Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by ReneAZ

Next up is "The Murder of Mary Russell" by Laurie King. I had stopped reading her Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell books years ago, although I LOVED the earlier ones (up to The Language of Bees and subsequent - awful IMHO), and I wouldn't buy it but I got it from the library. Hopefully it will be more like her earlier books in this series.

I just started this as an Audible book. While I agree that a couple of them in the middle weren't up to the early quality, the last couple have been quite good I thought. IAC, I'm looking forward to this one.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Now reading JAG in Space.

I had to abandon this one. He should have set it on a US Navy (water) ship, where he actually knows about things. It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't insist on giving detailed descriptions of things that he clearly hasn't researched well enough. Just too much of that to continue.

[I've also decided to discard the remaining books in this series, and the Lost in Space and Stark's War series (8 books in total). Now I've noticed how utterly clueless he is about actual space flight, it's just too irritating. I have plenty of good books to read that don't have a fatal flaw.]

Next up: Raising Caine by Charles E. Gannon. Third in his series about Caine Riordan.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I had to abandon this one. He should have set it on a US Navy (water) ship, where he actually knows about things. It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't insist on giving detailed descriptions of things that he clearly hasn't researched well enough. Just too much of that to continue.

I really enjoyed this series. What kind of thing was it that you felt lacked research?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I really enjoyed this series. What kind of thing was it that you felt lacked research?

Everything that involved space travel.

The description of the spaceship leaving a rotating dock. The idea that the US has a region of space it claims as its own and must 'patrol' to maintain sovereignty. The idea that a spaceship could hide optically by having a load of cameras and emitters. The idea that a spaceship could hide in the infra-red by careful management of heat (it's hard for a spaceship to not be warmer than background of 3K.) The idea that you can recover energy from waste heat. Innumerable bits of zero gravity and/or acceleration rubbish, e.g. the idea that there was no problem while getting 'gravity' from being on a ship attached to a rotating spacestation, but that being on a steadily accelerating ship under way might cause motion sickness.

So many, many things. It was just all too much.

[HarryT]

Thanks, and I do understand your frustration.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Everything that involved space travel.

The description of the spaceship leaving a rotating dock.

So many, many things. It was just all too much.

The book I'm reading now has this. The author spent 35 pages describing how the ship's engines start, warp drive activates and leaving the rotating space port. Too much time spent on fictitious tech.

[ATDrake]

Last month, I noticed the library's New Book shelf finally had available copies of some books that were eligible for the Hugo Awards, so I spent some quality time trying to cram as many as I could before the nomination period closed.

Of the ones I managed to finish in time, I really enjoyed (and went and nominated):

Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest: I'd thought that after certain things revealed by the 1st in the trilogy, last year's Hugo Award-winning The Three-Body Problem (which I finally got around to reading in full all the way to the end as a preliminary for the 2nd), that it was going to be a relatively straightforward sort of novel which dealt with the fallout of that. The fallout was dealt with, all right, but in a way which managed to pleasantly surprise me quite a bit, as a number of things that were proposed and seemingly carried out to their logical (but failed conclusions) and would have been perfectly fine left on their own as explored avenues that didn't work out, turned out to have serious thematic and practical significance later in the book, which made for an added level of enjoyment with skllful use of foreshadowing and resonance etc.

Highly recommended. The 1st book managed to surprise me by not quite going where I thought it would go, making it more interesting and entertaining to read in the process, I'd thought that the 2nd wouldn't be able to pull that off twice (but it did! and in a completely different way!), and now I'm hoping that the 3rd in the trilogy will pull a hat trick. Obviously, this one can't be read standalone, as even the blurb for this has significant spoilers for the first book which you should start with anyway.

Ian Tregillis' The Mechanical and The Rising, 1st & 2nd in his Alchemy Wars series of alternate history steampunk set roughly 19th century-ish, where the Dutch Protestants have conquered much of the world via magically-controlled mechanical creations, while the plucky French Catholics hold out a losing resistance with the use of advanced chemicals. In the meantime, the machines are beginning to work out their own resistance…

I really enjoyed Tregillis' earlier Milkweed Trilogy, which was another one of those WWII Lovecraftian occult secret history things, so I was curious about this one, but not expecting to like it as much as I did. Tregillis pulls few punches with the various twists and revelations and such, and sets up a very compelling high-stakes plotline which doesn't hold back on the costs for the characters involved, with an IMHO very good translation of IRL history and culture and relative level of technology to the setting.

