Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
Juuuust finished the first in the Mrs. Pollifax series: The American answer to Miss Marple/Amelia Peabody!!! What a WONDERFUL read. I'm probably the last in the universe to read it; loved it!
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Next to last, because I haven't read them yet though I've seen a couple in the library. I see now I'll have to try a few, at least for the locales which interest me.
So I went and bought that Carina Press 99 cent tie-in-to-the-freebie novel; it only cost me $1.11 after taxes which may end up being less in CAD, even after Visa's less-than-favourable currency exchange surcharge.
I was feeling pretty generous after having read a rather good book today,
The Long Tomorrow, a semi-classic post-apocalyptic sf novel by
Leigh Brackett,
an sf/mystery writer who also did screenplays for
The Big Sleep and
The Empire Strikes Back, among other things.
I bought this title on sale when Phoenix Pick had their 50% off coupon in April, after having gotten
The Best of Edmond Hamilton, who was Brackett's husband and had stories chosen by her as one of their free e-book of the month selections.
It's kind of a really depressing coming-of-age in the wake of a nuclear disaster which has led the surviving portions of US humanity to regroup in strongly religious Mennonite/Amish-type no-tech farming communities where too much knowledge and dissent and questioning of the new status quo are very strongly and sometimes fatally discouraged, yet the exploratory spirit and/or technological luxuries of a previous age lives on in a mythical hidden science-city*.
But it was a very good book about the dangers of fear, fanaticism, the preconceptions you have about the world you imagine beyond your personal borders, the nature and meaning of personal responsibility, and how you have to find your own way instead of clinging to the past in whatever form.
Highly recommended if you like post-apocalyptic explorations of human nature and reconstructive societies, for better or worse. I'll have to look up Brackett's other work sometime, some of which is available via Baen.
* Cities are banned because having too large a population concentration with too many resources would require technological advances which would lead people to another nuclear disaster, or so the reasoning goes.