceship rams another.

Which is actually a good transition to C.S. Forester, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. It’s evident why the Hornblower books are often cited as predecessors of Star Trek & similar spaceship-heavy worlds; the resource constraints, risks and human psychology at sea transfer easily to space. This book, which chronicles Hornblower’s earliest days at sea, is good clean fun, though chock full of British prejudices towards the French and the Spanish. Hornblower is a little too self-deprecating for my tastes, though he gives good angst.

Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark, is a fascinating, unpredictable book about an autistic man in the midterm future, forced by his penny-pinching company to choose whether to take a treatment that may cure his autism but that may (also) destroy him as he exists now. Moon creates a plausible world, with bureaucratic and legal rules that ring sometimes disturbingly true, and the narrator is incredibly interesting. He does have a Temple Grandin-like feel (Moon has an autistic child and apparently did a ton of research) and the story makes his constraints, and his choices, feel real and important.

And now, the first lines/paragraphs meme, in no particular order. These are books I reread, which is as good a criterion as any:

Read more... )
rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Riley gun)
( Oct. 31st, 2002 01:20 pm)
Because I'm a sick puppy, I googled "big gay alien," and 9 of 10 nonduplicative entries were about Clark Kent. The 10th was about Jar-Jar Binks. Make of that what you will.

Warning: lots of books ahead. What I've been reading (aside from copyright casebooks):

The AFLAC Duck v. Tim Hagan for governor: the district court just issued its opinion, saying that Mr. Hagan could continue to use his "TaftQuack" commercials, which accuse the current governor of "ducking" the issues and feature a Taft-headed duck saying "TaftQuack," which apparently sounds a lot like "AFLAC" and the quack of the AFLAC duck. Right result, but the court is seriously, seriously confused about the difference between copyright and trademark law. In that it doesn't get that there is one. In that, I suppose, it's like many ordinary folks, but a federal judge should know better.

Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best. I bought this biography because "A Peace to End All Peace" left me wanting to know more about this Lion of England, but I didn't want a really huge book. My mistake. While this short biography is informative enough in a general way, for reasons of length and/or copyright it doesn't include nearly enough of the words of the great man himself. Best maintains, I'm sure correctly, that Churchill was a great writer and speaker. But he rarely ever shows that. He even paraphrases, rather than quotes, Churchill's famous statement that "If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Churchill is a fascinating character, but you might do better with a slightly longer, more quote-y book.

Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold. Well, all you guys who wrote in about "A Civil Campaign" were right. Bujold knows how to write good space opera with a bit of wince in it. Her heroes do what's right, but sometimes that's not the reason they're doing it. "Borders" is really three previously-published short stories, connected by a framing narrative that doesn't really explain the reason the first story should be lumped in with the second and third. But that's okay, because each novella is interesting and fun.

I do have to say that Miles Vorkosigan (a dwarf) seems to see so much action with big and tall women that I'm reminded of "Humbug," in which a dwarf tells Mulder that he'd be surprised how many women find his stature attractive. Mulder's great response, of course, is that he might be surprised by how many men do, too. I'd like to see Miles's reaction to *that*.

Skimmed: Smallville tie-in "Strange Visitors." While I was bored by the VotB (Villain of the Book), the writing was pretty clean and enjoyable, and we got some Magnificent Bastard as a bonus.

Started to read but gave up in disgust: David Weber, Honor-something-or-other. Honestly, what is it with this guy? I started another book that his publisher put up for free, as a way of introducing readers to their back catalogue and, Baen hopes, getting them to buy new ones in the various series represented. Anyhow, the preachy narrative style bored me, and it was no different in the bookstore. I don't require dialogue within the first five pages, really I don't. I like Faulkner. But Faulkner didn't tell me up front who were the good guys and who were the bad guys -- I emphasize "tell," because there was precious little showing. I jumped about 2/3 in to see if anything changed, and there was more dialogue, but it was still all White Hat/Black Hat. Snidely Whiplash and Dudley Do-Right had more complexity of character. Also, apparently there's some sort of cat mentally bonded to the heroine, Honor Harrington. He's created a Mary Sue without even having real characters amongst whom to plop her down!

Anyhow, the Baen Free Library might be fun for anyone with some time to kill. As a matter of fact, it includes one of Bujold's novellas, "The Mountains of Morning," contained in "Borders of Infinity." There's also a Niven/Pournelle offering, some Mercedes Lackey stuff, and others of that ilk. James Schmidt's "Telzey of Amberdon," one of the early versions of what we now know as Lara Croft, was one of my childhood favorites.

Telzey's a Mary Sue too, but that's okay because I met her when I loved and identified with that kind of character. In fact, I think my first real break with Mary Sue came with Diane Carey's Star Trek books, where even I could tell that this nitwit girl/ensign/whatever-will-you-please-just-go-away! was interfering with the story I wanted to read, which was about Kirk and Spock. And McCoy, Scott, Uhura and the rest. But mainly Kirk and Spock.

Diane Duane's first book with Ael T'something, the Romulan commander ("My Enemy, My Ally"), and the one with the glass spider both skirted the Mary Sue borders (at one point, someone even says that Scott would marry the glass spider if only it were, um, physically possible), but she had such great stories to tell that I didn't mind. Her recent extensions of the Romulan books were, however, dreadful. I hope it's just the ennui of a writer dragged back into a universe she was finished with, but her most recent non-tie-ins have been bad, too. It's also quite possible that, given that I formed my emotional bond with her before puberty, the books were always bad, but I recently reread the Romulan attack on the Enterprise scene in "My Enemy, My Ally" and still thought it was nicely done. You can get "The Wounded Sky" for a penny plus postage and "My Enemy, My Ally" for $0.85 on Amazon, though you should really go through Bookfinder and see if you can't get it for less postage, because Amazon really squeezes there.

What will always be *the* Star Trek book for me (as in "*the* woman") is Barbara Hambly's "Ishmael." Itself a crossover with another Paramount series starring Mark Lenard, it's got amnesiac Spock in late 1800s Seattle, a crew desperate to find him back in the present day, Vulcan scholars, Klingon scholars, the physics of pool and the mathematics of blackjack, Uhura and Sulu drunk and telling silly stories, and so much more. Well, follow the link and you can see my and others' reviews. Also available dirt cheap!

Speaking of *the* woman, and I promise to stop rambling soon, did anyone else think that USA's "Case of Evil" was flawed at its foundation by the idea that Holmes could fall in love early in his career?
.

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