Highly recommended, if you like alternate history that really tries to make use of the history and cultural attitudes, as well as examining the competing ways in which society and philosophy about the treatment of artificial intelligence and human souls would evolve in such a world, wrapped up with both a thrilling political intrigue/espionage and complicated personal liberation story where freedom is not quite as free as it seems. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next in the series (the 2nd book kind of ended on not so much a cliffhanger, as a major game-changer with unforeseen consequences).

N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, 1st in The Broken Earth series of what I suppose could be called climate-change fantasy, which is really about exploring what would happen to society if regular catastrophic world-changing natural disasters occurred and there were also persons born with the power to manipulate local geology, who were occasionally blamed for it and essentially persecuted and/or enslaved (or not).

This had the best world-building of them all, and was a truly interesting depiction of a genuinely different human people that's more alien than a lot of harder actual science fiction tries to be, especially in terms of the sorts of societal standards and cultural myths and community interrelationships and long-term economic considerations/political history would evolve in response. And it also had an interestingly enigmatic story which apparently seemed to switch between some very disparate groups which you thought would be destined to meet up in the end, but instead tied together in a way that made sense as you gradually picked up on the unfolding clues as the story went along.

Very highly recommended if you like exploring those elements in your reading. This would be my first-spot choice for the awards voting if it makes it to the finalists, unless something even more compelling that I hadn't read popped up, for sheer ingenuity of ideas as well as good execution of the concept and an entertaining story to go with it, which is like the award-winning trifecta that Hugos should be, as far as I'm concerned.

Carolyn Ives Gilman's Dark Orbit, which fits somewhere into her Twenty Planets universe (which produced previous Hugo & Nebula-nominated material) and is about an exploration ship that encounters an unexpected human civilization on a planet previously thought uninhabited, and some weird things that happen which are related to a perceptual shift which explores certain unusual abilities.

Medium recommend. I think it suffered a bit from the formatting of the sections which switched between a diary kept by one of the crew (long stretches of italics are not that fun to read) and what was going on elsewhere, and the apparent murder mystery portion of it could have been handled better. But it was another book that had interesting ideas about human consciousness and sensory abilities and explored them fairly well.

Aliette de Bodard's The House of Shattered Wings, 1st novel in her Dominion of the Fallen dystopian setting which explores an alternate history supernatural urban fantasy world where actual fallen angels and their residual magic have completely warped the human world, which is now centred around the effects of having a regular influx of depowered alien supernatural creatures taking over from the local supernatural creatures who can't compete with their heaven-outcast mana and warping the way in which the human portion of society interacts as well.

Although the actual story (which takes place in Paris sometime long past WWII) in this was a relatively straightforward murder mystery (allowing for supernatural complications), the worldbuilding is actually very interesting. In a rare move for urban fantasy (or any fantasy at all*, really), it actually does pay significant attention to the effects of that sort of inadvertent conquest and ensuing colonialism, as the various IRL geopolitical powers of the past had ruthlessly used their ensuing supernatural resources in their regular conflicts (and conscripted their actual colonies such as the former French Indochina, into their wars), and the ruinous effect it had on them all which led to the current situation where the "modern" world is profoundly messed up and developmentally stalled and organized upon very different sociopolitical lines because of it.

Medium-high recommend. Maybe a bit of an acquired taste, but as with the Tregillis series, I really enjoyed the extrapolation of fantasy-world effects on real-world history and just how much the world would change because of that. And the murder mystery and character study elements were also well done. I'm pleased to find out that there are apparently already additional short stories in this setting and there will also be more forthcoming novels exploring the setting, which I'm looking forward to reading.

* I'm reminded of the recent revelation on her official website of additional wizarding schools for J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which apparently decided that all the Canadians would just have automatically gone to the US school throughout the centuries, because eh, why not?

Which, if one knows anything about actual Canadian history and/or culture, ahahahaha… no. Before the 1960s, maybe, our historical political and cultural situation was such that in a world where easy magical transport and communication is readily arranged, there would probably have been no way in hell that traditionally-minded non-First Nations/Inuit Canadian wizarding families in societies still more-or-less based on IRL ones (and especially not Québécois French Canadians, who are still pretty touchy about cultural heritage stuff and the perceived encroaching domination of the Anglophones) would have sent their kids to the US for schooling if they could get them into the much more prestigious and preferred colonial mothership British and French boarding schools, respectively, or make their own, if necessary (especially in Quebec). (And our history of First Nations students being taken away to boarding schools is very, very bad and probably not something that the average author should touch without a great deal of research and thought, just so you know.)

