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Originally Posted by thinkpadx
The TV-series looks interesting. I'll watch it when I'm done with the books.
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Better settle in for a bit of wait, then. Two more books minimum—in addition to the one that's being released in July (and took over 5 years to write).
I'm abandoning newcomer Bradley P. Beaulieu's
The Winds of Khalakovo. I read the first installment of a multi-part short story by him in the latest issue of
Beneath Ceaseless Skies and liked it quite well. It had a desert setting with a Bedouin/Arabic flavor (with ships that sail the desert!) that I'm just a sucker for. So since his first novel (Khalakovo) was/is free for a time, I thought I'd give it a shot. But the first book in this new series (shudder) is based on a Russian/Cossack culture (with ships that sail the sky!) that just isn't working for me. It's not the Russian culture per se, but rather the fact that it feels like a
different culture is being shoe-horned into the story just to keep it from being European in flavor. The culture just feels ancillary and forced, rather than integral. And there's some very clunky prose/dialog in the early chapters (not to mention a nagging sense of "where the heck is this plot heading?" that has lingered for far too long now).
I think I'm going to turn back to Chandler for a bit of tasty noir... along with tracking down as many finalists for the
Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the best short science-fiction of 2010) as I can.