But to be fair, Rowling probably didn't spare more than two seconds of thought for a unimportant throwaway background worldbuilding detail that's probably not going to make it into future books anyway. And most foreigners are pretty well-meaningly clueless about Canada anyway, most especially the neighbours, as Rick Mercer used to demonstrate to us with his "Talking to Americans" segments on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Fbone

The book I'm reading now has this. The author spent 35 pages describing how the ship's engines start, warp drive activates and leaving the rotating space port. Too much time spent on fictitious tech.

I wouldn't have minded if it had been a description of a spaceship leaving a rotating space station, rather than a slightly disguised description of a large sea-going ship leaving port!

[Dngrsone]

Finished Invasion of the Tearling by Erika Johansen. Going to reread Bones Burnt Black by Stephen Euin Cobb before going to one or both the freebies for the month.

[DrNefario]

I've just finished The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle. It picked up quite a bit after I mentioned it before. Then it sagged a bit. Then it picked up again. Overall it was pretty good.

I'm also due to finish my current short story anthology today, Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams. I've enjoyed it a fair bit. There's nothing like a good end-of-the-world.

Next up I'm intending to read Promise of Blood by Brian McLellan, and on the short story track, The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula Le Guin.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

Currently reading Midnight Riot (aka Rivers of London) by Ben Aaronovitch and Un Lun Dun by China Miéville. Loving both of them.

Finished reading Midnight Riot yesterday. Since I was in Winchester, I kept wanting to dash up to London to take a look at various locations in the book. Unfortunately, I was tied up. Now I'm making good progress in Un Lun Dun. I fly back to the USA today, so I expect to finish reading it during the flight. Not sure what I'll read next. I'm leaning toward The Flinck Connection by Estelle Ryan or The Void of Muirwood by Jeff Wheeler.

[Dngrsone]

I haven't read any China Mieville yet, and I really should...

**Edit: Finished Bones Burnt Black. Starting Deliver Her: A Novel by Patricia Perry Donovan, one of the Kindle Select freebies for this month.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

Finished reading Midnight Riot yesterday. Since I was in Winchester, I kept wanting to dash up to London to take a look at various locations in the book. Unfortunately, I was tied up. Now I'm making good progress in Un Lun Dun. I fly back to the USA today, so I expect to finish reading it during the flight. Not sure what I'll read next. I'm leaning toward The Flinck Connection by Estelle Ryan or The Void of Muirwood by Jeff Wheeler.

Didn't quite finish Un Lun Dun during the flight. I kept dozing off. Finished the last 70 pages this morning. Loved it. And all the "Un" references. And, I've decided to read The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley. I started it last year during Overdrive's "Big Read", but didn't finish it. I'm at the 1/2 way mark and should finish it in a day or two.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I haven't read any China Mieville yet, and I really should...

Un Lun Dun is my first by him. I have Perdido Street Station on my wishlist at the library -- just need to make the time in my schedule to check it out and read it.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by drjd

Finished Some Slips Don't Show - A.A fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner . With that, I have 12 more remaining in Bertha Cool/ Dolald Lam series, which I may expect to finish this month. I'm quite anxious to buy the 'D.A. - Doug Selby' series by the same author, but prices on both Amazon and Kobo are high. Will have to search some other publisher, maybe.

For a change of taste, next I'll read Truth, Love & A Little Malice by (Dr.) Khushwant Singh, (1915 - 2014). It is an autobiographical account of India's most renowned, prolific and controversial author and journalist. He has had an amazing and prolific career as a journalist, columnist, editor, author and a member of Parliament. I have read some memoirs and novels by him, and I find his styles as amusing, bantering, mocking, critical, candid, bold and poignant, interwoven into an enjoyable and spellbinding story. This book (a pbook, in fact) is waiting in my TBR since last 2 years.

Just finished Truth, Love & A Little Malice by [I] Khushwant Singh. As expected of the master story teller - a marvelous read. Highly recommended to people who love to read memoirs/autobiographies.

Next up, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, and this time no more ducking around! I'm determined to read SF!!